3 Actor, Avatar

Mon semblable, mon frère (mon fils, moi même)

A collection of Truffaut’s screenplays entitled The Adventures of Antoine Doinel contains a preface by the director in which he attempts an answer to the question: “Who is Antoine Doinel?” The simple response is that “Antoine Doinel” is the name of a figure that appears in five of Truffaut’s films (one short, four feature-length) and is always played by the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. But the situation is in fact much more complicated than that, as Truffaut’s preface makes clear. He claims that he is not only identified mistakenly as Jean-Pierre Léaud’s father; he is also confused with Jean-Pierre Léaud/Antoine Doinel himself. To illustrate the latter confusion, he relates an anecdote about something that happened the morning after one of his Antoine Doinel films aired on television: “I stepped into a café where I had never been before. The owner came up to me, saying, ‘I recognize you! I saw you on television yesterday!’ Obviously it was not me he had seen, but Jean-Pierre Léaud in the role of Antoine Doinel.” The café owner goes on to remark, “You looked much younger [in the film]!” In relating these incidents Truffaut implies that such errors are not singular (“I seldom bother to rectify a misunderstanding”) and are perfectly understandable—that is, he and Léaud do resemble one another so closely that he is not surprised when they are mistaken for each other.²⁵ Further, he seems to enjoy the confusion; at least, he chooses not to correct it, and he places it at the head of his discussion of Antoine Doinel as a way of beginning to explain the figure created by both Truffaut and Léaud: “The reason I mention this incident is that it illustrates fairly well the ambiguity (as well as the ubiquity) of that imaginary personage, Antoine Doinel, who happens to be the synthesis of two real-life people: Jean-Pierre Léaud and myself” (7).

In 1958, at the age of fourteen, Léaud answered an advertisement in France-Soir for the role of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, Truffaut’s first feature-length (and autobiographical) film. Léaud had already appeared a year earlier in a minor role in a swashbuckling romance; the film for Truffaut would be his first starring role, and so the two of them make a serious start on their film careers together. Truffaut explains in the preface to the Doinel screenplays that he was looking for a child who resembled him at that age—not necessarily a physical resemblance, but a “moral resemblance.” Léaud, with his careless and cocky attitude overlying tension and anxiety, reminded Truffaut of the mischief-making truant he was as a child, and he decided that Léaud was the person to play Doinel. At that age, interestingly, Léaud’s physical resemblance to the director that Truffaut mentions up front in the preface was not readily apparent. Instead, the physical resemblance seems to be the outcome of years of working together. For the relationship does continue beyond the first “love story” of The 400 Blows, to borrow from Truffaut’s remarks on director/actor romances. Like the actresses in those romances, the child Léaud stood in a submissive position to the film’s director. But though the first iteration of “Antoine Doinel” was conceived as an autobiographical figure for François Truffaut, it became obvious to the director as filmmaking went on that the young man who played the role contributed something of his own nature to the Doinel character: “Jean-Pierre turned out to be a valuable collaborator in The 400 Blows. He instinctively found the right gestures, his corrections imparted to the dialogue the ring of truth and I encouraged him to use the words of his own vocabulary” (8). Further, Léaud began to recognize, according to Truffaut, the way in which his own life mirrored Doinel’s (and thus Truffaut’s). Truffaut describes how the boy burst into tears on first viewing the film: “Behind this autobiographical chronicle of mine, he recognized the story of his own life” (8). Thus rather than seeing The 400 Blows as Truffaut’s autobiography, the viewer should understand that the film is a collaborative and intersubjective autobiography, a recasting of the nature of selfhood and self-representation.

For the next twenty years (until Love on the Run, 1979), Truffaut and Léaud continued their work on “Antoine Doinel,” with Léaud slowly growing toward Truffaut’s “present,” though he would of course never catch up to Truffaut’s real age while Truffaut lived.²⁶ And during this period one might say that a physical resemblance was created and cultivated. When Léaud, like Truffaut before him (and like Antoine Doinel), was expelled from school, Truffaut stepped in to find him a new school and paid the fees; he bought clothing for Léaud and provided lodging within easy reach of his own home.²⁷ He became, in other words, a kind of surrogate father to Léaud while the young man’s career took shape under Truffaut’s tutelage and that of another of the great French New Wave auteurs, Jean-Luc Godard.²⁸ For Godard, however, Léaud played quite a different role. As Nataša Durovicová points out, modernist self-reflexivity in Truffaut’s work contains an autobiographical element, while Godard’s “undermin[es] the authorial presence and authority”—or at least pretends to do so.”²⁹ Léaud seems to perform as a deconstructive element in Godard’s films, while Truffaut engages the actor fully in the construction of his auteurist self-projection. One cannot help but wonder whether Godard’s appropriation of Léaud as a figure is a kind of argument against Truffaut’s project. Certainly the two auteurs represent divergent approaches to the auteurist project, and Léaud would then constitute an important marker for the ways in which they differ: the same and yet not at all the same.³⁰

Truffaut’s image of Léaud, highly personalized from the beginning, becomes more and more indistinguishable from Truffaut’s own self-image, as Truffaut’s statements make clear. And Léaud indeed grows up to be a man who resembles Truffaut in hair and eye color, and facial features, even down to the lines on his face; this is evident in an image of the two men taken by photographer Richard Avedon in Paris in 1972, just after the release of Bed and Board. In that image, the physical resemblance between the two men is further enhanced by their nearly identical hairstyles, and their clothes, which exhibit the same cut and style. In December 1994, a retrospective of the Antoine Doinel films in New York inspired a brief New Yorker review entitled “Truffaut’s Twin,” which was illustrated by Avedon’s portrait.³¹ The photograph is not neutral on the point of the men’s resemblance; it aims to bring forth and underscore that likeness. By placing their high foreheads close together and nearly on a line with one another, Avedon lets us see the similarities in the strong noses and thin mouths, the hair and eye color. Certainly we can understand how a café owner might have been persuaded that his customer Truffaut was an older version of the young man in the television film. And some aspects of their resemblance are not merely natural or coincidental, but performative. They wear identical suits, shirts, and ties. They are both scrupulously cleanshaven, and one wonders whether the remarkably similar distance between their eyebrows might have been influenced by treatment with tweezers. The work of semblance performed by each man moves him closer to the other, or rather, closer to Antoine Doinel, who represents an aggregate self, a projected image. Each man wears his hair at about the same length and parts it in a similar style, though on opposite sides. This last feature—the same yet opposite hair part—is in fact a characteristic of a rare kind of identical twin, a “mirror” twin, who displays “mirrored” characteristics in such features as handedness or hair parts. The hair part on opposite sides in this particular image, while perhaps not designed with this in mind, helps to produce the effect of a mirror image in the two men’s faces.³² Thus Truffaut’s stated purpose, to make films narrated in the first person, evolves ultimately into a revised understanding of what a “person”—either grammatical or actual—is. In this case we could say that the person is fictional—Doinel—but he is not only fictional. He belongs also to the embodied author and his coauthor, both of them, and to the narrative of a life they make together.

Truffaut dedicates his film The Wild Child to Jean-Pierre Léaud, as I discussed in chapter 2. This dedication deserves a second glance here. When asked about it, Truffaut responded, “The choice of this story is more revealing than I myself thought, and I realized it afterwards: while I was shooting the film, 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. . . . Until The Wild Child, when I had had children in my films I identified with them, and here, for the first time, I identified with the adult, the father, so much so that when the editing was finished I dedicated the film to Jean-Pierre Léaud because that changeover, that shift, became completely clear for me, obvious. It is a film whose significance was brought home to me from the outside, by friends, by people who spoke to me about the film.”³³

When Truffaut makes The Wild Child, in other words, it is no longer a question of the actor taking Truffaut’s place as a child. Instead Truffaut has grown into a man, a father, and now he is ready to make Bed and Board, a film in which Léaud portrays the Antoine Doinel figure as a grown man as well. The interesting thing perhaps is that Truffaut has “fathered” Léaud all this time, has made the young actor not only his protégé, but also his son. So Truffaut’s moment of maturation (becoming a “father” to his film actor) occurs simultaneously with Léaud’s maturity within Truffaut’s films: the elder auteur and the younger actor grow together, in a peculiar reading of film time, and Truffaut also leaves his son Léaud behind to turn to another “creature,” the wild child, the gypsy actor Jean-Pierre Cargol. It is no coincidence that the story of The Wild Child mirrors precisely this kind of fathering and formative relationship in the historical account of an Enlightenment scientist and a primitive child, with Truffaut playing the role of the father.

Mothers and Their Auteurs

Truffaut’s relationship with Jean-Pierre Léaud lays bare the way in which auteurist film can draw upon the metaphor of paternity in the interaction between actor and director. In many of Truffaut’s observations, though he admits that Léaud has had important roles in the films of other directors, it is clear that he sees Léaud (or at least, the Léaud who is also Doinel) as his creation. In his estimation, their work together forged a near biological resemblance between the two of them, both physically and psychologically. The familial relationships at the heart of auteurism can, however, move in the opposite direction: a number of the auteurs in this study exhibit a profound interest in their biological parents, so that the parental relationship forms a significant part of the auteurist self-projection. In particular, the maternal figure plays an important role, even to the extent that the auteur’s mother can appear as an actor in his films.

A closer look at the presence of mothers (and to some extent, fathers) in auteurist filmmaking reveals a fascination with identity and personal origin on the part of the auteur. Meditating on the lives of parents extends the story of the auteur’s life to a time before his or her birth, a time that cannot be accessed through direct means, but instead must be pursued through the same materials used in filmmaking: stories and photographs. And if the self is imagined as collective rather than individual, as must to some degree be the case in auteurist self-projection, parents offer the foundational example of the way in which human lives are inextricably linked, whether through biology or lived relationship or both. Ingmar Bergman, while most obsessed with his mother as a figure, also dwells in his writing and filmmaking on his parents’ marriage, and his father’s role (and Bergman really saw it as playing a role) as prominent pastor in the Swedish church. Andrei Tarkovsky’s father was a renowned poet, and his mother an actress; both perform in his autobiographical Mirror. Woody Allen returns to depictions of his family in Annie Hall, Radio Days, and other films, though his actual family members do not perform as actors. And Almodóvar (who partners with his brother Augustín in their production company, El Deseo) repeatedly uses his mother as an actress in his films, though not with reference to their real family life.

In particular, the auteur’s representation of his mother can become an act of exploration, an inquiry into the ultimate source of intersubjectivity, in the sense that the mother’s biological (and subsequently, often, psychological) symbiosis with the artist child troubles the boundaries between these two entities, calls their status as individual subjects into question. This view of the maternal would seem to map neatly onto the Freudian notion that a son must separate from the mother in order to enter the world of language, subjective expression, and selfhood. But while the auteurist image of the mother does seem to underwrite the claims of French feminists—namely, that the mother in patriarchal systems represents the prelinguistic, mysteriously blank, and unknowable origin of life—there is also a tendency to envision the mother as a model for the auteur’s creative genius. She performs as his “creator” and thus provides the source for his creativity. We see in several instances an attempt to enter the mother’s subjective perspective, give voice to the mysterious maternal space, make it the center of the film’s focus. In this way, the mother is repossessed by the auteur and appropriated as part of the auteurist vision—she becomes part of the image he sees in his interior mirror and then projects on the cinematic screen.

When the auteur’s actual mother (as opposed to the Mother) enters the cinematic frame, one can see the way in which the mother’s body eludes the kind of categorization ordinarily assigned to images of the Mother. The flat surface of the photographic film image seems to replicate at first the impenetrable and wordless mask of the Mother, but in the auteurist films in which the directors’ mothers appear, it becomes clear that the auteurist project aims to move past the surface and attempts to enter the mother’s subjective position, in part in order to establish the filmmaker’s source of identity. The mother, like other actors in auteurist films, becomes the auteur’s avatar. In pursuing an analysis of several auteurs, I will interweave accounts of the maternal thematic with examinations of the performance of auteurist mothers, with an eye toward understanding these performances as a part of the auteur’s self-projection. To demonstrate, let me first turn to Ingmar Bergman.

Swedish state television released Bergman’s documentary film Karin’s Face in 1984, two years after his valedictory “retirement” with the making of Fanny and Alexander. The fourteen-minute film is a brief account of his mother’s life in photographs; there is no voice-over narration, only spare piano music (played by Bergman’s ex-wife, Käbi Läretei), and occasional explanatory intertitles. The method Bergman employs in this little film forecasts Ken Burns’s treatment of Civil War documents for the American television series aired in 1990. In Bergman’s documentary, still photography becomes “live” through the film camera’s treatment of the images: now panning, now tracking out, now coming in for an extreme close-up of mouth, hands, details of clothing, or eyes. Often a close-up will focus on just one eye. We begin with Karin Bergman’s passport, issued, the intertitle tells us, just a few months before her death. Essential biographical information—date of birth, marital status, maiden name, etc.—is conveyed by the camera’s panning movement down over the document, so that the passport becomes part of the narration, a device that allows the film to show rather than tell. What becomes clear in the repetition of images of Karin’s face is that Bergman is fascinated by how his mother’s face remains recognizably hers from young childhood through old age, and how the photographs oscillate in character between a kind of opaque, closed generic form (top photo) and moments of candid, if not always entirely legible, expressiveness (middle and bottom photos).

It seems quite remarkable that Swedish National Television would support such an unswervingly personal project: Ingmar Bergman’s meditations on photographs of his mother and family. But Bergman’s stature at the time and his status as “retired” filmmaker allow him to be viewed with nostalgia and reverence, in much the way he views the images. Further, it could be argued that the photographs—provincial school photographs, wedding photographs, passport photographs—are not merely images of Bergman’s mother, but generic icons that take on the function of representing an entire generation of Swedish women. The meditation, importantly, is not centered around Karin as a person, but on photographic images of Karin, and, as I have implied above, these images are in a concrete (as well as an abstract) sense impenetrable. In Den goda viljan (Best Intentions), the biographical novel about his parents’ marriage, Bergman writes, “Carefully I touched the faces of my parents,” when in fact he is touching photographs of his parents. The actual parents are dead now, and untouchable. An early shot in Karin’s Face shows a pair of well-groomed hands opening and thumbing through the heavy gilt pages of an old family photo album. One imagines that the hands are Bergman’s, and the fact that this sequence is in color (as opposed to all the other images of the film, which are sepia and black-and-white) marks it as part of the present, a present that cannot truly enter into the past. No narrating voice informs or reminisces for the viewer—we are confronted with the impassive images and the sparse annotations that mark them, names and dates, the name of a photographic studio, and then the occasional intertitle, telling us, for example, that Henrik Bergman (Bergman’s father) lost his father at an early age. Only once is there an evaluative comment: when the intertitle labels Karin and Henrik Bergman’s engagement photograph as “extremely odd.” In fact, it is not the character of his parents that Bergman seeks to represent, but relationship—theirs to each other, theirs to him. And it is not the photographs themselves, but the arrangement of them and the camera’s various perspectives on them, the rhythm of the presentation, that give the viewer a way into reading them. We seem to move toward a penetration of the photographic surface when the film camera moves in to focus on a single eye, as if that eye could provide a portal into the pictured subject’s mind. But the photographs, unlike the “moving” photographs of film, remain dead; Bergman cannot bring Karin back to life, as the cinematic “magic” of twenty-four frames per second seems to vivify the still image and allow the dead to breathe, walk, speak. In the intertitles and the photographs’ arrangement, Bergman seems to want to speak for his mother, he sets out to ventriloquize her, but her static and mute body unmasks a profound auteurist conundrum: the actor is not the auteur. The filmed person is not even a person, but a photograph of a person. The cinematic actor’s body and subject are irreparably fragmented, mere vehicles for the auteurist vision, and any other impression we receive is mere illusion. What is demonstrated time after time is the impossibility of breaking through the photographic surface, just as it is impossible to look into the heart or mind of another human being, even one as symbiotically related to oneself as one’s mother.³⁴ Karin’s Face marks the beginning of a cinematic and literary project for Bergman. In Magic Lantern, and in the semiautobiographical epic Fanny and Alexander, Bergman begins to return to the kinds of scenes represented in the family photograph album featured in Karin’s Face. And it is in his “retirement” that a full-force exploration of his mother’s girlhood and his parents’ troubled marriage takes form: in the novelistic biography Best Intentions, made into a film with Bergman’s screenplay in 1992; in the book and film Sunday’s Children, an episode from Bergman’s childhood about his father, directed by Bergman’s son Daniel in 1992; in the short novel about Bergman’s mother’s young womanhood and adulterous affair, Private Confessions, directed by Liv Ullmann as a television film in 1996. Thirty years after Bergman’s mother’s death in 1966, in other words, he is still working to bring life to the still, smooth surface of the photographic images in his family album, taking over his mother’s generative function.

When Andrei Tarkovsky first began to outline a plan for the film that became Mirror, he called it “Confession” and envisioned a hidden-camera interview with his mother, in which he would pose questions he had written in advance. His use of the word “confession” in this context begs further exploration. Who is confessing, and what? In the original film script (which the Soviet film authorities blocked because they found the hidden camera unethical), Tarkovsky’s mother would have been the person “confessing,” either in the sense of helping her son to outline her life story or in the sense of responding to an interrogation with some kind of confession of wrongdoing. In the finished film script, we receive a hint at what Tarkovsky might see as his mother’s crime; at one point the film’s narrator receives a tongue-lashing from his ex-wife, who criticizes his relationship with his mother: “Until you die you will not forgive [your mother] the fact that she destroyed her life for you.” If we return for a moment to the idea that the actor sometimes literally takes the director’s place in film, we can see that Tarkovsky’s introduction of his mother into his cinematic world resurrects her, refuses her sacrifice of her life for his, and replaces his image with hers. Now the woman who gave up her career as a writer to support her ultimately errant husband and gave up her chance at an independent life to raise her children takes up the place of central interest in Mirror, a film that is often described as Tarkovsky’s (autobiographical) confession. The actor who plays her son, the narrator, the actor who voices Tarkovsky’s lines, so to speak, does not even appear on the screen.

In Mirror, then, Tarkovsky shifted the film from a documentary to a narrative mode, but he kept his mother in the frame as an actress.³⁵ Within the film’s story, the protagonist’s young mother is played by Margarita Terekhova, but Tarkovsky’s own mother, Larisa Tarkov-skaya, plays the protagonist’s mother as an old woman.

In creating Mirror, Tarkovsky re-created his own world, but also, and perhaps more important, his mother’s; like Bergman, his exploration of his mother’s marriage and personal history forms the essential basis for his own self-projection. Robert Bird remarks, “It wasn’t until [Tarkovsky] changed the focus of the film from the mother to the protagonist that he changed the title to Mirror.³⁶ But it is not clear that Tarkovsky ever really “changed the focus of the film.” It is true that the finished film, Mirror, as opposed to the originally conceived documentary interview, includes the perspective of a fictional son, but from beginning to end the film seeks to come to an understanding of the mother’s experience of the past, in part by interrogating her photographic image.

The narrative of Mirror opens with a young woman sitting on a weathered wooden fence, looking out across green fields and forests. We (the camera’s perspective melded to the viewer’s) approach her from behind and then move around to look at her face. Natasha Synessios reports that this image—the woman seated on the fence, smoking a cigarette—re-creates as precisely as possible a photograph taken of Tarkovsky’s mother during his childhood, during the wartime years. The woman in Mirror wears the same clothes, has the same hairstyle, sits on the same sort of fence in the same sort of posture as Tarkovsky’s mother had done thirty years earlier. But while the evocative black-and-white photographic image from the 1940s presents an impenetrable, two-dimensional surface, the color film image moves through three-dimensional space; it enters the photograph, so to speak, in order to move from behind the woman and reveal the environment that surrounds her, enter into her space.

Though attempting to enter the mother’s mental and emotional space seems a major preoccupation in Mirror, the figure of the mother remains an enigma. She is often pensive, silent, shedding tears for which the viewer is offered no narrative explanation, or suffering extreme anxiety about things that seem trivial when no proper context is offered. Beyond re-creating the three-dimensional space in which his mother moved (down to rebuilding the dacha in which she lived and planting buckwheat outside so it would grow as it had thirty years before), Tarkovsky provides a kind of narrative voice for his mother’s thoughts. Not the typical narrator, however—in this instance, he engages his father, Arsenii Tarkovsky, a celebrated poet, to read selections from his poetry in a voice-over that seems to speak to the mother figure of the film. The poems address the love between the poet/father and the young mother, a love that apparently has suffered with the poet’s absence and the mother’s solitude during the war. Thus both Tarkovsky’s mother and father play roles in the film (as both parents figure in Bergman’s Karin’s Face), though the father’s role is limited to his voice, a voice that works primarily to establish something about the mother’s character, while the auteur’s biological mother appears as the protagonist’s mother as an old woman.

The film’s narrative claims that the narrator’s wife closely resembles his mother as a young woman, and old photographs reveal that the faces of the two women—Tarkovsky’s mother as a young woman and the actress who plays her—are in fact strikingly similar. In order to stress this resemblance, Tarkovsky casts the same actress to play the two roles, wife and young mother. In one striking dream sequence, the actress playing his young mother is confronted by a mirror in which not her image, but the face of Tarkovsky’s aged biological mother, appears. Within the frame of the narrative, interestingly, this is the son’s dream, not the mother’s. In the son’s projection, the mother is young and old all at once. And at the conclusion of the film, once again the aged woman appears in the same frame with her “younger self,” underscoring something that marks Bergman’s representation of his mother as well: the conflation of past and present that is embodied by the mother’s presence, the violation of time’s ordinary sequential nature.

One of the appearances of Tarkovsky’s mother in Mirror involves a meeting between the narrator’s mother and his son—but it is a non-meeting because the two do not recognize each other. In a supernatural sequence, the boy (who appears in the opening prologue as the television viewer) waits alone in an apartment. He has an encounter with a mysterious woman who suddenly appears and as suddenly disappears, leaving only a condensation ring on the table where her cup of tea sat, and that ring slowly evaporates and disappears as well. Then the doorbell rings, and Ignat goes to answer (see the image of Larisa Tarkov-skaya). There stands Tarkovsky’s mother, and she asks after the person who, she believes, lives in that apartment. But Ignat does not know that person. The old woman is bewildered, confused; she searches Ignat’s face, seeming at some level to recognize him, while he clearly does not know her. She goes away, he closes the door, and the viewer is left to wonder about the scene’s significance. Tarkovsky explained in an interview that “although he did not have a logical understanding of, or explanation for, the fact that her grandson did not recognise her, he needed to see his mother’s face a little frightened, a little shy. . . . It was very important for me to see my mother in this state. The expression of her face when she is shy, confused, disconcerted. . . . It was very important for me to see this state of the soul of someone whom I feel very close to, this state of depression, of emotional awkwardness. It is like a portrait of someone in a state of humiliation.’”³⁷ Then the question arises as to why it was necessary for Tarkovsky to see his mother, his actual mother, not an actress playing her role, in a state of humiliation. In placing his mother in this position, he brings about her submission to his vision. She becomes his creature, and in some respect he may also take his revenge on her for the sacrifice she offered him and his sister, the renunciation of her own artistic life in service of his. At the same time, he restores her to artistic life by making her an actress in his film.

In moving from Andrei Tarkovsky to Pedro Almodóvar, it is tempting to point to Almodóvar’s homosexuality and hypothesize about the way in which the filmmaker’s strong identification with his mother corresponds to the cross-gender performances that proliferate in his work. But in fact Almodóvar’s engagement of his biological mother, Francisca Caballero, as an actress within the framework of several of his cinematic narratives corresponds in some vital respects to Tarkovsky’s use of his mother in Mirror. One is the use of the mother to evoke landscapes and narratives of the rural past, the premodern. Jean-Claude Seguin notes Caballero’s importance in an article on geography and the body in Almodóvar’s films: “The maternal figure, Francisca Caballero, is the most complete portrait of the penetration of the rustic into the city. Whether she is a television news announcer, a literary journalist, or a dancing extra, she embodies oddity, the untouchable transplant, a body encased in the city, uncorrupted and incorruptible, pure of any urban contamination” (my translation).³⁸ As in Tarkovsky’s Mirror, the mother’s body acts as a chronotrope, a site that combines the village and culture of the filmmaker’s childhood with his urban present: in the first of the films in which she appears, Francisca Caballero does indeed, with her hair pulled back in a bun, her body armored in a plain black dress, in her countrified manners and language, represent the landscape and the culture of the filmmaker’s past.

She is solid and soberly dressed, a standout in the flash and color of the hip Madrileño society that dominates Almodóvar’s palette.³⁹ This type of evocation of his mother’s world appears frequently in his work: in the villages of Talk to Her and Bad Education, and significantly in Volver (2006), a film that includes in its plot the return of a dead mother. The visually arresting opening of Volver focuses on a ritual performed in a wind-blasted La Mancha cemetery by a small crowd of traditionally dressed women, virtually indistinguishable from one another in their black dresses. About his representation of La Mancha, Almodóvar says, “I come from there, and even if it is an embarrassment to say so, I admit that [representing La Mancha constitutes] a confession, an evocation of my roots” (162). In this way Almodóvar, a figure whose work showcases the verve and radical departure of Madrid’s movida of the 1980s, signals a tenacious connection to an older Spain, a Spain he projects through the body of his mother. This is true of Tarkovsky’s geographic axis of maternal representation as well; his mother is the dacha, the countryside, memory. The difference between the two filmmakers is the way in which they relate ultimately to the rural past. Tarkovsky idealizes the Russian countryside and colors it with nostalgia, while Almodóvar embraces Madrid as the center of his representative universe, and, in fact, he brings his mother into Madrid, forcing a marriage between what Seguin calls “the maternal image” and the urban cultural landscape.

Thus Seguin’s reading of Francisca Caballero as an actor in her son’s films is only partially accurate. It is interesting, for instance, that he refers to Caballero as “the maternal figure,” when in fact she often does not play a mother figure at all. She is the mother of the protagonist in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, and in What Have I Done to Deserve This? she appears as a villager who, if not a mother herself, declares that she cared for the protagonist of that film when she was a baby. (Her role is listed officially in the credits not as “mother” or “babysitter,” but as “dental patient.”) But in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, she plays a television news announcer, and in Kika she is a journalist. It is not that she is a “maternal figure” (unless maternal means “older woman” or “traditionally built older woman”); she is Almodóvar’s mother, a fact that one does not necessarily know unless one knows who “Francisca Caballero” is.⁴⁰ She indicates Almodóvar’s relationship to the maternal not by acting as a mother, but by being his mother and offering (to those in the know) a link between the narrative of the film and Almodóvar’s narrative of his life. Like Tarkovsky’s mother or Bergman’s mother, Almodóvar’s mother forms part of the auteurist compact with spectators and performers as the biological director’s avatar.

Beyond casting his mother as actress, Almodóvar returns repeatedly to investigations of the significance of the mother-son relationship in a way that complicates the question of where one person begins and another ends, particularly in an autobiographical context. A reading of one of his films—All About My Mother—uncovers the auteur’s autobiographical impulse, the way he connects self-formation to the maternal figure, the importance of mother-as-actress, and the disintegration and re-formation of bodies into new persons. First, the director notes that the figure of the son (a character who loses his life in the first fifteen minutes of the film) is a stand-in for Almodóvar: “All About My Mother is as autobiographical as any film about a director from La Mancha who just won an Oscar. “All About My Mother even talks about the way I became a spectator and how I became a filmmaker.” In other words, the figure of the son Esteban in the film does not share biographical details with Almodóvar but evokes a deeper kinship; Almodóvar explains that Esteban is “a sensibility,” not unlike Truffaut’s claim of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s “moral resemblance” to himself (204-5).

In All About My Mother, Esteban/Almodóvar requests that his mother read the opening of Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons to him. The filmmaker explains to an interviewer that this “was one of the texts that I had selected for my mother to read before the camera in a film that I always wanted to make and now never will. Basically, it would consist of putting a camera in front of her so that she could talk, because what she needs to do is talk and tell stories about things, and she is very entertaining. She would read—something she does very well—a series of texts. She would be this mother who is teaching you what’s best. How are we to understand, from the selection of that text, “what is best”? Like Tarkovsky’s original idea of putting his mother into a secretly recorded interrogation situation, with the questions written by him, Almodóvar, too, writes a script for his mother, or at least, he gives her the lines to say, the ones he considers best, ironically. His mother’s notion of “best” does not really enter into this picture. That he places her in the position of reading from Capote’s book points toward the importance of her acceptance of his notions of identity and authorship; the title Music for Chameleons marks a clear association between the son’s sensibility and one of the dominant themes of the film: identity transformation.

Here I would like to argue that Almodóvar’s interest in bodies in transformation has direct relevance not only to his drive to upset norms of gender construction, but he deals in complicated ways both with self-construction and film as a mode of self-representation. Unknown to Esteban, his long-absent father has had a sex change and is now a woman. And one of the primary figures of the film is Agrado, a formerly-male woman (played by a female actress) who explains in detail to a theater audience how she paid for the operations that turned her into a woman: so and so many pesos for buttocks, breasts, lips, and so on. The enumerated parts of the body conform to the way in which actors’ bodies are broken down and reassembled in film, but also to the way in which a female actor can become the avatar of a male, how several different bodies can be assembled under the name of the single auteur, who in his turn is also not one, but many, acting under the sign of the auteur.

Another way Almodóvar represents the body reassembled is through the motive of transplantation. After the shocking car accident that takes Esteban’s life in an early sequence of the film, we see that his mother, Manuela, makes the difficult decision to donate Esteban’s organs. Because she works in the transplantation unit, Manuela has access to confidential records and is able to hunt down the identity of the person who receives her son’s heart. And not only Manuela is obsessed with the material, corporeal heart. The film obsessively focuses on the heart’s removal from Esteban and transfer from Madrid to La Coruña, transported in a cooler via helicopter. Irrationally yet persistently, Manuela identifies Esteban’s heart as Esteban, and its transferal to another human being creates an amalgam of Esteban and that person, to the degree that Manuela travels to La Coruña to see “her heart.” Esteban’s heart is not only his—it is his donee’s and his mother’s, and the topos of transplantation thus segues into the topos of intersubjectivity or the topos of the avatar—but the person with Esteban’s heart in his body is now a version of Esteban, and by virtue of the connection between Manuela and Esteban, he is a version of Manuela as well (a reference seems to be implied to the circulatory system in pregnancy, when the expectant mother shares blood-flow with the fetus she carries).

It is not merely the case that Manuela works in the transplantation unit; she has the unusual job of working as an actress there, which underscores the idea of mother as actress, working according to someone else’s script. It happens that Manuela performs in a film as a woman who must decide whether or not to donate the organs of a loved one who has suddenly died. When Esteban is killed in the crash, the role suddenly becomes real—she does not have to perform, she can simply be the woman experiencing horrific loss and trauma. Thus Manuela becomes the epitome of the film actress, the nonperformer whose role is determined by the director (in this case represented as fate, though of course we are watching a film, so the ironic coincidence is as constructed as the wooden hospital movie scripts). That Almodóvar is quite in agreement with Tarkovsky on this point about film acting can be ascertained from his remarks about his work with the actress Victoria Abril: “She only understood when she realized that it wasn’t she who had to invent, but me” (93).

The relationship Almodóvar creates between Manuela and Esteban might seem at first to bear little resemblance to Almodóvar’s relationship with his mother. But Esteban promises Manuela, who once acted on the stage, that he will write a role for her and bring her back to the theater, as Almodóvar brings his own mother, never a professional actress, but a countrywoman from La Mancha, to the screen in his films. Viewers and critics view Almodóvar rather consistently as a “women’s” director; it has been remarked that the primary vessels for his self-projection are the actresses Carmen Maura, Penélope Cruz, Victoria Abril, and Chus Lampraeve, among others. But the representation of women in his films deals predominately with camp or drag versions of feminine roles; in fact, roles from films. His mother occupies a different kind of position; one should not be so naive as to claim that she represents herself, but her presence in his films as a body, a body that relates to his “real-life” persona, references the auteur’s presence behind these films. The kind of woman she represents is not derived from a cinematic icon, but in his films she becomes one, and through his work we see the possibility of transformation and gender ambivalence even in a figure that seems at first so solidly female (maternal) and traditional. The way in which Almodóvar engages his mother as actress suggests that even in the midst of capturing the image of his country’s and his personal past through her, he also uses her as an expression of his challenge to traditional culture. For instance, he relates his mother’s enjoyment in shopping for the clothes she will wear on-screen (and apparently then keep for her own use); as a young woman in the village, she found herself limited to black clothing at an early stage of life, while in her son’s later films she wears prints and colors. And it is possible to imagine something subversive in her role as reader, both in the film her son imagines (but only produces as a fiction in All About My Mother) and in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, where she reads the news as a television announcer. In each instance of reading, the woman gives voice to a masculine script—the news for which one assumes a masculine source and the book by a (gay) man, but ultimately the script written by her own son. Rather than functioning as an anchor for the wandering son, the mother, in becoming a cinematic figure, offers a model of the ultimate transformative power, the site of oscillation between the masculine and the feminine, which Almodóvar portrays throughout his oeuvre.

Herzog’s Kinski

In the examples above, the auteurs employ their mothers as a site or a screen for their self-projections, interrogating and studying and transforming the surface of the maternal body for some hint as to the mystery of their own identities, their personal and cultural pasts. The instances I now want to explore involve a different kind of relationship, one in which the link between the auteur and the actor is not genetic, but sexualized and pressed into a supernatural realm. In first looking at Werner Herzog’s collaboration with Klaus Kinski, I do not mean to say that there is a literal sexual relationship between the two men, but rather that an eroticized violence characterizes the romantic and hypermasculine vision Herzog seems to hold of their relationship. As François Truffaut creates an alter ego, a mirror image that can perform his younger self, Werner Herzog finds and captures a wild child who can perform the savagery of Herzog’s vision and take his place on the altar of artistic sacrifice, to use an expression typical of Herzog’s vocabulary.

In 1999, eight years after the death of Klaus Kinski, his director, Werner Herzog, produced a documentary on their relationship entitled Mein liebster Feind—Klaus Kinski (literally, My Best Enemy—Klaus Kinski). While the German title plays off the relationship between the words Freund (friend) and Feind (enemy), the English-release title, My Best Fiend, implies Kinski’s demonic nature both on- and off-screen, a caricature upheld by both Kinski (in his writing and his acting) and Herzog. In the course of the film we hear how Herzog, still a young man, is struck by a particular performance by Kinski in a German film of the 1950s about World War II.

In an interview, Herzog is asked why My Best Fiend says nothing of Kinski’s personal history or background, and he responds, “It never interested me. I never wanted to make an encyclopedic film on Klaus Kinski. It was always evident to me that it should be my Klaus Kinski, that’s why I have this extra, whom I met at the airport, carry a sign that says ‘Herzog’s Kinski.’”⁴¹ The airport scene Herzog describes is an odd and significant one, in fact. After many years, Herzog is returning to Peru, where Kinski and he had their first great success in Aguirre: The Wrath of God. When he arrives at the airport, he is indeed met by a man carrying a sign marked “Herzog’s Kinski.” But we know from the interview that the scene is staged. And upon reflection, it does seem strange to be met at the airport with a sign bearing someone else’s name. It is not the dead Kinski, but Herzog who is expected. In this staged moment of reunion with a cast extra from Aguirre, Herzog creates confusion between himself and his actor, a confusion that the documentary encourages throughout, and that could be an autobiographical statement about his career.

Herzog’s highest degree of success as a feature filmmaker coincides with his collaboration with Kinski. When Kinski died, Herzog’s stock as an auteur of narrative films fell perceptibly, a fact he obliquely expresses in the valedictory tone of My Best Fiend. At that juncture, Herzog began to focus primarily on documentary filmmaking, and it is his documentaries that have maintained his status as an auteur. Once Kinski left his stage, it seems that there was no avatar that could fully take Herzog’s place in a fictive framework. My Best Fiend, while on one level eulogizing the dead actor and looking nostalgically at the lost artistic collaboration between the two men, also works toward erasing or engulfing Kinski. There are moments (like the airport greeting) when Herzog attempts to absorb Kinski entirely into his auteurist vision, a vision that focuses on the blood sacrifice one must make in order to force savage nature into art. If there is a recognizable autobiographical signature in Herzog’s filmmaking, it is this: the repeated performance of Herzog’s belief that art demands human sacrifice, in the form of a human who stands in for the artist. Kinski plays that role for Herzog, takes that important auteurist position for him. It is the violence of their relationship, in which Herzog demands repeatedly that Kinski enact Herzog’s sacrificial fantasies, that leads me to characterize their bond as eroticized under the banner of Death.

The notion of sacrifice comes to the fore from the very beginning of My Best Fiend, which shows us Kinski’s one-man performance as Jesus in the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin. The placement of Kinski’s manic Christ at the film’s opening establishes the actor’s savagery and aggression, but it also underscores his role as a sacrificial victim. This implication will return later in the film, when Herzog relates the striking number of violent accidents and attacks that occur on his film sets. Kinski attacks an extra with his sword and shoots a gun into a tent, grazing the head of another actor. Herzog threatens to shoot Kinski. A cameraman slices his hand to the bone during the filming of a shipwreck in Fitzcarraldo. Another technician has to be airlifted out of the jungle when he cuts his own leg off with a chainsaw in order to avoid death by snakebite. And repeatedly, we have the scenes of Kinski enraged, Kinski foaming at the mouth. Set against the clips of a raging Kinski is the quiet voice of Werner Herzog. Just after the opening sequence in the Deutschlandhalle, Herzog visits the house where Kinski lived for a short time in a type of boarding-house arrangement together with Herzog and his family, when Herzog was thirteen. The building has now been renovated, and the former boarding house is occupied by a single, well-off couple who gutted the apartment and furnished it lavishly. Herzog’s narration of his own family’s poverty, the crowded and sordid conditions of the establishment, and Kinski’s wild and destructive behavior while living there is ironically set off by the utter Bürgerlichkeit of the horrified and fascinated couple, and Herzog’s own recessive, polite, and quiet delivery. In Herzog’s narrative, Kinski throws potatoes at the dinner table, he shrieks obscenities at a visiting journalist, he goes naked to the door to meet the mailman, he locks himself into the only bathroom for forty-eight hours and, according to Herzog, reduces all of the fixtures inside to fragments that “could be sifted through a tennis racket.” Herzog relates all of this to the bourgeois couple in a gentle and humorous tone.

One begins to get the impression in this sequence that the savagery that underlies Herzog’s vision—which demands that a ship be dragged over a mountain, smashing its prow on the rocks; that a young woman fall sacrificial victim to a vampire; that a troop of Spanish conquistadors be crushed by the brutality of a world they cannot understand—has to find expression through Herzog’s demon, Kinski, for Herzog himself is such a kind and gentle chap. Kinski and Herzog, however, both come from a working-class background, displaced by the new German bourgeois. Kinski’s violence is really Herzog’s violence, but Herzog must contain, harness, and control it in order to produce art—Herzog’s art. Not unlike the roaring river in Peru, Kinski performs in Herzog’s cinema as a force of nature that runs into apocalyptic destruction. He becomes the sacrificial victim that art demands.

When asked in an interview about his working relationship with Kinski during Nosferatu, Herzog replies, “Well, Nosferatu was easier than others because he needed so much preparation for stepping in front of the camera, four hours’ make-up. Fangs, ears. . . . It was like a harness. You see, if he threw a tantrum and beat the ground with his fists, the make-up would be ruined and he would be in for another four hours. . . . I managed to domesticate him, to make his real qualities productive for the screen.”⁴² The notion of harnessing or channeling Kinski emerges in My Best Fiend when Herzog describes how he often pushed Kinski into a rage in order to get the acting affect he desired. Kinski, he explains, wanted to overact, and Herzog wanted him to play his malevolence (as Aguirre) more quietly. So Herzog would bait or tease Kinski, perhaps eating a piece of chocolate in front of him when no one on the set had eaten any chocolate for weeks, thus throwing Kinski into a rage. After the tantrum, Kinski would have lost the energy to play Aguirre at his preferred level of intensity. Even Kinski’s rages, then, are the products of Herzog’s sadistic machinations, according to Herzog.

Kinski, in his autobiography, All I Need Is Love, offers a somewhat different account: “[Herzog] doesn’t possess a spark of talent and has no idea what filmmaking is. . . . I determine every scene, every adjustment, every shot, and refuse to do anything other than what I see as right. This way I can at least save the film from becoming complete trash.”⁴³ Kinski, whose writing style closely mirrors his acting style, showers Herzog with invective; he is “humorless, mendacious, stubborn, narrow-minded, pretentious, unscrupulous, bumptious, spiritless” and much worse (197). Herzog, for his part, makes an astonishing move regarding Kinski’s autobiography in My Best Fiend. He claims to have coauthored it: “We would sit together and think of all the nastiest things to say about me.” Thus the vision of Herzog published as Kinski’s Herzog is still Herzog’s Kinski’s Herzog.

There is a way in which Kinski understands the sacrifice demanded of him. He writes in his autobiography:

[Herzog] confesses that the living and working conditions on location will be filthy and disgusting, as if he were reading a deserved verdict, and explains just as brazenly and coarsely (licking his lips as if savoring some tasty tidbit) that each of the participants will have to endure unimaginable punishment and privation, risking death, to follow him, Herzog . . . “Unto death,” as he obnoxiously expresses himself. The whole time, he keeps his eyes shut to his megalomania, which he imagines to be genius (196).

Here Kinski aids Herzog once again in producing an image that closely parallels Herzog’s signature as auteurist director. The question arises at to whether a “Kinski’s Herzog” might not exist alongside “Herzog’s Kinski.” Despite his repulsion for Herzog’s sacrificial vision, Kinski willingly lays himself on the altar. “I don’t know why I say yes this time [to Nosferatu and Woyzeck]. There must be a point to my choosing to endure someone else’s hell when I’m at my nadir. Will I experience pain myself after I’ve incarnated it? . . . Do I transfer the hell of others into my own life, or is it the other way around? Do I live through everyone, and does everyone live through me? Who can tell?” (245-46).

Kinski’s question is critical to my discussion: placing Herzog’s story of Kinski alongside Kinski’s provides an opportunity for experiencing the avatar as embodied person and intentional agent, a person who questions the directorial vision even as he allows himself to be seduced by it. The sacrifice the auteur demands is represented in the film narratives and the rhetoric of the auteur and the actor as a blood sacrifice, but it seems to be a self-sacrifice on the altar of the auteur’s self-projection. And it is the tension between the two subjects, according to Herzog’s film, that provides the energy for Herzog’s self-projection, Herzog’s Kinski. But at the same time, Kinski’s death provides some support to Bergman’s statement that the auteur cannot exist without an actor: “Without a you, no I.” Herzog stages an end for Kinski’s career as a film actor in the context of My Best Fiend. It is 1988, three years before Kinski’s death, and the actor has just filmed a death scene, the final scene of their last film together, Cobra Verde. “He was spent,” says Herzog, “burnt away like a comet, he was ashes.” He claims that Kinski said at that moment, “We can go no further. I am no more.” This was the end of Herzog’s Kinski and the end of Kinski’s Herzog as well. Neither Cobra Verde nor any of Herzog’s feature films that followed would enjoy the success of their collaborations.

A Painful Connection

Liv Ullmann continued to work with Ingmar Bergman until his death, and she reflects a unique and different sensibility from that between Herzog and Kinski, though here, too, is a form of the erotic fascination and obsession exhibited in the Herzog/Kinski partnership. In 2001, an article about Ullmann appeared in the New York Times Magazine entitled “An Independent Woman,” preceded by the writer’s observation: “She spent years as Bergman’s muse, star, and lover. Now, as she works alone behind the camera, Liv Ullmann understands what their relationship has been about.”⁴⁴ Like Herzog and Kinski, Bergman and Ullmann seem to oscillate between positions of framing and being framed. And like Herzog and Kinski, there is an intersubjectivity at work that is impossible to disentangle. On the set of Persona in 1966, when the Bergman-Ullmann affair first began, Bergman said to his actress, “I had a dream last night. That you and I will be painfully connected.”⁴⁵

The connection is achieved through intimacy, but that intimacy embraces both the sexual/spiritual and the cinematic. Of Bergman’s signature close-up images, Ullmann writes:

I love close-ups. . . . The closer a camera comes, the more eager I am to show a completely naked face, show what is behind the skin, the eyes; inside the head …

When the camera is as close as Ingmar’s sometimes gets, it doesn’t only show a face, but also what kind of life this face has seen …

Privately we long for exactly this kind of recognition: that others should perceive what we really are, deep inside. To make a film with Ingmar is, for me, to have this experience. (244)

Ullmann’s interpretation of the close-up’s meaning echoes that of early film theorist Béla Balázs, who claims that “close-ups are often dramatic revelations of what is really happening under the surface of appearances” (56). Ullmann emphasizes the sensual nature of the cinematic exchange between actor and audience via the camera (which is “Ingmar’s”—the lover’s). The whole passage and in particular certain of Ullmann’s words—“eager,” “naked,” “skin,” “long[ing],” “deep inside”—breathe an unmistakable eroticism into filmmaking that finds expression in Bergman’s autobiography, The Magic Lantern. He writes, “Film work is an intensely erotic business. One’s closeness to the actors knows no reservations, the mutual surrender is total. . . . The atmosphere is irresistibly charged with sexuality. It took many years for me to finally learn that one day the camera will be turned off and the lights extinguished.”⁴⁶ These remarks by Bergman on the eroticism of filmmaking echo those of Truffaut. They appear in his account of his sexual relationship with Harriet Andersson while they were working together on the set of Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika, 1953), and in this instance the story is simply “factual,” historic. But I would argue that Bergman refers here both to something quite specific and tangible (his relationships with Harriet Andersson, then Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, and others) and something more metaphysical and universal: sexuality as an act of self-reflection or self-construction that lies at the heart of his film work.

It is not at all coincidental that it is on the set of Persona that this “painful connection” takes shape. Persona is in fact about a painful connection between two women, the linking of two individual subjectivities through film or, more precisely, through a photographic image. At a moment of crisis in the film, the viewer is confronted with the frightening merged image of the faces of the film’s female protagonists. In his autobiographies, The Magic Lantern and Images, Bergman discusses how certain of his films begin with a single, enigmatic mental image. Persona, he says, grew out of a vision of two women, wearing hats, sitting on a beach and comparing hands. This mental image, in its turn, was inspired by an actual photograph of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson. Bergman decided to make a film with the two of them because they were, as he puts it, so “devilishly alike.”⁴⁷ In evaluating the six-year relationship with Bergman that grew out of their collaboration on Persona, Ullmann asserts, “We were so much alike. What he had not known about himself he began to see in me—as if in a mirror—despite the fact that I was a woman and much younger and perhaps unlike him in ways he didn’t know” (110). In Persona, Bergman explores the permeability of the bounds of selfhood, using the cinematic apparatus and especially the physical nature of film and still photography as a means of projecting questions about intersubjectivity. The figures in Persona regard themselves as real people, and under ordinary circumstances the spectator is engaged to see figures in films as real people. But by creating a vampiric narrative, and by inserting references to the actors as photographed images (when the film “breaks,” for instance, or images of the two women’s faces are merged into an image of one frightening face), the film probes the question of what it means to be “real.”

In this chapter on actors, I have concentrated on the relational and collaborative nature of auteurist self-projection. An exploration of how the intimacy of auteur/actor relationships—sexual, biological, inimical—reveals the embodied and emotional status of what passes between the two agents. Auteurist cinema lays bare that the act of self-formation occurs through other bodies and persons, and that it is through self-projection and spectatorship (in which the roles of projection and spec-tatorship revolve through director, actor, audience) that the sense of a “person” is formed. I do not argue that it is the case that every auteurist act of self-projection involves an intimate relationship between auteur and actor, but such relationships stand as an emblem for the kind of mutual sacrifice and tension that occurs when a self takes shape on the screen.

When we recall the statements of the auteurs on acting at the beginning of this chapter, we could perhaps agree that auteurist cinema can generally be defined as an autocratic mode, with the auteur employing not only actors, but technicians and many others toward the realization of a personal vision. But the actor inserts him or herself stubbornly into the artist’s vision, and must be recaptured by the auteur in various moves intended to assert the primacy of that vision—moves that are not always successful, for the viewer may choose to privilege the actor’s performance as the primary object. Thus the actor, absolutely necessary and intrinsic to the expression of the auteurist’s self-projection, also can pose the greatest threat to authorial control. In the case of Herzog and Kinski, a battle for supremacy becomes obvious. Whose lines will be spoken? In what voice will they be recorded? Who is performing for whom? Whose vision will be realized? In the end, the actor and the director must burn out as individual subjectivities—they exist only in concert with each other in the cinematic performance and they lose themselves as selves there. With Bergman and Ullmann, the confrontation takes a different and less violent form but claims the same sacrifice. Ullmann says at one point that Bergman gives her herself through his close focus on her face. Bergman tells her that they are “painfully connected,” and when he retires from directing himself, he gives Ullmann his scripts to direct—the story of his parents, the story of one of his own stormy (pre-Ullmann) love affairs. In her autobiography, Liv Ullmann writes of the moment Bergman told her about his mother’s death: “‘Now I have no one,’ he cried, and he was completely defenseless. I knew that I could never leave him, and in a way I never have” (222).

After having been convinced by Barthes, Foucault, and others who taught us of the impossibility of “knowing” an author and the foolishness of pursuing the details of an author’s so-called life in the hope of interpreting the author’s work, we still find ourselves confronted with persons, bodies, and the impact of persons and bodies on others. What is ephemeral in film and other forms of discourse keeps straining toward materiality, and it seems to me that the auteur’s relationship with his actors is an arena where we can watch the struggle between the material and ephemeral take place—in fact, they stage that struggle in their films, the struggle to make vision incarnate.