Tarja LAINE

Shame and Desire

Emotion, Intersubjectivity, Cinema

Rethinking Cinema"
No.3
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 Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION. Intersubjectivity in Film Studies 9

Emotions and Intentionality 14
Intersubjectivity in the Cinematic Experience 18
The Course of the Argument 23
CHAPTER 1. "You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!" 29
What Is Intersubjectivity? 29
The Returned Look 33
Masochistic Intimacy 4 36
Violent Confrontation 45
Voyeuristic Shame 49
Reciprocal Intersubjectivity 54
CHAPTER 2. Intersubjectivity and Otherness 61
Dialectical Spectatorship 61
Sense of Communality 65
Triadic Communality 70
Idiotic Communities 73
Intersubjectivity and Solidarity 76
CHAPTER 3. An Appetite for Alterity 85
Otherness Within 85
Images of Abjection 93
Love and Abjection 101
CHAPTER 4. Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect 109
The Bodily Subject 109
Carnal Perception 114
Inside/Outside 118
Intersubjectivity, Sexuality and Gender 126
Conclusion 139
References 143
Index 151

7
 INTRODUCTION

Intersubjectivity in Film Studies

The Other is indispensable for my own existence,

as well as to my knowledge about myself. This
being so, in discovering my inner being I discover
the other person at the same time, like a freedom
placed in front of me which thinks and wills only
for or against me. Hence, let us at once announce
the discovery of a world which we shall call inter-
subjectivity.
(Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism & Humanism)

The lack of 'identity construction' seems to lie at the heart of con-

temporary cinema. As a result, a new perception of cinema is coming
into sight, a perception that is no longer related to visual pleasure or
narrative, ego-strengthening, two-way identification, but to the concepts
of affect, emotion and intersubjectivity. An example of this kind of'new
perception' can be found for instance in a crucial and much-discussed
scene in Matthieu Kassovitz s acclaimed Hate {La haine, 1995), which
examines the lives of three teenage friends from a housing project
outside Paris: Vinz (Vincent Cassel) who is Jewish, Hubert (Hubert
Kound6) who is Afro-Caribbean and Said (Said Taghmaoui), who is an
Arab. In this important scene, Hubert and Said are being assaulted in a
Parisian police station upon being arrested. The scene opens with a
medium shot of two police officers performing the act of violence
directly towards the camera. In the next shot the camera has moved
exactly 180 degrees, and we see a close-up of a younger officer. Later,
when Hubert directs his face (that now has lost all the traces of human
dignity) to the camera, the shot is followed by another close-up of the
young officer, looking down in shame. The spectator comes to share the
officer's shame through a very complex, triadic system of identification.
On the one hand, the spectator identifies with the officer as seen by
Hubert, on the other hand the spectator identifies with Hubert as the one
who looks, and, finally, the spectator identifies with the 'panoptic' look
of the larger social structures ('the French nation'), the discursive
construction of vision that defines the subjectivity of both Hubert and

9
Shame and Desire

the young officer (and supposedly 'justifies' the police violence against
migrants in France).
The way in which the editing is organised in this scene epitomises
Sartre's quotation cited above, which suggests that the concept of
intersubjectivity deals with that dimension of the self that links the
subject immediately with the relational, interpersonal world, where the
'outside' of the collective experience becomes the 'inside' of the sub-
ject's psychic life. This means that in order to fully understand subjec-
tivity, one has to take the subject's relationship with the Other into
consideration. This relationship is not merely an external one; it contrib-
utes to the core of subjectivity itself. Since subjectivity exists in the
signification of others, the subject's being in the world can have mean-
ing only through self-awareness of his or her presence in front of the
others. During my research, I have come to the conclusion that this
intersubjective dimension of subjectivity could be extended to the
cinematic experience as well. The 'cinematic' emerges from an intersub-
jective 'in-between' space, since the cinematic experience is much more
immediate, much more dependent on the existence of others, and much
more socially conditioned than assumed in theories that operate within
the ocular-specular paradigm only (such as psychoanalysis). Generally
speaking, one might claim that cinema is the art of shared space, bring-
ing before the spectators the intersubjective 'life-spaces' of the charac-
ters in the film. Cinema is not some kind of objectified external universe
cut off from the spectator by an impassable barrier that separates the
corporeal from the intellectual, or the private self from the public space.
Rather, I have come to see cinema as a matter of affects that emerge
from between the inside of the self and the outside of the world, and also
from between different temporalities and spatialities, that are holding the
intersubjective world together.
The intersubjective perspective in film theory, then, maintains that in
contemporary cinema the traditional, dialectical poles of inside and
outside, subject and object, seeing and being seen no longer seem to be
valid. The status of the object and the subject of the look are inter-
changeable: we are surrounded by images that look back at us, aggres-
sively, seductively, provocatively, indifferently. Like the look of Hubert
in the film Hate discussed above, images look back at us, simultane-
ously constituting and transforming the discourses (the mediations of
'reality') that define the ontological distinction between 'the self and
'the Other', engaging us in new kinds of intersubjective relationships
across social communities. This is the debate around which my argu-
ments regarding contemporary cinema revolve. But how can we theorise
this new way of looking that we find not only in movies, but also in

10
 Introduction. Intersubjectivity in Film Studies

installation art, photography, reality television, the city, the street, in

chance encounters, and in our more private, intimate relationships?
Psychoanalytic film theory, for instance, heavily epitomises the con-
cept of look, and in particular the way in which the look and the phe-
nomenon of cinema relates to the psyche of the individual spectator.
Cinema is seen as a Kleinian 'good object', granting the spectators what
they unconsciously desire and disavowing that there is any lack. For
Melanie Klein, the mother's breast is the metaphor for both the 'good'
(when it produces satisfaction) and the 'bad' (when it denies satisfac-
tion) object for the infant in the pre-Oedipal stage. According to Klein,
this process is replayed throughout adulthood by the unconscious de-
fence mechanism against the lack. These mechanisms include projection
(projecting the 'good' and the 'bad' aspects of the inner self onto some-
thing or someone in the 'external' world), introjection (taking the 'good'
and the 'bad' from the 'external' world into the self), and projective
identification (recognising the 'external' parts of the self in the other,
but not as originating within the self). Similarly, cinema produces
satisfaction by allowing the spectators to identify with their own vision
as 'omniscient', and by inviting the spectators to project their ego ideal
onto the film characters. In this way, cinema offers the spectators the
illusion of pre-Oedipal (the stage in which the infant's sense of self is
not yet wholly individuated), Imaginary wholeness; and cinema as
Imaginary is identified as the ideological function of cinema. However,
as has been argued in the context of psychoanalytic reasoning, since
cinema is always already Symbolic (the order of language and the
societal imperatives of 'the law of the Father'), it also introduces a
rupture in these Imaginary processes and re-establishes the lack by
producing the good object as lost.1
Psychoanalytic film theory, then, strives to show how cinema has the
power to take advantage of the subject's basic desire to look and his or
her drive for wholeness through situating the spectator at the 'omnis-
cient' position, at the centre of vision. This idea of the so-called 'inter-
pellation' was reframed in film theory by Jean-Pierre Oudart and Jean-
Louis Baudry, and it was borrowed from Louis Althusser's political
reading of Jacques Lacan: just like language in Althusserian thinking,
cinematic experience (the way in which the spectators experience the
tension between the narrative content and cinematic texture of the film)
is ideological in nature, because the spectators are blind to the fact that

Klein, 1979. On cinema as a good/bad object, see especially Metz, 1982. On (earlier)
psychoanalytic film theory see also Oudart, 1977/78; Dayan, 1985; Baudry, 1986;
Mulvey, 1985. On criticism of this earlier psychoanalytic film theory, see, for in-
stance, MacCabe, 1975; Heath, 1977/78; Andrew, 1984.

11
Shame and Desire

their knowledge (and their way of looking) has already been produced in
a certain (ideological) discourse beforehand.2 The quest in psychoana-
lytic film theory is to find out how cinema works on the spectator as a
subject of desire, what is the ideological function of cinema, and what
might be the alternatives (e.g. a Brechtian 'deconstructionist' cinema a
la Jean-Luc Godard). In this way, psychoanalysis epitomises the desire
to look and the illusion of the transcendental gaze, but it does not allow
the returned look that would allow one to see oneself in the Other's
eyes.3 In other words, it is all about 'the subject'.
Kaja Silverman has posed answers to this problem by positing a dif-
ferent kind of being-in-the-world as spectators. By confronting psycho-
analysis with the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt,
Silverman inquires into a more adequate theory of intersubjectivity in
cinema:
The concept of [being-in-the-world] makes visible something which psy-
choanalysis has functioned to make invisible: what it means for the world
that each of us is in it. [...] Since Lacan, those of us working within that dis-
course have begun to understand that subjectivity pivots around a void: that
each of us is in a sense no-thing. However, we have not learned to hear the
call to Being which echoes out of this void. We have not yet understood that
the "no-thing9 links us inextricably to the world we inhabit, and makes its
affairs ours as well.4
According to Silverman, we are world spectators insofar as we can
only see from a certain position in the world: "The 'there' from which
each of us looks is finally semiotic; it represents the unique language of
desire through which it is given to the subject to symbolise the world."5
Furthermore, we can only appear in the world insofar as we are seen by
others in it: "We can appear, and so to Be, only if others 'light' us up.
To be lit up means to be seen from a vantage point from which we can
never see ourselves."6 Silverman does not, however, challenge the basic
Lacanian premise of the look that subscribes to the fundamental lack.
The world spectator remains to be a subject divided in language, not as a
subject concretely and bodily present in the world. Furthermore, in this
new way of looking we are not merely spectators: we participate, we are
challenged, we have to respond. This look is reflective and self-

2
Althusser, 1971; Oudart, 1977/78; Baudry, 1986.
Except in the Lacanian gaze of the Big Other (the gaze imagined by the subject in the
Symbolic field) and in Laura Mulvey's erroneous analysis of 'returning the gaze'.
4
Silverman, 2000, p. 28.
5
/£/</., p. 19.
6
Ibid., 2000, p. 23.

12
 Introduction. Intersubjectivity in Film Studies

conscious, and has a strong bodily and social dimension, and thus the
concept of the look in psychoanalytic film theory needs to be re-thought.
The most thorough critique of psychoanalytic theories of spectator-
ship has come from cognitive theorists, such as NoSl Carroll and Murray
Smith.7 In this critique, the emotional context seems to be especially
relevant, as an answer to the demand of a film theory that would not rely
only on "one main function; unconscious sexual desire."8 Cognitive
theorists of cinematic emotions concentrate on the ways in which emo-
tional response is mediated through film narrative: as Ed S. Tan has put
it, cinema is an 'emotion machine9. The cognitivists explore the way in
which film narrative is structured in order to activate the spectator's
understanding of the cinematic event as emotionally relevant, after
which their evaluation of the event becomes emotionally charged. The
process of evaluation is related to the spectator's understanding of how
the film character appraises the event emotionally, and how this ap-
praisal is intelligible in the situation in question. The situational mean-
ing in turn forms the basis for the emotional response in the spectator
that is then felt as a concern for the sympathetic film character and as a
change in action readiness (the urge to do something for the character).
According to Torben Grodal, for instance, the situational meaning in the
film experience renders emotions to motivational forces for potential
actions:
[The emotions] guide the simulation of action tendencies, vividness and sa-
lience which focus attention, and feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity
that influence our response to characters and scenes. It follows that the film-
viewing experience must be described as a process, a mental flow, with bod-
ily reactions as sounding boards.9
Furthermore, the film narrative 'addresses' the concerned spectators
in their imaginary role as physical witnesses to the events of the fic-
tional world, and triggers emotional responses in the spectators by
guiding their attention to the significance of an event that is related to a
certain emotion. According to Tan,
[T]he situation addresses viewers in their imaginary role as witnesses to the
events of the fictional world. And it is to this situational meaning structure
that the [emotional] components are related. Thus urgency signifies that in
the eyes of the viewer it is high time that something is done by or on behalf
of the protagonists with whom the viewer sympathises, regardless of

On cognitive approaches to film, see, for instance, Carroll, 1990 and 1997; Smith,
1995; Tan, 1996; Grodal, 1997. Furthermore, Plantinga and Smith, 1999, is a valu-
able collection of essays on film and emotion from a cognitive perspective.
8
Grodal, 1997, p. 228.
9
Ibid, pp. 127-8.

13
Shame and Desire

whether the protagonist himself or herself shares that urge. But the compo­
nent controllability is always minimal: the viewer can do nothing. It is this
condition that guarantees safe involvement.10
The spectator as a 'physical witness' is then a 'product' of narration
that addresses the spectator as a witness to the film events. In the struc­
ture of film narration, the spectators are a kind of narratees or confi­
dants, who are never under the illusion that they are omnipotent and able
to 'control' the image, as is the 'voyeur' in psychoanalytic film theory.
In the process of narration, films cue emotional responses (action ten­
dencies) in the spectator that direct the spectator's (bodily and mental)
attention toward a character, an object, or an event in film, and provoke
(blocked) action toward that character, object or event. Emotions are
functional action tendencies - shaped by situational expectations - that
in the cinematic experience motivate the spectator toward understanding
the characters' actions and goals, or the significance of an object or
event. The cognitive approach thus tends to see emotion as functional
and rational cognitive ability to cope with a situation that is developed
through evolution as a tool that has survival-value - emotions orient us
in our environment, help us to evaluate our world and react to it more
quickly - and the spectator's ability to simulate emotions in allegiance
with the film characters is based on the same ability. From the cognitiv-
ist perspective, then, it is important to study the ways in which films cue
emotional responses, in terms of goals, judgements, beliefs, and motiva­
tions (to name a few), because it gives a clearer understanding of the
emotional process of watching a film, and of how cognitions guide that
process.

Emotions and Intentionality

The cognitive approach may, however, be criticised for drawing too
artificial a parallel between emotion and cognition. Cognition is, indeed,
linked with emotional processes and they do interact in the narrative
flow. Yet cognition is not necessarily the most crucial component of
emotion, and neither can emotions be reduced to such a component:
emotion is not identical with cognition. As Michael Stocker claims, by
reducing emotions to cognition we disregard affect - the element that
puts the 'motion' in emotion - and define emotions, of all things, as
lacking emotionality: "Affectivity cannot be explained away, accounted
for, or described just in terms of nonaffective worlds and nonaffective
judgements."11 Whilst it is true that cognitions (evaluations, beliefs,

,u
Tan, 1996, p. 55.
11
Stocker, 1996, p. 43.

14
 Introduction. Intersubjectivity in Film Studies

concerns, assessments and attention) are important constituents of

emotions, and that those constituents typically account for having an
emotion, they do not cause or guarantee the emotion.
The cognitive approach may also be criticised for holding too static
and rationalistic a perspective on emotions. Whilst it is generally ac-
knowledged that social and cultural features may shape the emotions in
various ways - theorists like Carroll and Susan Feagin, for instance,
emphasise that in the cinematic experience, emotions are aroused when
the cinematic text mobilises the spectators' 'pre-existing dispositions9 or
'affective sensitivities' to certain cultural values.12 Little sense is given
of how emotions arise within the social field. Instead, as Deborah
Lupton has put it, the emotions are treated as "somewhat sterile entities"
that are "the outcomes of a logical sequence of information processing
such as is performed by computers." Many theorists cannot imagine
emotions without an adequate 'reason'; yet, as Silvan Tomkins notes:
"feeling and thinking are two independent mechanisms [...] affective
judgments may precede cognitive judgments in time, being often the
very first and most important judgments."14 Emotions cannot always be
rationalised (even whilst they motivate human action); they can be
multiple, contradictory, irrational, and inexplicable. It would seem that
several cognitive scholars studying emotions would agree with this
criticism. For instance, Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith write how
Cognitive scholars tend to discuss emotion states in terms of goals, objects,
characteristics, behaviours, judgements, and motivations. Necessarily this
means that these scholars tend to break down emotions into component
process, and this process of dissection is central to a cognitive perspective
on emotion. [...] [B]ut these feelings cannot be dissected without doing vio-
lence to the emotional experience.1
This suggests that the emotional experience cannot be so direct and
unmediated as the cognitive film theory of emotions tends to assume in
its emphasis on the spectator's emotional response, felt as a concern for
a particular character and as a change in action readiness. This approach,
however, allows the cognitivists to gain insight into the specific emo-
tional processes and subprocesses in the cinematic experience that are
cognitive, rationalistic and instrumental, as well as into the ways in
which films cue the emotional responses through genre conventions,
narrative and stylistic elements (such as music and facial expression).

12
Carroll, 1997; Feagin, 1999.
13
Lupton, 1998, p. 14.
14
Tomkins, 1995, p. 44.
15
Plantinga and Smith, 1999, p. 3.

15
Shame and Desire

What is needed, then, is a theory of subjectivity that avoids these dif-

ficulties associated with the subject of psychoanalysis and cognitivism,
and that provides some sense of the intersubjective and socio-historical
processes that unifies the subject and the world, and of how the relation
of the subject to the world is affected by emotions. Therefore, the most
relevant thinker for the intersubjective cinema seems to be Jean-Paul
Sartre, who, in his philosophy, aims at discovering the structure of
subjectivity within the world through the concept of intentionality. For
Sartre (as for Edmund Husserl before him), human consciousness,
including emotions, is always consciousness o/the world, and it is
directed toward the world. There is no consciousness on the one hand
and a world on the other as two closed entities "for which we must
subsequently seek some explanation as to how they communicate."16
This means that the core of human subjectivity is not to be found be-
hind consciously lived experience (for instance, in unconscious urges),
but rather within that very experience of the world. In Freudian psycho-
analysis, there is no intentionality to be found. Instead, the explanation
of human motivation lies in unconscious desire. Sartre objects to this
kind of determinism by arguing that desire as a lack of fullness is not to
be discovered in libidinal drives, but in the relationship with the subject
and the world. As Betty Cannon puts it, Sartrean consciousness is
an openness toward Being, a desire or lack of a future fullness rather than a
self-contained, intrapsychic system. [...] The human being is not a bundle of
drives but rather the assumption of a position on Being. Consciousness im-
plies its partner, the world.1
Another crucial difference between Sartre and psychoanalysis is that
in the latter the ultimate goal for the subject is the pursuit of pleasure
(the pleasure principle), whilst for Sartre it is the attempt to create value
for one's life and get a sense of self through connecting with the world;
through 'sculpturing' one's figure in the world. The subject's sense of
self in the world and his or her connection with the world are identical:
without the world these is no subject; without the subject, there is no
world. Consciousness, for Sartre, is then a desire for fullness, but it
manifests itself in the subject's intersubjective relationship with the
world, not in the intrapsychic lack upon which the subject is founded.
This desire is not sexual in nature (although it can manifest itself as

10
Sartre, 1956, p. 405.
17
Cannon, 1991, p. 38.

16
 Introduction. Intersubjectivity in Film Studies

sexuality), but a socialised need (since it gains its significance in the

intersubjective world).18
For Sartre, it is through the experience of shame that the subject is
revealed to him- or herself as existing for others. In shame, there exists a
(pre-reflective) consciousness of self as existing for oneself and for
others. Through an experience, which Sartre calls the look of the Other,
the (pre-reflective) consciousness makes the self present as an object in
the world, as an object for the Other; not directly, and not as an object
for consciousness, but "in so far as the person is an object for the
Other."19 It is in my being as an object for the Other that I am able to
experience the Other as a subject; not simply as an object in the world,
but as a conscious subject like the subject him- or herself. This aspect of
my being is revealed to me through the look of the Other. As the look
reveals another subject, it also reveals the subject's own status as an
object under the look of that other subject. Whilst in psychoanalysis
other people are not important as subjects, but only as ego-constituting
and need-gratifying (or frustrating) objects for the narcissistic subject,
for Sartre the relationship with the Other defines subjectivity insofar as
the look of the Other reveals that the subject has his or her foundation
outside him- or herself, outside his or her own consciousness, in the
Other. Furthermore, the subject's relation with the Other is not simply
external, but the Other affects the subject's being in such a way that the
relationship becomes a reciprocal internal relationship of being to being.
I am what I am for the Other and never for myself. But although the
Other's look determines my being and gives it a nature, an 'outside',
"that very nature escapes me and is unknowable as such."20 This means
that subjectivity is shaped in and through an intersubjective relation
between the self and the Other, as the version of the subject's identity
that he or she can observe is an 'objectified' version, a representation of
the self that is shaped in anticipation of how the subject would be
viewed from the Other's point of view.
In the cinematic experience, the look of the Other could then surprise
the spectators by confronting them with their own look, thereby disrupt-
ing the 'illusion of imaginary unity' assumed in psychoanalytic film
theory. This is a situation that the spectators anticipate, as it suggests

This desire is motivated by the need of being in the world as a free consciousness, a
need to be one's own source of being, a 'God' (the creator of one's own foundation).
This desire is, of course, impossible to fulfil, because it presupposes an impossible
proximity with the world, a consciousness without intentional ity. Therefore, Sartre
concludes: "man is a useless passion." Sartre, 1956, p. 784.
Sartre, 1956, p. 349.
Ibid., p. 352.

17
Shame and Desire

that their position is always and already inscribed within the film, that
the spectators' 'desire to look' is being observed by the Other. The look
prevents the spectators from looking from an omnipotent position and
disturbs their relation to the film. At that precise moment, the spectators
have to think of themselves as in an unsatisfactory relation to the others
(or the consciousness of the others), exposed to the eyes of the others
within their own field of vision. As a result, the spectators are able to
experience the Other not as an object of the look, but as a conscious
subject that is able to reduce the spectators to objects. The spectators
become aware that they exist for others just like the others exist for
them. By pointing at the relationship between the subject and the Other,
Sartre's discussion of the look allows one to abandon the model of
spectatorship that is based on the opposing positions of subject and
object, active and passive, seer and seen.
Even though Sartre posits his analysis of subjectivity as ontological,
it is by no means essentialist or ahistorical. Subjectivity exists in the
signification of others, is informed by the encounters with others. 'Self
is not an inner essence to be realised, but a possibility as discovered in
the relationship with the social world. This is the reason, to emulate
Robert Harvey, why the Sartrean spectator is never one.2] But how can
we limit the field of inquiry to intersubjectivity within the social field?
The most appropriate way seems to be to look at how emotions pinpoint
prevalent modes of looking or ways of seeing and being seen, since
emotions promote the continuous exchange between the 'outside' (the
position from which the subject is seen) and the 'inside' (the position
from which the subject looks). As Sartre has shown, emotion is an
orientation towards the world and an embodiment of the world and it
cannot be reduced to the one or the other. This is why emotional proc­
esses resonate with cultural meanings, even though they are individually
embodied, and the same could be claimed for emotional processes in the
cinematic experience.

Intersubjectivity in the Cinematic Experience

As argued, the relation of the subject to the world is affected by emo­
tions and, in this connection, one can make a distinction between more
or less introspective emotions. There are emotions that are sustained
through a process of taking the standpoint of others on oneself in the
context of the social. The (anticipated) encounters with others are from
the start more intrinsic to emotions like guilt, shame, embarrassment or
pride than to emotions like fear, joy, disgust, surprise, anger, or sadness.

Harvey, 1991.

18
 Introduction. Intersubjectivity in Film Studies

Among the emotions this book deals with are repulsion, fear and anger
(strong bodily reaction), guilt and pride (strong social dimension), as
well as love and desire (strong relation to the object). But of all emo-
tions, shame most directly reveals the intersubjective foundations of
individual existence, as shame is simultaneously an interpretive process,
a way of seeing oneself from the standpoint of others, and a sensed
inability to take control of one's identity and organise a response. In
Sandra Lee Bartky's words, "shame is manifest in a pervasive sense of
personal inadequacy that, like the shame of embodiment, is profoundly
disempowering."22
This suggests that shame implies more than being seen by others,
and the concept of the look is too abstract to represent interpersonal
relations in general (if that was the case, then the central issue would
simply be to avoid discovery). Towards the end of Lars von Trier's
controversial film Dogville (2002), for instance, Tom (Paul Bettany),
faced with the moral dilemma of choosing between the town and Grace
(Nicole Kidman), is ashamed of his actions even before he has done
anything shameful (betrayed her confidence), since he is forced to view
himself as if he already had done so. In this way, shame operates moti-
vationally; with the imagined look of the Other in mind, Tom has inter-
nalised the notion of right and wrong, the prerequisite for "the very idea
of there being a shame culture, a coherent system for the regulation of
conduct."23 What is revealed to Tom is his own inferiority with regard to
this system, whilst he nevertheless does not fully understand his situa-
tion. In shame, then, there is a sense of being before the community
without being part of the community unlike in embarrassment and pride,
or even guilt (in which the focus lies on the action one has committed
instead of on the self). Shame, therefore, seems a type of emotion best
suited to open up cinema spectatorship to the new kind of theorisation
this book hopes to offer.
But shame differs also from other introspective emotions, even
though it can be associated with them. Michael Lewis has provided a
useful four-feature phenomenological definition that distinguishes shame
from emotions like pride, shyness, empathy, guilt, or embarrassment.
First, the desire to hide or to disappear is a very important feature in the
phenomenology of shame which distinguishes it from pride. Shame
means that a drastic restructuring of one's field of vision has taken
place. The second feature of shame is intense pain and discomfort which
distinguishes it from embarrassment and shyness (which can be partially
pleasurable feelings). The third feature is the feeling that one is inade-

Bartky, 1990, p. 85.

Williams, 1993, p. 82.

19
Shame and Desire

quate and unworthy. Shame is an evaluative statement by the self in

relation to the self, and this distinguishes it from guilt, which is an
evaluative statement by the self in relation to an action one has commit-
ted. And four, in shame we become the object as well as the subject of
shame which imprisons the subject in the complete closure of the self-
object circle. In guilt, by comparison, the self is the subject, but the
object is external to the self, since the focus of guilt is upon the action
that does not meet certain cultural standards.24 The fact that shame is a
painful emotion that revolves around the status of self in the field of the
social enables the subject to understand his or her own conditions of
existence and possibly re-negotiate his or her relationship with the social
anew.
In Dogville, again, Grace (around whom the narrative evolves) aims
to win the friendship of the townspeople in order to be safe from the
gangsters. But in order to gain community acceptance, she must volun-
teer her labour as Dogville's unpaid (and humiliated) housekeeper,
gardener, baby sitter, all-purpose farmhand, and, finally, prostitute. But
Grace also has an effect on others; by not breaking down, Grace makes
the townspeople see themselves as they really are. Or better, she makes
them see themselves as seen. This is the ontological structure of shame.
The townspeople may say that they are falsely accused (as Tom puts it),
but they feel that the charges are true. This is the ethical dimension of
Dogville: Grace confronts the townspeople in a way that contests the
established values of the community. She presents Dogville with its own
image, and calls upon the townspeople to recognise the shame of it and
to change it, or to agree to it and to deny the shame. At a moment like
this, when the subject (the townspeople) experiences the Other (Grace),
he or she is publicly most exposed. This is closely connected to shame,
and this is why in shame the Other has the power to literally shape the
world that the self lives in. But if shame is denied, as happens in Dog-
ville, it can convert into blind anger, contempt and hatred against some-
one that offers even fewer defences than that available to the shamed;25
in this case, Grace herself, is the one who 'shames'.
For the same reason, the people of Dogville resent the 'gift' of Grace
(in the film, she is seen as a kind of gift to the townspeople); they resent
her generosity because they experience it (paradoxically) as a limitation
to their own freedom (because they feel indebted to her). In an effort to
gain back their freedom, the townspeople subject Grace to a series of
economic transactions in order to free themselves of the sense of shame
her arrival in Dogville creates. Simone de Beauvoir has written that

Lewis, 1995, p. 34.

Woodward, 2000, p. 226.

20
 Introduction. Intersubjectivity in Film Studies

generosity permits the mutual recognition of free individuals and is

thereby a mark of an authentically moral attitude.26 By rendering her
body as a voluntary gift, Grace attempts to extend her own existence
through others, but without an accompanied sense of entrapment or
shame.27 In De Beauvoir's terms, this is generosity born of flesh, in
which the subject forms an ever-shifting and ecstatic unity with the
Other without possessing him or her: "What is required for such har-
mony is [...] on the foundation of the moment's erotic charm, a mutual
generosity of mind and body."28 This kind of generosity belongs to those
who open themselves to others without considering the possible nega-
tive consequences. This is why the 'generosity of flesh' is always about
the 'body at risk', and the ambiguity of gift-giving resides in the fact
that it can create an obligation for giving in return (there's no such thing
as a 'free' gift).29
In Dogville, the notion of shame is significant since it shows how the
attempt to possess the (freedom of the) Other inevitably gives rise to
conflict. What happens to Grace can be extended to the town that she
has come to represent. Grace offers us an image of the larger disasters at
play in the film. At first, Grace uses her own body in order to bridge the
distance between herself and the townspeople. In the end, however, she
ends up as an unpaid prostitute whom most men of the town visit to
fulfil their sexual needs. At this point, Grace dwells in a trance-like state
in which her body reacts mechanically, almost without any pain or
reflection. Ultimately, Grace's (sexually violated) body serves as the
motivation for her vengeance, which turns into a destructive orgy.
Grace's suffering body, therefore, marks out an appropriate space for
exploring the moral and social breakdown of Dogville. The luminous-
ness of design and the (partly improvised) camerawork in Dogville lends
itself to this 'drama of the flesh' that focuses the spectators' attention on
the intersubjective relations between the people they are seeing.30 By

zo
DeBeauvoir, 1997, p. 158.
27
Needless to say, I am not suggesting that women should give themselves to others at
the cost of sexual violence, or at any other cost. Instead, I am referring to a kind of
generosity that involves an ethical relationship with the Other without self-
possession, as understood in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques
Derrida (see, for instance, Derrida, 1994).
28
De Beauvoir, 1997, p. 402.
29
Bergoffen, 1997, 158; Bergoffen, 2002,414.
30
According to Peter Scheperlein, this is the difference between framing and pointing
in cinematography. The filmmaker can either carefully plan and control the shots
within the precisely calculated frame of the camera. Or the filmmaker can spontane-
ously point the camera at an event that seems exciting and relevant. "The framing
method, with its complete control, fosters formalism, while the pointing method, with
its loss of control, fosters realism - the polished versus the raw" (Scheperlein, 2005,

21
Shame and Desire

replacing the setting with the outlines of houses on the floor, von Trier
invites the spectators not only to invent the town for themselves, but
also to zoom in on the characters.31 The setting is not there to distract
vision, and the camera moves freely through the imaginary walls. Pre-
cisely for this reason, one of the most unsettling scenes in Dogville is
the one in which Grace is raped by Chuck (Stellan SkarsgSrd). In this
scene, the way in which the camera zooms out from long shot to ex-
treme long shot (three times in total) is most peculiar; the camera moves
so far away from the centre of action that the spectator is forced to focus
his or her attention on the details of the disturbing event. In this way, the
spectator's attention is drawn into the scene by the camera's restraining
force, rendering the spectator unable to stop watching what he or she no
longer wants to see. By zooming out on the centre of action, other
townspeople are brought into the frame; ultimately making Grace's rape
a social act. In other words, the rape that is born out of Chuck's internal
needs is also about something much larger; namely a system of power in
which Grace has absolutely none, except the 'power' to disappear into
it. In this way, the conflicts and emotions between characters in Dogville
are set in motion, drawing the spectator into the cinematic space. It is
through this intersubjective relationship that the spectator is affected by
the film (considering affects as primarily social).32
Von Trier's Manderlay (2005)33 takes off where Dogville left off and
its cinematography and the setting is very similar to Dogville, since this
film too was shot in an isolated, bare studio (an old machine hall in
Northern Sweden), where there were no walls and no natural light at all.
But in contrast to the situation in Dogville, in Manderlay Grace (Bruce
Dallas Howard) has no need to show generosity of the flesh, because
this time, as she tells her father (Willem Dafoe) in the beginning of the
film, she "has guns". In Manderlay plantation, slavery is still in place.
Against her father's advice, Grace frees the slaves with the help of her
father's gangsters. Mam (Lauren Bacall), the mistress of the house, dies
shortly after, and Grace decides to stay in order to teach the slaves
American ideals of freedom and democracy, but unintentionally creates
an even greater hell for them. Eventually, it is Grace who grabs the

p. 11). According to Scheperlein, Von Trier's first films are characterised by the
framing method, while in his later films (from Breaking the Waves onwards) the
pointing method becomes dominant.
From an interview with Lars von Trier in http://www.dogville.dk, accessed 31 Oc-
tober 2006.
32
For an extended analysis on Dogville, see Laine, 2006b.
The second film of Von Trier's USA - Land of Opportunities trilogy of which
Dogville is the first. At the time of the writing, the production of the third film titled
Wasington (not a typo) has been postponed.

22
 Introduction. Intersubjectivity in Film Studies

whip. Timothy (Isaach de Bankole) is not the proud rebel Grace saw/
wanted to see in him: he has stolen and gambled the harvest money of
'The Freed Enterprise of Manderlay' and deserved to be punished by the
'Mam's law'. But, in fact, Grace punishes Timothy because he confronts
her with her own hypocrisy, which manifests itself visibly in this action.
In this self-referential action (Grace's action is self-referential because it
leads to conscious self-perception, it brings her outside of herself), her
'proper' image emerges, which she can no longer escape. As a result,
she realises that she is not the 'freedom fighter' she took herself to be
but a self-righteous 'social worker' filled with liberal guilt. This is the
mirror Von Trier holds in front of his target audience (liberal American
and European intellectuals), presenting them with their own image
which is, like Grace's, not what they took it to be. In this way, Man-
derlay creates intersubjective connections not only between individuals
in the film, or between the film and its spectators, but also between the
spectators and their socio-historical context. In his discussion of the
film, Jayson Harsin writes tellingly:
Von Trier's other major indictment of American analyses and solutions to
the race problem involves American social welfare practices. The film dra-
matically attacks the social welfare solution that took hold in the post-World
War II period, which is based on the individualisation and pathologisation of
African-Americans in poverty. Instead of extending New Deal visions of
economic and social rights as prerequisites for liberty to African-Americans,
poverty became medicalised and culture became racialised in 1960s studies
of African-American poverty. The solution was to send in stereotypically
white, do-gooder social workers to rehabilitate poor African-Americans.
Even in the wake of hurricane Katrina this paradigmatic solution remains
dominant.34

The Course of the Argument

This book investigates what I consider the most interesting and least
theorised aspects of contemporary cinema; namely the strategies it uses
to epitomise and re-articulate emotions and intersubjectivity. In this
context, the 'traditional' modes of seeing and experiencing are no longer
appropriate, the argument that will be developed in chapter one. Films
that employ the tactics of intersubjectivity do not simply 'appear' before
us; instead, we are surrounded by them, exposed to them, and con-
fronted by them. Films of this kind can look back at us, surprise us, and
throw us into an objective apprehension of ourselves. But since the
power to catch and return the spectator's look was already a subject of
fascination for many modernist filmmakers, contemporary cinema has
34
Harsin, 2006.

23
Shame and Desire

needed to create new ways of confronting the spectator's look. Chapter

one examines the way in which films such as Sin - A Documentary on
Daily Offences (Synti - Dokumentti jokapdivdisistd rikoksista, Susanna
Helke and Virpi Suutari, 1996), Man Bites Dog (C'est arrive pres de
chez vous9 Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel, Benoit Poelvoorde, 1992),
Something Happened (Nagonting har hdnt9 Roy Andersson, 1987),
World of Glory (Hdrligt drjorden, Roy Andersson, 1991) and Hidden
(Cache, Michael Haneke, 2005) force the spectators to leave their
position of 'safe voyeurism' and make them conscious of their relation
to the screen. Emotions play an important role here, since the confronta-
tion becomes a question of negative emotions, such as repulsion, shame,
and guilt for being unable to stop watching. These emotions are then the
core of the 'ethical pursuit' of these films.
Both emotions and cinematic experience are socially conditioned.
Even though it cannot be said that, say, a 'Finnish reading' of a Finnish
film is the only accurate one (since it would mean that for instance an
African or a Latin-American spectator could not understand the 'mes-
sage' of the film), sometimes the spectator's emotional reaction depends
on specific cultural knowledge. There are emotional signs and clues that
say something only to people who share the same cultural memory. The
concept of intersubjectivity pays attention to these 'macro-phenomena'
that are related to specific cultural institutions, languages, and collective
structures. Chapter two examines the extent to which the film The Idiots
(Dogme #2 - Idioterne, Lars von Trier, 1998) lends itself to the so-
called dialectical logic of intersubjectivity, in which the question of
social identity is dependent on the subject's identification with the Other
as well as with the third Other outside the group that the subject and the
Other have formed. The subject internalises the praxis - the purposeful
activity - of the group and actualises this praxis as his social being. This
dialectical logic can be useful in analyzing how national cinema ad-
dresses its spectator as a historical subject. It is a question of cinematic
identification, but not as the Lacanian mirror, but an intersubjective triad,
a progressive interaction, where the subject constitutes him- or herself as
a part of the group in a social context. In this connection, shame is a
very special cultural emotion and mode of intersubjectivity, and perhaps
nowhere more so than in Finland, as will be shown through a close
reading of Aki Kaurismaki's Drifting Clouds (Kauas pilvet karkaavat,
1996).
Shame is shared by everyone who has the concept of the Other, be-
cause the intersubjective relationship between the subject and the Other
can be disturbed in a moment of shame. For precisely the same reason,
shame can be a critical resource to rearticulate the terms of self-obsessed
societal norms and ideals. Especially art practices could mediate shame

24
 Introduction. Intersubjectivity in Film Studies

as positive moments of societal disruption. Every one of us identifies

with certain societal norms and ideals, and occasionally every one of us
relapses into incompleteness before those ideals. Chapter three shows
how the images of the Finnish photographer Pekka Turunen can elicit a
crisis of identification by inviting the spectator to identify with subjects
who are denied recognition in the socially conditioned field of vision
and to find the Other within themselves. This could open up new subject
positions where the viewer must re-negotiate his or her identity and
accept the disturbance in the societal norms with which the viewer
normally strives to identify. But since shame lies at the heart of human
relations, it could serve to understand social relations of another culture
as well. I shall explore the question of how shame and 'abjective other-
ness' figure in the film Head-On (Gegen die Wand, Fatih Akin, 2004),
and how these concepts aid us in understanding intersubjective relations
in the context of the transnational. Needless to say, this approach is not
without its problems as it suggests that through emotions (shame) one
gains 'immediate' access to otherwise unfamiliar cultural practices. In
the end, I shall argue that in this kind of encounter with the unfamiliar
there are always discrepancies that do not translate and thereby do not
produce 'all-owning' spectatorship (that aims to make the unfamiliar
familiar). Instead, it could produce spectatorship that de-familiarises the
self, that respects the externality of the other, and accepts the fact that
intercultural knowledge can never be wholly established in terms of one
culture or the other.
Shame is an emotion that mediates one's intersubjective interaction
with the world; interaction that is fundamentally a bodily one. It is the
subject's body that interacts with the world and that experience teaches
the subject what he or she is. In the cinematic experience, the relation-
ship between the film and the spectator is based on the mutual capacity
for and possession of experience through common structures of embod-
ied vision. Whilst this is true for cinematic experience in general, certain
films, such as Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (Irreversible, 2002) hold time,
space and the spectator's body together in such a way that they become
intelligible through carnal rather than visual knowledge. Furthermore, in
the intersubjective space of carnal knowledge, emotions play a crucial
role. Emotions promote the continuous exchange between the 'outside'
and the 'inside': it is through emotions that the subject embodies the
social world. Emotional processes, then, resonate with cultural mean-
ings, even though they are individually embodied and created from
within, and the same could be claimed for emotional processes in the
cinematic experience. Through an analysis of Eija-Liisa Ahtila's video
installation If 6 Was 9 (Jos 6 olis 9, 1996), chapter four demonstrates
how emotions can invite the spectators to challenge the intersubjective

25
Shame and Desire

limitations of a given culture, revealing the images that culture tries to

hide from itself. Reflective shame, for instance, enables the spectators to
shift their attention from their presence before the image to the shame
itself. As a result, an immediate and embodied intersubjective frame-
work becomes visible. This framework is at the same time 'transparent'
and re-orienting towards the world: it presents a possibility to rearticu-
late the terms of the social network after which something new may
emerge.
The critical discourse developed in this book draws on the points of
view (and points of enunciation) I have inhabited, both as a 'transcul-
tural subject' (I lived in Finland until I moved to the Netherlands at the
age of 27), as a film spectator, and as a film scholar. Sartre writes that
understanding is not a quality coming to human reality from the outside,
but connected to experience and emotions, moving out from within:
Understanding [...] is a characteristic way of existing. Thus, the human real-
ity which is / assumes its own being by understanding it. I am, therefore,
first a being who more or less obscurely understands his reality as a man,
which signifies that I make myself man in understanding myself as such. I
may therefore interrogate myself and on the basis of this interrogation lead
an analysis of the "human reality' to a successful conclusion which can be
used as a foundation for an anthropology.35
Similarly, as Annette Kuhn in her book Family Secrets has shown,
by turning attention to the deconstruction of images closer to home (in
her case, photographs from her own childhood and images from her
shared ethnographic past) one can move from personal emotions and
private experience to the public, collective realm: "Emotion and mem-
ory bring into play a category with which film theory - and cultural
theory more generally - are ill equipped to deal: experience."36 Vivian
Sobchack also writes of the unwillingness of film theory to deal with the
concept of (affective and embodied) experience that is merely seen as "a
hangover from a sloppy liberal humanism."37 Yet without taking the
concept of (personal) experience into consideration, little sense can be
given either to the important cultural and historical dispositions and
sensitivities that the spectator brings to the cinema (since no experience
is purely subjective) or to the ways in which the spectators actively react
to these dispositions in order to bring about change (since no experience
is purely discursive either).

35
Sartre, 1993, p. 13, italics added.
36
Kuhn, 1995, p. 28.
37
Sobchack, 1992, p. xiv.

26
 Introduction. Intersubjectivity in Film Studies

Therefore, what this book aims to show, is that when personal as

well as emotional experience and understanding is set in motion, it can
become an intersubjective position between 'home' and 'the world' that
could be shared with human subjects across cultures and that could lead
one "back into the presence of one's history on a composite screen of
cultural memory."38 It is my conviction that it is possible to speak across
differences, as this book itself attempts to show, and that the personal
experiences and emotional responses addressed here are to a certain
extent shared in different contexts. Emotions are not just particular
occurrences, but inherent in our ways of being-in-the-world. By taking
the cue from my own experience, therefore, I aim to offer the reader
insights into the configuration of self and Other especially within the
new Europe, and its new cinemas, coming out of the experience of
transculturalism. In each case, I shall show how key areas of Sartre's
theory apply to the work in question and reveal the intersubjective
dynamics and affective bonds within the film (or work of art) and
between the film and its spectator. By focusing on the issues of specta-
torship and emotions in terms of the intersubjective, this book proposes
an insight into the ways in which our social world is constituted, the
ways in which we are engaged with visual display, with visual objects,
or people-as-objects, and the look with which they respond to our
looking.
The origins of the present book lie in my PhD-dissertation at the de-
partment of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam. I am much
indebted to Thomas Elsaesser and his always-insightful comments and
relentless encouragement. Among the many other colleagues and friends
who have contributed to the development of this book and to whom I
would like to extend my gratitude are Richard Allen, Laura Copier,
Remus Thei Dame, Jos6 van Dijck, Charles Forceville, Jaap Kooijman,
Jobien Kuiper, Saskia Lourens, Susanna Paasonen, Patricia Pisters,
Astrid Soderbergh Widding, Ed Tan, Ginette Verstraete, Frank van Vree
and Michael Wedel. Finally, Dominique Nasta, my editor at P.I.E. Peter
Lang, is to be warmly thanked for her invaluable suggestions and sup-
port during the writing of this book.

Bruno, 2002, p. 418.

27
 CHAPTER 1

"You Want to See?

Well, Take a Look at This!"

What Is Intersubjectivity?
The notion of intersubjectivity is concerned with the way in which
subjectivity exists in the signification of others, the way in which sub­
jectivity is clued up by one's engagement with the Other. This mode of
engagement is often conceived in visual terms; in his major philosophi­
cal work, Being and Nothingness (L 'Etre et le Neant\ Jean-Paul Sartre
describes how the look of the Other reveals that the subject has his or
her foundation outside of him- or herself; how the subject's identity is
imposed on him or her from the outside. This relationship with the Other
is not only external, but also internal: one defines his or her subjectivity
according to how he or she is being seen by the Other. The intersubjec-
tive dimension of the self binds the subject with the Other in such a way
that it becomes part of the self. In contemporary cinema, too, the status
of the object and the subject of the look seems to be exchangeable;
cinematic images look back at us and address us to re-think the ways in
which our intersubjective relationships are constituted.
Cinema could also engage its spectator in a kind of relationship that
dissolves the classic opposition between the subject and object of the
look through the concept of the returned look. Since the subject depends
on the Other for his or her being in the visual field, the look of the Other
can throw the subject into an objective apprehension of him- or herself.
The look of the Other has a constitutive function for the subject's sense
of self, and this could be seen as the nature of cinematic experience as
well. Admittedly, this dyadic account of self and Other seems rather
abstract and ahistorical, and is in itself inadequate for the explanation of
sociohistorical dimensions of (intersubjectivity. Yet it serves here as a
theoretical basis for proceeding to triadic and embodied modes of
intersubjective constitution that allows one to think of the subject/
spectator as a social being in a historical context.
The theme of otherness and intersubjectivity is one of Sartre's main
concerns in Being and Nothingness, in which he discusses the look of
the Other through the emotion of shame in order to examine the exis-
29
Shame and Desire

tence of others for the self; for Sartre, there is an immediate intersubjec-
tive field to be found in shame. Sartre places his emphasis on shame
before somebody in his famous description of a voyeur, who, undis-
turbed, has been looking at a captivating sight through a keyhole. First
the voyeur is aware only of the keyhole and of what is to be seen
through it. The voyeur's consciousness is conscious of itself as con-
sciousness of the keyhole only. Then the sudden sound of footsteps in
the corridor makes the voyeur realise that 'he' is being observed (ac-
cording to Kaja Silverman, this figure of the voyeur is "so hyperboli-
cally masculine" that she, as well as shall I, consistently deploys the
male pronoun when referring to this voyeur).1 With the presence of the
Other, the voyeur's unreflective consciousness makes his self present as
an object in the world, as an object for the Other:
I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. I am
alone. [...] But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is look-
ing at me! What does this mean? [...] The unreflective consciousness does
not apprehend the person directly or as its object; the person is presented to
consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the Other."2
This realisation allows the voyeur to look at what he is doing as if it
were through the observer's eyes. The voyeur is no longer just observ-
ing a forbidden scene; the voyeur is abruptly made conscious of himself
observing the forbidden scene, as an object for the Other. The voyeur
realises that he possesses a self which the Other knows and which he
can never know. It is in the voyeur's being as an object for the Other
than he is able to experience the Other as subject, "for how could I be an
object if not for a subject?"3
This aspect of his new being is revealed to the voyeur through the
look of the Other. Furthermore, the voyeur experiences that he has a
foundation outside of him, in the Other. The voyeur is what he is for the
Other and never for himself. This self-consciousness on the level of
being-for-others involves for Sartre consciousness of the self as an
object in the world, in the world of the Other: "I have my foundation
outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the
Other."4 But although the Other's look fixes the voyeur's transcendence
and gives it a nature, an 'outside', "that very nature escapes me and is
unknowable as such."5 This realisation degrades the voyeur in his own

1
Silverman, 1996, p. 245, fh. 1.
2
Sartre, 1956, p. 349.
3
/6&/., p. 361.
4
Ibid, p. 349.
5
Ibid,p. 352.

30
 "You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!"

eyes and reduces him to shame: "... I am ashamed of myself as I appear

to the Other [...] Shame is shame of oneself before the Other; these two
structures are inseparable."6 Experiencing, through the look of the
Other, his revelation as an object in the Other's world, the voyeur
cannot apprehend the object he is for the Other. The self that is made
present to the voyeur through his experience of the Other's look is a self
that escapes him and exists for the Other as an object of values that
comes to judge the voyeur without him being able to act on this judg-
ment or even to know it.
Sartre understands shame metaphysically, as an indication of our ba-
sic relatedness to others. The intersubjective existence of two self-
conscious subjects is discovered in the emotion of shame. Because of
shame, because of my concern with how I appear to the Other, I become
aware that others exist together with me in an intersubjective field. In
this intersubjective field, the concept of the look plays an important role.
It is the look of the Other that surprises the subject through revealing
that his or her foundation lies outside of him- or herself. In shame, the
subject is no longer "the master of the situation," but an object for the
consciousness of the Other.7 The subject now has acquired an identity
which he or she has not given him- or herself. For Sartre, then, one of
the most essential points in shame is that by apprehending him- or
herself through the look of the Other the subject recognises the nature of
his or her lost status as an 'omnipotent' subject.
In Seminar /, Jacques Lacan discusses Sartre's treatise of the look
(which in psychoanalytical language is very often referred to as the
gaze) as follows:
The gaze in question must on no account be confused with the fact, for ex-
ample, of seeing his [the Other's] eyes, I [the voyeur] can feel myself under
the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not even see, not even discern. All that

Ibid, p. 303. For many theorists, like for Sartre, the emotion of shame is connected to
being seen and exposed inappropriately by others. However, no actual observer is
necessary in order to feel shame, nor is it necessary that one believe that one is being
observed by the other. One may feel shame being alone and knowing this to be so.
Instead, in shame, the subject shifts his or her viewpoint from that of the actor to that
of the critical, detached observer, but so that the subject fulfils both of these func-
tions. The subject both identifies with the observer and constitutes the observer. It is
part of the complexity of shame that the exposure it implies refers to the Other, but
that Other is in the first instance oneself. To speak about the observer is thus to speak
metaphorically, and "being seen exposed9 is a sign of being at a disadvantage and
suffering a loss of power; and that recognition of disadvantage and suffering is what
is central to shame. For a discussion, see also Taylor, 1985; Williams, 1993; Lewis,
1995; Katz, 1999.
7
Sartre, 1956, p. 355.

31
Shame and Desire

is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others

there.8

What Lacan outlines here actually articulates exactly what is also at

stake when shame is experienced; namely the discovery of the intersub-
jective existence of self and Other. In shame the subject sees him- or
herself being seen, and because of the subject's concern for how he or
she appears to the Other (exposed to the look of the Other in a disadvan-
tageous relation), the subject becomes aware that others exist together
with him or her in an intersubjective field. Yet the way in which the
concept of the look/gaze has been applied in psychoanalytic film theory
(the so-called apparatus theory in particular) does not deal adequately
with this idea of intersubjectivity. As a result, psychoanalytic film theory
assumes an isolated spectator - and so social questions of spectatorship
are masked. It is therefore necessary to return to Sartre's original discus-
sion of intersubjectivity that can be discovered in the returned look to see
that the visual field of cinema is a much more complex realm of inter-
subjective relations than what psychoanalytic film theory has argued it
to be.
In other words, I employ the concept of intersubjectivity to empha-
sise the point that cinema spectatorship is an intrinsically reciprocal
practice that is constitutive of subjectivity, and to move outside of the
intrapsychic model of earlier moments in film theory where the concept
of spectatorship is often structured by the diametrically opposed but
complementary positions of subject and object, active and passive, seer
and seen. No longer is there is a strict separation between subject and
object via the technological mediation provided by the camera; instead
cinematic images can look back at us, surprise us (much like the Sar-
trean voyeur is being surprised), and throw us into an objective appre-
hension of ourselves, for example through the emotion of shame, as
shown in the beginning example of Hate. (One could even say that to a
certain extent cinema as a money-making institution always 'looks
back' at the audience in order to be able to address it and to gain from its
existence: "no audience comes to a film ignorant of cinema, or of their
role in realising it. The task of cinema is to deliver audiences to films,
and the task of audiences is to constitute films as objects of consump-
tion."9) Furthermore, even though for Sartre the structure of shame

8
Lacan, 1998, p. 215.
Cubitt, 2005, p. 333. Murray Smith makes a similar argument with regard to the
institution of fiction in general. According to him, all films implicitly call our atten-
tion to their artificial status and in that sense look back9, but not all films invite us
explicitly to concentrate on the conventions that direct our attention to the relation
between spectatorship and the institution of fiction. Smith, 1995b, p. 121.

32
 'You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!"

epitomises the structures by which we are related to others ontologi-

cally, this model could operate as a basis for understanding the social
dimensions of intersubjectivity, as it is based on the subject being seen
in a certain sociohistorical context. Sartre's model of intersubjectivity
could therefore serve as a model for understanding the various, still
unexplored ways in which we are engaged with cinema (and visual
culture much more generally).

The Returned Look

Many psychoanalytic film theorists, the most notable ones being
Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey, have argued that cinema is inherently
voyeuristic. I agree that voyeurism can occur when the spectators'
emotional reaction to the scene is predicated upon their act of seeing the
events portrayed in the film, and when identification with the camera as
one's own look is privileged over character identification. As Richard
Allen has shown in his Projecting Illusion, a film that privileges a
disembodied, a-central (as opposed to central) point of view upon the
characters and events often gives rise to voyeurism; a superior, sadistic,
objectifying, and distant viewing position in relation to the subject of
representation.10 The voyeuristic look is sadistic, according to Sartre,
because it is structurally empowering: the voyeur 'creates' the object of
his look with his eyes as it were. It is precisely this kind of look that can
embarrass, humiliate, and shame the Other. A voyeuristic look is an
attempt by the subject to create a world of his or her own without
boundaries - characterised by psychoanalysis as desire - through reduc­
ing the Other to an object in it. At the same time the voyeuristic look is a
fascinated look, a pure mode of losing oneself in the world in the act of
looking. On the one hand, my voyeurism organises the situation (there is
a spectacle to be seen behind the door only because I am looking
through the keyhole), but on the other hand the spectacle exists as the
object of my 'unreflective consciousness' (my consciousness is the
object and there is no way I can define myself as being in the situation).
A voyeuristic look is a fascinated but superior (objectifying) look that
demands both proximity with and distance from its object.
But as in Sartre's example, in the cinematic experience the (voyeur­
istic) spectators could be surprised in the act of looking by confronting
them with their own look and thereby disrupting their illusion of imagi­
nary unity and sense of 'control' over the image. This is a situation that
the spectators anticipate, as it suggests that their position is always and
already inscribed within the film; that their presence is being paid

Allen, 1995.

33
Shame and Desire

attention to and their desire to look is being observed by the Other. The
power of cinema to catch and return the spectator's gaze has been a
subject of fascination for many modernist filmmakers such as Luis
Bufiuel, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and many others. By
allowing the film character to look directly at the camera for several
moments, these filmmakers aim to disrupt the spectator's imaginary
illusion of omnipotence towards the image. One of the most famous
examples of this modernist aesthetics of the provocative look include
Harriet Andersson's direct gaze at the camera towards the end of Berg-
man's Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika, 1953). At this
point of the film, her life as a suburban housewife has made young
Monica malcontent, cruel, and finally unfaithful towards her husband,
leaving him alone with their newly born baby. Her gaze directed at the
camera eye seems to challenge the spectator, saying "Judge me if you
dare." Another famous example is Jean-Paul Belmondo's direct address-
ing of the camera/spectator in the beginning of Godard's Breathless (A
bout de souffle, 1960) with the words: "Si vous n'aimez pas la mer, si
vous n'aimez pas la montagne, si vous n'aimez pas la ville... allez vous
faire foutre!" These scenes are deliberately meant to be awkward mo-
ments for the spectator, not only because they are threatening to the
spectator's personal space, but also because they suggest that the specta-
tors are constituted for the film and not vice versa. The spectators are
now forced to think of themselves in an unsatisfying and unpleasant
relation to the Other by being exposed to the look of the Other.
However, it would be a mistake to assume that the provocative look
only belongs to the aesthetics of modernism. The so-called 'primitive
cinema' plays similar tricks with the spectator. As Tom Gunning has
shown, early cinema intends to elicit a primal response from the specta-
tor by directly soliciting spectator attention through strategies of threat
or intimacy. As a result, the desired response is not always pleasurable.
Gunning calls this an exhibitionist cinema, since it constructs an awk-
ward relationship with its spectator that spoils the voyeuristic pleasure
of cinema through the recurring look at the camera by actors, like in the
film The Bride Retires (1902):
A woman undresses for bed while her new husband peers at her from behind
a screen. However, it is to the camera and the audience that the bride ad-
dresses her erotic striptease, winking at us as she faces us, smiling in erotic
display.11
But similar tactics can be found later in film history as well. In low
budget film noir pictures Killer's Kiss (Stanley Kubrick, 1955) and The

11
Gunning, 1990. p. 57.

34
 " You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!"

Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964) direct addressing of the camera eye is
used not as a conscious modern technique (like in the films of Bergman
or Godard; although Godard was very much influenced by Fuller as
well) but as a more general practice to increase the violent effect. In
Killer's Kiss, the gangster boss Vincent Rapallo (Frank Silvera) has just
found out that his mistress is running away with another man. In frenzy
he approaches the camera with a glass in his hand. The following shot is
a POV from his perspective on a framed picture of two comic figures
who hereby occupy the place of the amused observer, laughing at Ra-
pallo' s anguish. In the next shot Rapallo throws the glass aggressively at
the picture/camera causing a cracking effect followed by a swinging
movement of the camera. In an interestingly similar fashion, The Naked
Kiss opens with a burst of violence as the prostitute protagonist Kelly
(Constance Towers) beats her drunken procurer unconscious with her
stiletto. The opening sequence consists of a series of rapidly alternating
POV/reaction shots (seventeen shots in total that are only 'interrupted'
four times by a long shot from a low camera angle of the room where
the fight takes place) of Kelly's raged face on her defenceless procurer
until he is lying on the ground. The sequence is shot with a shaky hand-
held camera which increases the violent effect. The opening sequence
ends with Kelly again gazing directly at the camera eye, which now,
supposedly, is a mirror. She puts on and combs the wig that she had lost
during thefight,corrects her make up, and quickly collects herself while
the opening credits roll.
In the context of the postmodern cinema, the 'threatening' effect of
direct addressing of the audience seems to have partly lost its power (at
least as a purely stylistic device, even though as a narrative function it
can still be effective) after being employed in numerous films of differ-
ent kind such as Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), Ferris Bueller's Day
Q^(John Hughes, 1986) or Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999). The
technique that was designed to be shocking in the context of modernism,
is not so shocking anymore for the contemporary audience. This is why
filmmakers have had to invent new ways of confronting the spectator's
gaze. The film still can function as the look of the Other by forcing the
spectators to leave their position of 'safe voyeurism'. In many ways,
films still can reveal the spectators their dependency on the Other for
their being in the visual field. This revelation consists of the fact that the
foundation of their look lies elsewhere, in their engagement with the
Other. In this way, cinematic images do and can look back at us and
throw us into objectivity in our own field of vision.

35
Shame and Desire

Masochistic Intimacy
It has already been established that cinema can be a source of dis­
pleasure as well as pleasure, being able to take advantage of the specta­
tors' desire to look. This is the tactic used in the Finnish documentary
Sin - A Documentary on Daily Offences {Synti - Dokumentti jo-
kapdivaisistd rikoksista, Susanna Helke and Virpi Suutari, 1996). By
epitomising the structures of look and shame, the documentary Sin re-
determines the nature of cinematic experience in the scopic field, and re­
defines the politics of looking involved in it. In his book Representing
Reality, Bill Nichols has convincingly shown how the unacknowledged
presence of the documentary filmmaker (especially in the observational
mode of documentary) often clears the way for the dynamics of voyeur­
istic pleasure.12 But a documentary could also - without necessarily
being the self-reflexive mode of documentary - take advantage of this
voyeuristic structure and turn the spectators into objects of the look
themselves.
In the documentary Sin, ordinary Finnish people found via newspa­
per ads confess their misdemeanours through the camera to the others
watching them. The confessions are based on the seven deadly sins:
gluttony, envy, sloth, boredom, pride, lust and wrath. The persons are
filmed in their everyday environment - mostly at home or at work - but
consistently standing full length and facing the camera, as in a police
line-up. The spectators are invited to witness intimate personal stories in
authentic settings, but these settings nevertheless give an impression of
being highly staged, even though the documentary does not explicitly
acknowledge the presence of the filmmakers or call the process of
filmmaking itself into question. Furthermore, the way in which the
persons tell the most intimate things about their lives is downright
masochistic, demanding recognition from the spectators even if it were
contemptuous.
This is a kind of masochism that Sartre defined as the consequence
of the self that causes it to be absorbed by the other, an attempt to lose
oneself in the subjectivity of the Other in order to get rid of one's own.
A masochist relies on the Other to make him- or herself exist; maso­
chism is an "act by which the Other would found me in my being."13
Masochism, then, has a strong intersubjective dimension, since a maso-

12
Nichols, 1992.
13
Sartre, 1956, p. 491. This kind of masochism is thus essentially different from the
4
pre-Oedipal masochism9 theorised by Gaylyn Studlar. For Studlar, the cinematic
experience re-creates the experience of pre-Oedipal infancy by placing the spectators
in a passive position at the mercy of some entity ('the mother') for what they desire,
which, according to Studlar, is the ultimate fantasy of the masochist. Studlar, 2000.

36
 'You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!"

chist insists on being defined by the Other. According to Sartre, the

subject experiences this being-as-object as shame, and will love his or
her shame as the profound sign of his or her objectivity
But masochism as foundation of subjectivity is a failure. According
to Sartre, masochism is not an attempt to fascinate the Other, but an
effort to cause oneself to be fascinated by one's own objectivity. In
order to do this one needs to be able to realise the intuitive apprehension
of oneself as object for the Other. It is for the Other that the masochist
''will be obscene or simply passive, for the Other that he will undergo
these postures [...] The more he tries to taste his objectivity, the more he
will be submerged by the consciousness of his subjectivity."14 Thus the
masochist ultimately posits him- or herself in transcendence in relation
to the Other, treating the Other as an object and transcending the Other
toward his or her own objectivity: "Thus in every way the masochist's
objectivity escapes him [...] in seeking to apprehend his own objectivity
he finds the Other's objectivity, which in spite of himself frees his own
subjectivity."15
It is this paradox of masochistic attitude that underlies the experience
of the documentary Sin. At first the strong masochistic aspect in the
documentary discourages the spectators' identification with its persons,
giving rise to a voyeuristic viewing position in relation to the subject of
representation. Since identification with the persons' beliefs and emo-
tions in the documentary Sin is discouraged, the spectators are tempted
to adopt an objectifying, superior and contemptuous viewing position,
encouraged by the fact that the persons in the documentary make the
confessions addressing the camera, as if the presence of the camera (and
thereby the spectators) was a justification for their confessions. Yet an
objectifying viewing position is being discouraged as well, if we assume
Sartre's theory on masochism to be correct. Through their confessions
and the aspect of masochism in them, the persons have already moved
beyond the spectators' objectifying definitions, because the masochist
inescapably always abuses the Other, demanding of the Other (in this
case, the spectator) that he or she be taken at the value he or she would
want to be taken at. As a result, the spectators cannot adopt the field of
the camera as their own and thereby 'control the image'. Instead, the
field of the camera becomes the field through which the spectators
experience that they are being seen by the Other. By returning the
spectators' look, the persons of the documentary occupy the position of
observer towards the spectators. Reflecting the spectators' look back
onto themselves, the documentary makes an object of spectacle out of

14
Sartre, 1956, p. 493.
15
Ibid, p. 493.

37
Shame and Desire

the (voyeuristic) spectators, which they experience as shame. The

documentary Sin catches out the spectators by their own looking, invit-
ing the spectators to see themselves seeing, saying 'Tow want to peek at
other people's lives? Well here's intimacy for your
This, according to both Lacan and Sartre, is the function of (visual)
art. Art must lead to reflection, catch the spectators looking, invite the
spectators' eyes to see themselves seeing, and thereby invite society
seeing itself as seen. As Lacan puts it:
The function of the picture - in relation to the person to whom the painter,
literally, offers his picture to be seen - has a relation with the gaze. This re-
lation is not, as it might at first seem, that of being a trap for the gaze. [...]
The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his
painting which, in part, at least, might be summed up thus - You want to
see? Well, take a look at this! He gives something for the eye to feed on, but
he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze
there as one lays down one's weapons.16
According to Lacan, art combines the lure of the eye and the 'tam-
ing' of it. Art tames because "it encourages renunciation";17 the specta-
tors are simultaneously given the confirmation of their desire through a
visual fantasy and denied it, by making the spectators aware of their
lack: there is a simultaneous awareness of desire and lack.
In the documentary Sin, the spectators are given the confirmation for
their 'visual fantasy' by leading them to believe that the confessions in
the documentary are being made to satisfy their desire to look. At the
same time, however, the spectators are denied all the pleasure of look-
ing: through the returned look the spectators sense that their reactions
toward the person's confessions are being observed by that very person.
The spectators feel that the confessions are being made so that their
reactions to them could be observed. The tales told in the documentary
feel all too intimate, and the spectators experience embarrassment, even
shame, and think that they are invading the privacy of the persons in the
documentary. The spectators become objects for the Other, and experi-
ence shame through the return of their look in the documentary; and this
is the basic structure of shame that in Sartre's thinking epitomises the
way in which we are related to others, and the way in which we all seek
to make objects of each other. The function of the Other is threat, be-
cause the look of the Other has the power of reducing me to an object in
the world of another and degrading me to shame. My only strategy is to

16
Lacan, 1994, p. 101. See also Sartre, 1978a, p.75.
17
Lacan, 1994,p. 111.

38
 "You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at Thisl"

look back and re-establish my subjectivity by reducing the Other to

objectivity.
Thus, the emotion of shame signifies that in addition to confronting
the spectators in the act of looking, the documentary also confronts the
spectators with the Other - who refuses to be an object for the specta-
tors' look. The documentary Sin on the one hand fascinates the specta-
tors through intimacy, but on the other hand painfully emphasises its
own representational nature. In Shame and its Sisters, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick and Adam Frank in their discussion of shame and the taboo
on looking (specifically looking directly into the eyes of another person)
claim that the shame resulting from the act of looking/being looked at is
deeply ambivalent. The source of the taboo on reciprocal looking is
intimacy, because it at the same time expresses a desire to look and to be
looked at simultaneously "with interest or enjoyment in a relationship of
mutuality."18 This means that in shame one may wish not to look or to
be looked at, but also to continue to do so (think of children who cover
their face in shame but also peek through their fingers so that they may
look). This is why the spectators are fascinated by the documentary Sin,
and why they wish to continue watching it despite the awkward feeling
it produces in them. Another reason for this ambiguity of fascination/
awkwardness could be that the spectators are caught between the shame
of looking and the shame of being ashamed to do so: as a defence
against looking too intimately at the Other the spectator continues
watching; not to continue would be too obvious an escape.
The documentary Sin catches the spectators in between intimacy and
shame by fascinating them with intimacy but simultaneously not giving
the spectators the opportunity to 'control the image9. The spectators
cannot assume an omniscient position in relation to the film, or to get
satisfaction from their desire to look, because the spectators feel that
their presence is being taken into consideration in advance. For instance,
the persons in the documentary take long pauses while they are speak-
ing. They pose in an unnaturally immobilised manner and talk with an
expressionless, monotonous voice as if they were repeating something
they had learned by heart. The immobility both inside and outside of the
image is essential in the documentary. It is clear that the confessions are
being made for the sake of filming.
As the spectators are not given the opportunity to 'control' the im-
age, they feel threatened by the subjectivity of the Other. The intimacy
that in the beginning fascinates the spectators becomes painful and
disturbing, because the spectators are confronted with it as it were
against their will. Standing next to his identically dressed twin brother, a
18
Sedgwick and Frank, 1996, p. 138.

39
Shame and Deske

little boy confesses thai he cannot remember his brother when they have
been apart for more than two hours. An elderly lady talks about her
loneliness in the hallway of her house, surrounded by other elderly
ladies (her fellow sufferers?) (figure I). Sitting at a conference table, in
an environment that traditionally does not tolerate revealing one's per-
sonal weaknesses, a civil servant confesses his sense of insecurity and
fear. A young man reveals his total lack of interest towards the world
(and the spectators) before the camera. Fascinated by his own indiffer­
ence, he is portrayed staring directly at the camera, in a close-up. while
the deep focus of the frame reveals the small room in which he lives,
apparently without much need to reach out to the world (figure 2). Even
though the young man is addressing the spectator, paradoxically at the
same time he is ignoring the spectator, and when he finally lowers his
eyes it does not seem that he is concerned about the spectator's judg­
ment, but that be is not even interested whether he is being judged or not

Figmre 1: Sim — A Documentary on Daily Offences.

Screen capture
The influence of painful intimacy both inside and outside of the
frame makes it intolerable for the spectators to confront the look of the
confessors that suddenly seems to have extended to the whole frame.
The whole frame looks back at the spectator, embodying the encounter
with the raw subjectivity of the Other, reducing the spectators to shame.
But why? Because a look cannot be looked at. As Sartre writes:

40
 "/OH Want to See? Well. Take a Lookal Tlii

I direct my look upon the Other who is looking at me. But a look, canoot be
looked at As soon as I look in the direction of the look it disappears, and I

Figure 2: Sin - A Documentary on Dairy Offences,

Screen capture
It is clear that emotional identification, empathy or substitute shame
(shame by proxy) toward the Other are not at stake here. What makes
the spectators feel ashamed is not so much what the Other does, but
rather the fact that the Other is not ashamed of what he or she does, of
publicly confessing the most intimate details of his or her lire. The
spectator cannot possess the Other, because the Other does not cease
looking back at the spectator. This confrontation with the Other's inti­
macy is, according to Slavoj ZLzek, where we encounter the function of
shame at its purest: "it opens up with the prospect of the total 'transpar­
ency' of the human being."20
According to Sedgwick and Frank, another source for the taboo of
mutual Looking is the constraint on the direct expression of certain
affects, since intimacy necessarily involves the sharing of affect: "Since
the face is the site of the affect* mutual looking becomes tabooed insofar
as it might violate whatever cultural constraints there may be on the

'* Sartre. 1956, MM.

w
Zizefc, 2001, p. 73.

41
Shame and Desire

expression and communication of affect."31 Furthermore, the free ex­

pression of emotion on the face, which the Other can see, also enables
the Other to achieve control over and contempt for the subject who
wears his or her emotions on his or her face. In the documentary Sin, the
persons do not express emotions on their faces; they keep their poker
faces despite the intimacy of the life stories they tell. This places the
spectators in a position of combined intimacy and distance> which
blocks the emotion of contempt on their part, resulting in awkwardness
and a feeling of shame instead. For instance* the 'sloth' part of the
documentary shows a civil servant standing nwtionlessly, staring
straight into the camera (figure 3). He is being shown in the dusty hall of
an office building and he tells us with irony in his voice about his work
as a draftsman of future scenarios:
My work is to draft future scenarios. Earlier we formulated visk«is and
strategies, now it's scenarios, In the reports we write things like sustainable
development, decentralisation of government integration. I can write a re­
port on a global theme any time. [ can also write proposals that I know will
never be accepted.

Figure 3: Sin - A Documeatary on Dally Offences.

Screen capture
The self-irony emphasises the persons' awareness of the spectators,
especially when combined with the 'staged' setting. In this scene the
static camera is situated in the hallway so that to therightwe can see a
meeting mom in which people are sitting motionlessly by a table on
21
Sedgwick and frank. 1#*>, p. 1*4.

42
 ■you Woni to &e? Well, Take a Look a! This!1'

which we can see apparently important papers. Further back in the

hallway stands a man, equally motionless. The general atmosphere in
the image is grey, joyless, cold and immobile.
In the next scene we are being taken into a recreation room for
nurses in a hospital (figure 4). The nurses in the background are situated
in stiff positions, at a distance from each other, so that a sense of depth
is created in the image. To the left a long hallway opens mat is lit from
its other end. The cold, bluish lighting, combined with the depth of
image, emphasises the contrast between the light and the shadow, and
creates a kind of Kafkaesque atmosphere of bureaucracy. This atmos­
phere is further emphasised throughout the documentary by the poign-
ant, non-tonal music, which is played by a string orchestra. The person
who is speaking in the scene is situated in the middle of the image. She
is also staring straight at the camera and says in an urmaturalty serious
voice: "An (sic) patient could ask to be taken to the bathroom and be
told: 'You did a poo-poo only yesterday, you'll have to wait till tomor­
row*.**

Figure 4: Sin-A Documentary on Daily Offences*

Screen capture
The ' lust* part of the documentary is perhaps the most confronting
one. It introduces us to a married couple with a number of children
living in a bungalow. They tell us about their dissatisfying relationship
in a series of oppressive images - the setting is filled with props from
the daily life of the couple while there is little sense of space in the
images. In the first alternating series of images the man and the woman

ii
Shame and Desire

are standing alone in front of the camera, but later they appear together
in the setting. The first communal image is situated in the bedroom. The
woman is talking, looking straight at the camera. Her husband is stand-
ing next to her, in a diagonal line in relation to the camera (figure 5).
She says: ' i f my husband doesn't show enough sexual interest in me, I
punish him. Either I don't cook for him or I eat his goodies or I take
money from him." In the following image the man is standing in the
middle of the dining room. His wife is further left in the kitchen, holding
their children, but within hearing distance (figure 6). The man says:
"I'm afraid my wife will find a man who can talk and who isn't as cruel
towards the kids as I am." Again, the couple in the documentary share
the most intimate things of their lives with the camera, demanding
recognition from the spectators, and discouraging the spectator's identi-
fication. The spectators are again tempted to adopt an objectifying
viewing position, as the practice of filmmaking creates a space where
observing the intimate confessions is justified. But the fact that the
couple are staring directly at the camera renders the intimate encounter
painful, and paves the way to the emotion of shame. The spectator is
again made object for the Other in his or her field of vision. Yet despite
the fact that the couple are staring directly at the camera whilst directing
their words to the spectators, seeking to make objects of spectators, they
really seem to address each other, which adds to the situation an inten-
tion of empathetically understanding this unhappy Finnish couple,
without necessarily approving their actions ("... I punish him..." "...
who isn't as cruel towards the kids as I am...").
As a result of all this, the topic of the documentary, the seven deadly
sins, is not very obvious to a casual observer, since they are dealt with in
isolation from their context. The moral codes, the seven deadly sins,
stay floating in the air. It is clear that they exist, but they cannot easily
be defined. The spectators cannot assume a superior, omniscient posi-
tion in relation to the persons in the documentary, because they have to
try hard to understand what the documentary is all about, and how the
topics dealt with in it are related to each other. The documentary does
not strive to tell a truth; instead it is openly subjective, absurd, and even
contradictory in its content. It plays with the paradoxes of intimacy and
distance, with the artificiality of the form and the genuineness of the
content and of irony and seriousness. As one title card in the documen-
tary declares: "I started to study at the age of forty. My husband started
harassing me in all sorts of ways. He hid my alarm clock. Often he
unscrewed the bathroom light bulb so that everybody had to go there in
the dark." The documentary does not give straightforward answers to
how the seven deadly sins are related to, and exist in, our everyday
lives. Who is the victim of the sin, who is a sinner, or are we all sinners?

44
 "You Want to See? Well, Tata a look at This!"

.iim, or I eat
o/i lake mcnevfronv
Figure 5: Sin - A Documentary on Daily Offnces,
Screen capture

Figure 6: Sla - A Documentary oi Dally Offences-

Screen capture

Violent Confrontations
Whereas the documentary Sin makes use of the aesthetics of the
provocative look in order to distance the spectator, the ntockumentary
(or, to be more precise, the film is a mock making-of documentary) Man
4-5
Shame and Desire

Bites Dog (C'est arrive pres de chez vous, Rimy Belvaux, Andre
Bonzel, Benoit Poelvoorde, 1992) seeks to draw the spectator closer
using the same technique. This has to do with the difference in the
diegetic status of the films, which determines the variation in the
function of the provocative look. But despite the different aims these
films hope to achieve, there is one thing they have in common: both
films are confronting to the spectator. A low-budget horror film with a
strong cult status, the Belgian film Man Bites Dog (the literal English
translation of the original title is "it happened in your neighbourhood")
revolves around a film crew shooting a documentary of Benoit the serial
killer (the crew appearing on the screen is supposed to be the same one
that made the faked making-of). The film crew follow Ben when he
visits his parents, attends a bar, and recites his poetry. They also follow
him when he rapes and murders his victims; men, women, young and
old. Despite of its comic aspects, Man Bites Dog is disturbing, not only
because Ben commits his violent acts so cold-bloodedly, but also
because the film crew who witness the brutality are by no means
bothered by it. In fact, as the narrative unfolds, the crew become more
and more involved in the various murders. Not only do they finance the
documentary with the money Ben has stolen from his victims, they also
help him dispose the bodies of his victims and finally participate in the
rape of a female victim in front of her husband. The film ends when
both Ben and the film crew are gunned down by another serial killer; the
camera continues rolling until the film runs out.
It is not surprising that the critics often define Man Bites Dog as a
mockumentary, a film that is made to look like a documentary, despite
its fictional status. The look of the documentary is achieved through the
use of handheld camera and in-camera editing that gives the impression
that the entire film is being shot with one camera only and without any
intrusion by the filmmaker (except for the occasional fast paced
flashback sequences of the murders Ben has committed). This heightens
the illusion of immediacy and creates a false sense of authenticity in the
film, even though the spectator is aware of its fictional content. The film
was also shot in a grainy black-and-white 16 mm stock which is similar
in appearance to many cinema verite documentaries (the filmmaking
movement that began in France in the 1950s). The grainy quality is
heightened by the use of natural lighting which is understood to be part
of the 'authentic' look of the verite style. Most of the film is shot in long
takes, which implies an exact temporal correspondence between the
duration of the event and the duration of the image. Furthermore, the
film was shot on location with non-professional actors, the sound was
recorded live as well, and the film makes almost no use of non-diegetic
sound, which all creates a stronger illusion of reality. All of the actors,

46
 'You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!"

but especially Ben, gaze directly into the camera. This direct addressing
of the camera eye is not only a convention of documentary realism, but
it also places the spectator in the position of direct witnessing (the
spectator takes the position of the cameraman as Ben addresses him).
Some of the aesthetic choices described above were due to the low
budget at the disposal of thefilmmakers(using the documentary form is
of course less expensive and thus more accessible to low budget film-
makers than adopting the classical Hollywood style). Yet the fact that
Man Bites Dog consciously plays with elements of documentary en-
courages the spectators to 'believe' that they are witnessing actual
events. This enhances the extreme voyeuristic dimension of the film.
What ultimately disturbs the spectator in thefilmis not Ben's casualness
and emotional detachment towards his murderous activities (in the film,
no other explanation is given to his actions except that it is a way of
making a living) which makes violence and murder appear totally
meaningless. The film is confronting, because it questions the boundary
between the observant and the participant in violence and, in so doing,
potentially invites the spectators to redefine their own relationship with
violence in the media.
Like Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997) or Oliver Stone's
Natural Born Killers (1994), Man Bites Dog raises the issue of media
attention and fascination with serial killers. Rimy, the director of the
documentary within the film keeps on shooting his picture even though
two of his soundmen have already died in the process. After the death of
Franco, the second soundman, R6my justifies his decision with the
following significant lines, directly addressing the camera: "Right
before he died, I told him, come on, we've got enough footage, we've
got enough sound. And he said, we'll never have enough." The filming
does not end as long as there is an audience willing to keep on watching.
The gang rape sequence is by any standards the most disturbing
event of the film, because it takes away the 'entertainment value' of
violence, reminding the spectators of their relation to the on-screen
horrors that they find disgusting and repulsive off-screen. At this point,
the intersubjective dimension of the film is intensified. Emotions play an
important role here, since the confrontation of the spectators with their
own look becomes a question of negative emotions, such as repulsion,
shame, and guilt for being unable to stop watching. The scene is shot,
like most of the film, from the point of view of the supposedly diegetic
cameraman Andr6 as the crew breaks and enters into an apartment of a
married couple making love. The scene is edited in-camera as each
member of the film crew, including Ben, brutally rapes the woman in
turn, whilst the recording mike records her screams. Here, four different
types of returned looks can be identified. First, there is R6my's desper-

47
Shame and Desire

ate look at the camera. Unlike anyone else in the film crew, he actually
appears to be disgusted with himself. Then there is Andre's frantic,
primitive look, and the subdued look of the rape victim's husband whom
Ben forces to look at the camera. And finally there is Ben's casual,
proud look ("See that? She's moaning!") The only person who is denied
the look is the rape victim herself. In the close up of the woman there is
no returned look, only the face already beyond pain. Her suffering
cannot be communicated via vision, it can only be heard; in this sense
the scene is a textbook example of Michel Chion's notion of female
voice as the 'point of the cry'.22 In this way, Man Bites Dog goes a step
further from Godard's use of prostitution as a metaphor for the position
of the filmmaker under capitalism, such as in his My Life to Live (Vivre
sa vie, 1962) and Every Man for Himself (Sauve quipeut (la vie), 1980).
In Man Bites Dog the position of the filmmaker is that of the rapist, and
the fact that the film forces the spectator to become a participant of the
rape, is utterly beyond disgust.
Frank Lafond makes a similar point when he writes that "[t]he film
crew clearly stand in for the audience, first sitting off-screen in the dark
of the theatre and then progressively involving itself in the criminal's
murderous activities."23 This scene, seen in a viciously graphic form,
forces the spectators to leave their position of safe voyeurism, as the
violence becomes painful and disturbing because the spectators are
confronted with it as it were against their will. Lafond continues: "[Man
Bites Dog] does not provide freedom from responsibility insofar as the
viewer/voyeur enjoys the sight of pain inflicted on other people because
he has expressed a desire for it."24 The scene ends with a lingering
tracking shot of the victims that have been tortured to death, non-
diegetic flute music playing in the score, and the crew sleeping half-
naked on the kitchen floor where the rape took place. This shot, unlike
almost every other shot in the film, does not imply being filmed from
the point-of-view of a diegetic cameraman. Furthermore, this scene
changes the whole film, as Man Bites Dog can no longer be seen merely
as a 'snuff satire' after the appearance of the gang rape scene. And
whilst the film crew get even more deeply involved with Ben's mon-
strous acts, Ben gains increasing control in the process of shooting the
documentary itself. Toward the end of the film, Ben attempts to attack a
postman who is able to escape, an event which is stretched several times
in slow motion and reverse motion in the film. In the following shot, it
appears that Ben is sitting behind the editing table, accusing the film-

" Chion, 1982.

23
Lafond, 2003, p. 100.
24
Ibid.p. 100.

48
 "You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!"

makers that they did not come to his aid but continued filming. This
would suggest a collision between the representation and what is being
represented, and this is the core of the film's 'ethical pursuit'. The
violence is representation, representation is violence, and it is from this
in-between space in Man Bites Dog that not only the terror, but also the
moment of intersubjectivity is rendered discernible.

Voyeuristic Shame
By positioning the spectator in between shame and intimacy with the
Other, film could take advantage of the seemingly sadistic and structur­
ally empowering voyeuristic look of the spectators (that 'creates' the
Other with the eyes) and turn it back onto the spectators themselves.
Films like Man Bites Dog and the documentaiy Sin could thereby
question the dichotomy of subject vs. object of the look in psychoana­
lytical film theory, as theorised by Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey. In
his book The Imaginary Signifier (Le Signifiant imaginaire) one of the
cornerstones of the apparatus theory, Metz states that the process of film
viewing is based on scopophilia, the desire to see more, and this notion
leads him to analyze the film experience more closely as voyeurism (as
well as fetishism and exhibitionism), where he finds the unconscious
roots of the 'scopic regime' of cinema. For Metz too, voyeurism is a
form of mastery, which is derived from the subject's attempt to gain
control over the Other on the level of perceptions; the subject imagines
that his look determines the Other.25
According to Metz, there exist two types of voyeurism: private (un­
authorised) and public (authorised), of which the first type is dominant
in film experience. Public voyeurism is discursive interaction based on a
mutual agreement as, for example, in the peep show. This is also the
nature of the film institution in itself. Films are made to be watched, and
the spectator knows this when buying the ticket. The cinematic experi­
ence, however, is closer to private voyeurism. The darkness of the film
theatre, the apparent privacy of the situation and the shape of the cinema
screen together create 'a keyhole effect' that is complemented by the
film characters' unawareness of the spectators. The film characters
allow themselves to be seen, but they act as if they were unaware of this,
and unauthorised voyeurism is one of the means by which the (classical)
cinema disguises its discursive nature. For Metz (and for Mulvey)
spectatorship thus functions on two levels: on the one hand as ego-
constitutive identification, and on the other hand as sadistic (erotic)
voyeurism, where the spectators subjugate the film character as the

Metz, 1982.

49
Shame and Desire

object of their look.26 The spectators as subjects of lack feel that the field
of camera really is their 'transcendental' field of vision, and are thereby
able to subjugate film characters as (i.e. erotic) objects of their look. The
basic condition of voyeuristic look is a distance between the spectator
and the object of the look. According to Metz, "[P]erceiving drive
concretely represents the absence of its object in the distance at which it
maintains it and which is part of its very definition: distance of the look,
distance of listening."27
By contrast, for Sartre a voyeuristic look creates intimacy between
the seer and the seen: the voyeur forgets himself and 'fuses' with the
object of his look:
No transcending view comes to confer upon my acts the character of a given
on which a judgment can be brought to bear. My consciousness sticks to my
acts, it is my acts; and my acts are commanded only by the ends to be at-
tained and by the instruments to be employed. My attitude, for example, has
no 'outside9; it is a pure process of relating the instrument (the keyhole) to
the end to be attained (the spectacle to be seen), a pure mode of losing my-
self in the world.28
It is only after the voyeur experiences the look of the Other that dis-
tance is created between the voyeur and the object of his look. Through
the look of the Other, the unreflective consciousness makes the self
present as an object for the Other: "First of all, I now exist as myself for
my unreflective consciousness [...] I see myself because somebody sees
me."29 In this process, the voyeur's subjectivity becomes threatened, the
voyeur becomes conscious of himself as an object for the Other: "All of
a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself [...] in that I have
my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure

Like Metz, Laura Mulvey proposes views about the importance of scopophilia in film
experience in her classic article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema9, but unlike
Metz she takes gender difference as her starting point. According to Mulvey, the
classic cinema defines the male subject by the capacity to see, as the source of the
look (voyeurism), whereas the female subject is defined by the capacity to attract the
look (exhibitionism). This reflects the attempt in the patriarchal system to subjugate
women. For Mulvey, the psychic mechanisms invoked by cinema are gender-bound
rather than gender-neutral. See Mulvey, 1985. Later psychoanalytic theory, however,
has questioned the separation of the female spectator from the basic structure of
cinematic pleasure, by claiming that the psychosexual organisations of human beings
cannot be reduced to simple oppositions between the active, sadistic, male psyche
and a passive, masochistic female psyche. Sexual identification is more dynamic, and
gender difference does not determine the way of looking. For a discussion, see, for
instance, Williams, 1982 and Rodowick, 1991.
27
Metz, 1982, p. 46.
28
Sartre, 1956, p. 348.
29
/&tf.,p.349.

50
 "You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!"

reference to Other."30 This means that the object presented to conscious-

ness is out of the voyeur's reach: "it is separated from me by nothing-
ness which I cannot fill since I apprehend it as not being for me and
since on principle it exists for the Other"31 The voyeur's subjectivity
flees from him, and will never belong to him, but he nevertheless is that
object for the Other.
The new consciousness is embellished by the feeling of shame.
Shame, then, is "the recognition of the fact that I am indeed that object
which the Other is looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as my
freedom escapes me in order to become a given object."32 Yet this self,
which the voyeur is in the world of the Other, is made alien to him, for
the Other's look fixes his transcendence: all the instrumental-things in
the midst of which he is (including the keyhole and the spectacle that is
to be seen through it) now turn toward the Other and escape the voyeur:
the voyeur is the object in the midst of a world (the voyeur is one with
the world as a passive object among other objects) which flows toward
the Other. It is in the voyeur's being as an object for the Other than he is
able to experience the Other as subject.
Voyeurism, and the shame that follows, is for Sartre an indication for
the whole human condition. A voyeuristic look is an attempt by the
subject to create a world of his own without boundaries by reducing the
Other to an object in it. Yet in this process the subject is being caught in
action: the subject realises that others exist with him in the same inter-
subjective field, seeking to render the subject into an object. This leads
to shame:
My original fall is the existence of the Other. Shame [...] is the apprehen-
sion of myself as a nature although that very nature escapes me and is un-
knowable as such. Strictly speaking, it is not that I perceive myself losing
myfreedomin order to become a thing, but my nature is - over there, out-
side my livedfreedom- as a given attribute of this being which I am for the
Other/3
The content of shame is then that the subject is in fact an object and
constituted as such by the Other. The subject, who so far has conceived
his or her own origin by projecting to be his or her own foundation (the
'creator' of his or her own being) now, as an object, realises that he or
she is dependent upon a consciousness other than his or her own. The
result of this is the loss of freedom - the subject's foundation now lies in

Ibid, p. 349.
Ibid,p. 350.
IbuL,p. 350.
Ibid,p. 352.

51
Shame and Desire

the freedom of another - and it is the loss of freedom that degrades the
subject to shame. The sense of loss of freedom is an essential feature in
shame: in shame my self is not only seen as an object in the world of
another and experienced as objectified, it is also sensed as taken by
forces beyond my subjective control, since the Other can take a point of
view on me that I cannot. Even though there is an objective dimension
of my being, that dimension of myself essentially escapes me. Shame,
for Sartre, is thus more than a moral sentiment (even though morality is
a part of it, at least if the 'sale voyeur' has internalised the cultural
conventions of privacy that he is violating). Since shame reproduces the
conditions of basic humanness, shame is a metaphysical rather than a
moral feeling.
Through the emotion of shame, then, the subject/object dichotomy of
apparatus theory could be turned upside down. In his two short films,
Something Happened (Ndgonting har hdnt9 1987) and World of Glory
(Harligt drjorden, 1991), Roy Andersson uses shame in order to reveal
the spectators to themselves as existing for others. Something Happened
is a public service announcement film about AIDS that was commis-
sioned by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. However,
the project was cancelled before the film was finished as it was consid-
ered too dark and controversial. In his film, Andersson argues against
the medical establishment's official explanation for the virus's origins.
The film is composed of 25 tableaux, shot in a sterile visual style with
deep space, immobile camera, direct addressing of the spectator, and
laconic articulation (should this sound familiar: Andersson's style was
in fact very much a source of inspiration for Helke and Suutari in their
documentary Sin). First the spectator is fascinated by the richness of the
frame but also by its intimacy: we are invited to follow people in every-
day situations and intimate moments that we are not intended to see in
social situations of another kind. But with the look of the Other in the
film, the eyes directed to the camera that haunt the spectators in the act
of looking, the spectators are presented in this visual field as objects for
the Other's look.
The sixth tableau of the film, for instance, consists of a group of doc-
tors in white coats playing pool and having a following dialogue while
addressing the camera in an arrogant tone of voice: "You know, just
about anything could suddenly turn up down there, in the warmth and
damp. [...] Sure! There are all sorts of viruses and bacteria in Africa.
And all those monkeys running around as they please." This is the
discourse of'us' versus 'them' where AIDS is used as a justification for
social exclusion and public control. With the direct address, the specta-
tors are confronted to define their position within this discourse. This is
followed by a series of static shots of men and women in different

52
 'You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!"

everyday situations at home and at work, again gazing directly at the

camera, while the voice over identifies them as high-risk groups: homo-
sexual men, drug abusers, prostitutes, the 'others'. But the returned look
disturbs the othering and makes it impossible for the spectator to adopt a
position of supremacy and indifference, suggested in the sixth tableau.
All of the sudden the spectators are conscious of themselves not only in
the act of looking, but as objects for the Other, in the world of another.
The object of my look has suddenly taken a point of view on me that I
cannot apprehend. As a result, the spectator is able to experience the
Other as subject, as the Other refuses to be an object for the spectator's
look.
This theme is developed even further with World of Glory\ where
Andersson explores humanity by telling a story of a broker in modern
day Sweden, haunted by feelings of guilt and shame. Like Something
Happened, World of Glory unfolds in 15 tableaux, in a series of static,
immobile shots with deep space and grey, washed out atmosphere. The
opening of the film is downright unsettling: a crowd of civil servants in
an open lot observe how a group of naked women, men and children are
forced to enter a closed van. A tube from the van's exhaust pipe is
connected to the compartment where the people are, and the van drives
off slowly in circles around the lot, while distant screams can be heard
in the background. The protagonist of the film stands among the crowd
passively; towards the middle of the scene he turns slowly around and
looks directly into the camera. Andersson himself has described this
scene as a reconstruction of the ethnic cleansings of the Second World
War:
The camera is nothing other than time and history watching. It is, quite sim-
ply, memory and knowledge. Therefore the main character looks into the
camera: he looks toward history, toward memory, toward time and toward
us.34
Why is this returned look so powerful? According to Philip Hal lie,
one cannot understand evil unless one empathises with those who are
being victimised.35 This is why, faced with such a horrific scene, the
spectators tend to automatically identify with the victims. But by mak-
ing his protagonist look directly at the camera Andersson denies the
spectator this kind of easy solution: with one look the spectators realise
that they, too, are the observers, not the victims. This realisation is
accompanied by the emotion of shame. The 'world of glory' is the world
of coldness and insensitivity, where material things have replaced

34
http://www.royandersson.com, accessed 31 October 2006.
35
Hallie, 1985, p. 90.

53
Shame and Desire

human emotion, and this is what is ultimately shameful in human condi­

tion.
In this way, Andersson's films first lure the eye and then catch the
spectators in the act of looking, making the spectators objects for the
Other's look, the Other that now appears as another subject. At this
point, shame emerges, as an intersubjective moment when the subject
recognises the foundation for his or her existence. Shame, or guilt, then
is a metaphor for the denial of truth, of history and its influence on the
self. The Other, here, is the presence of history that always haunts us,
that always looks at us and defines us, even though we are not always
aware of its look. The visual style of Something Happened and World of
Glory catches the spectators in the act of looking, confronting them with
images they would rather have kept their eyes averted from, such as
images of human experiments in Nazi Germany. This creates a harsh
contrast of indifference and recognition, disturbance and acceptance in
both films.

Reciprocal Intersubjectivity
As stated above, for Sartre shame is a threatening situation. For him,
all the relations with others are characterised by the subject's attempt to
make objects of others and vice versa. Shame, therefore, echoes a
possibility of 'filling in the void' between the self and the Other. Sartre
shows clearly that the look of the Other has a constitutive function for
the subject, but that function is not necessarily limited to being a threat.
This means that the Other can be a threat to the subject (the Other can
objectify and shame the subject) but the Other also can be beneficial to
the subject (the Other can support and care for the subject). The rela­
tionship between the subject and the Other can be productive instead of
threatening; we are not separately bound, but interdependent, pro­
foundly connected beings. But how?
Towards the end of Sartre's play No Exit, one of the three characters
trapped in the room of hell voices what must be Sartre's most famous
phrase: Hell is other people. Hell is 'other people' in the respect that
each of these characters are trapped eternally in a relation with each
other, in which they either objectify each other, or perceive each other as
threatening to their own subjectivity. In his discussion of No Exit Arthur
C. Danto describes how in the play
Each demands of the others that he or she be taken at the value he or she
would want to be taken at, that others perceive him as they would want to
perceive themselves, because there is a mutual refusal, indeed incapacity to

54
 'You Want to See? Weil, Take a Look at This!"

do this, each is forced to see himself through the eyes of the others, and
none can escape an identity imposed from without.36

Hell is thus a hopeless situation in which the subjectivity of each is

both exposed to others and hostage to others, and from which it is
impossible to escape. Understanding this possibility of 'being seen by
the Other' is experienced as shame. Consequently, shame reveals the
human condition in which we are related to others, the condition from
which there is no exit. Relations with others always involve conflict; yet
Hazel Barnes in her book on Sartre notes that there is also hope for
reciprocity in intersubjective relations.37 This reciprocity means respect-
ing the Other as another subject, without attempting to use the Other to
one's own ends. This does not mean that the Other does not have an
effect on the subject or vice versa, but that, despite that effect, the
subject remains open to the Other. The subject accepts that he or she is
"a factual limit to the Other's freedom" and that the Other is a factual
limit to the subject's freedom, but tolerates this limitation and removes
from the Other "those free possibilities of courageous resistance, of
perseverance, of self-assertion which he would have had the opportunity
to develop in the world of intolerance."38
According to Barnes, in order to acknowledge the reciprocity, one
needs to recognise the positive potential of the look. The first possibility
for reciprocal subjectivity is two people looking into the world together,
in a common project. The second is the experience of 'look-as-
exchange'. This kind of look is not "a union of subjects but a mutual
affirmation of respect for the Other as subject" that resembles Sartre's
concept of 'love' outlined in Being and Nothingness but that lacks the
"attempt to assimilate the Other's freedom."39 The look-as-exchange
"involves the usual subject/object alternation, but with the added inten-
tion of [...] understanding the Other's world and using this understand-
ing to enhance both self and Other."40 Through the look-as-exchange I
recognise the Other as a subject fundamentally like myself in his or her
basic 'humanness', but it is not marked by threat but by an ethical
attitude of reciprocal respect, which Sartre in Critique of Dialectical
Reason (Critique de la raison dialectique) referred to as "a free ex-

i0
Danto, 1985, p. 90.
37
Barnes, 1974.
38
Sartre, 1956, p. 494.
39
Barnes, 1974, p. 64.
40
Ibid, pp. 333-4, italics added.

55
Shame and Desire

change between two men who recognise each other [in a positive or
negative way] in their freedom."41
The phenomenon of reciprocity could occur in the cinematic experi-
ence as well, as it is not a closed system of subject and object, but a
potentially dialogical space of two (or more) subjects. Michael Haneke's
Hidden {Cache, 2005), for instance, creates reciprocity by establishing a
subject/object alteration between the film and the spectator. In this film,
it is not a gaze directed at the camera but the vision of camera itself that
returns the spectator's look. The film opens with what resembles a
classical establishing shot of a Parisian residence with minimal move-
ment within the frame that lasts about three minutes to the point when
we hear a piece of diegetic off-screen dialogue that somehow appears to
originate behind our backs. The image pauses and then fast-forwards,
revealing that what we saw was not a regular establishing shot but a
television screen showing a surveillance tape left anonymously on the
doorstep of Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Bino-
che). Similar static establishing shots of the house as well as of other
locations occur throughout the film, which makes the spectators doubt
their own perception. It is unclear what the diegetic status of these
images is. This is one hidden layer of this multi-layered film between
which the spectator is invited to negotiate. The theme of the film is what
happens when a personal and/or national disgrace that is safely hidden
suddenly surfaces, and this is achieved through the juxtaposition of
(mostly static) camera shots and surveillance images, as well as diegetic
and non-diegetic shots. These elements interact throughout the entire
film, thereby bringing about the effect of doubt. The film is shot on
digital video, which further disturbs the act of viewing, as the quality of
the surveillance images is exactly the same as the regular shots.
The narrative evolves around the mysterious tapes and the question
of their dispatcher, whose identity nevertheless remains hidden. The
function of the tapes is unambiguous: it is a manner of demanding
recognition for the French national shame that has long been hidden in
plain sight; namely the police massacre of 200 Algerians during a
demonstration against a discriminatory curfew in Paris on October 17,
1961.42 This is the political reason for being of the film. The tapes

41
Sartre, 1982, p. 110.
42
This violent attack against the peaceful demonstrators was ordered by Maurice
Papon, a former Nazi collaborator and then the chief of the Paris police. The French
authority was not only reluctant to investigate the event, but it also remained silent
about what happened. Furthermore, despite the extent of the massacre, the press cov-
erage of it was scarce and downplayed due to the censorship of the media by several
levels of the French authority. It is telling that upon viewing the film for the first time
I personally felt ashamed for my ignorance of the Paris massacre, but in retrospective

56
 "You Want to See? Well Take a Look at This!"

feature what appears to be footage of a hidden camera; the camera has

access to both the most open and the most private places, but neither the
camera nor the filmmaker are visible to the protagonists or the spectator.
Furthermore, an important issue with regard to the tapes is the fact that
they are made available to those under surveillance. Georges is meant to
know that he is being watched, and, in this knowledge, to recognize and
accept the responsibility of his actions. In a crucial scene in the film
Georges visits Majid (Maurice Benichou) for the first time to accuse
him of terrorising his family. George's visit has been filmed without
him or Majid knowing it. Later, the mysterious tape is sent to Anne to
whom Georges did not tell the truth about his confrontation with Majid.
On this tape, we witness Georges accusing and threatening Majid; after
Georges's departure Majid starts to cry inconsolably in his low-rent
apartment. This intimate encounter with the raw subjectivity of the
Other is painful to watch for both the spectator and Georges, and it
paves the way to voyeuristic shame, since the footage looks like some-
thing that has been secretly filmed.
But there is more to it than that. Namely, the question who filmed the
conversation and the emotional outburst that followed it? Why did
neither Georges nor Majid notice the presence of the camera? It would
be an easy solution to decide that the camera is simply out of sight just
like in candid camera or reality television shows (the fact that the film
never reveals who is surveilling the family would seem to support this
idea). But the camera could also be seen situated in the in-between space
of the diegesis and the non-diegesis, and it is from this position that the
reciprocal intersubjectivity emerges. (This in-between space is present
in other films of Haneke as well, such as in Funny Games where two
killers have total power over their victims because they can move
between the diegesis and the non-diegesis whilst the tortured family
cannot.43) In Georges and Anne's house, we also twice witness a young
Arab boy that seems to be bleeding from his mouth (the tapes are
wrapped in childish drawings of a figure whose mouth is similarly
smeared with blood). Later we find out that this boy is Georges's re-
pressed memory of Majid when Georges was six years old. This further
blurs the distinction between diegesis and non-diegesis, reality and
representation, vision and dream, memory and imagination. This tech-
nique also distances the spectators from the protagonists so that they
remain aware of their own viewing process. Any identification with the
protagonists is discouraged, and, as a result, the spectators are invited to

my lack of knowledge should not have been surprising at all. See, for instance,
http://www.washington-repoitorg/backissues/0397/9703036.htm, accessed 1 July
2006.
43
Sorfa, 2006, p. 100.

57
Shame and Desire

grasp all the different viewpoints at once - because they are uttered right
through them. The protagonists in Hidden talk through the spectators in
order to reach each other, but in vain. Although their paths cross,
Georges and Majid never 'meet', except in the reciprocity of spectator-
ship. Miscommunications and misunderstandings are the narrative
forces of the film, residues in the self/Other alteration that enable mo-
ments of added intention of understanding the complex interactions
between the protagonists that the tapes have set in motion.
In this enigmatic network, Georges stands out as the central figure.
Majid's parents worked for Georges's family, and, when they died
during the October 17 demonstration, Georges's parents took in Majid.
In the film, Georges has guilty dreams about deceiving Majid into
killing a rooster, which results in Majid being hastily sent off to an
orphanage. The dream scene starts abruptly with a close-up of an axe
cutting the head off the rooster; the young Georges watches the event
frightened. An exchange of looks is established between Georges and
Majid through a series of shot-reverse shots which develop into the
dream-Majid approaching the camera with his axe raised to an extreme
close-up so that in the end he 'swallows' the image. This scene is a
forceful demand of recognition of guilt. It is also a forewarning of
shocking events yet to come. Towards the end of film, Majid asks
Georges to come to his apartment. As soon as Georges is there, Majid
says: "I asked you to come because I wanted you to be present." In an
abrupt gesture, Majid then slits his throat, bleeding all over the place.
Majid's suicide is an extreme demand of recognition, but Georges
refuses to acknowledge this demand or admit his quilt to himself or to
his mother, Anne, Majid, or Majid's son.
Georges's attitude is an analogy for the French national imaginary
and its undercurrent of guilt and shame for the treatment of Algerians in
France. Georges (the nation of France) seems to refuse to take responsi-
bility for something that happened far behind in the past, since he
(France) is not the same person (nation) any longer. By placing the
spectator at the point of junction of human interactions in the film,
Haneke attempts to establish an exchange of recognition of this guilt
between the spectator and the film. In an interview about the film,
Haneke himself has stated that Georges's guilt is traumatic, because he
refuses to accept that his selfishness has destroyed one human life.
Instead, he prefers to keep the secrets as they are, buried deep under the
fa$ade of his 'stable' bourgeois family. The exchange of recognition that
Haneke sets up is then not only positive. I do not need to approve of
Georges's decision of living in denial to be able to recognise it as behav-
iour of another person fundamentally like myself in his basic human-
ness. George's past wrongdoing is, in fact, quite normal selfishness for a

58
 'You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!"

six-year old child. The things become complicated only when he refuses
to acknowledge his guilt. Here, the spectator can empathise with Geor-
ges without identifying with him. Within the framework of film theory,
Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis explain the
difference between (conscious) empathy and (visual) identification as
follows:
Consciously experienced empathy has very little to do with identification
[...] The difference might be put in the following way: Empathy = I know
how you feel; knowledge and perception are its structuring categories. Iden-
tification = I see as you see, from your position: vision and psychic place-
ment define its terms.44
This aspect - empathy without identification - is crucial to reciprocal
intersubjectivity in a political sense, since it renders it an activity that
recognises the Other's impact on the self for participation in the reality
of two (or more) separate subjects, but also acknowledges the external-
ity of that Other.
This simultaneous distance and proximity allows the emergence of
multiple positions beyond the self/Other dichotomy. The meaning of the
film for the spectator originates therefore from the intersubjective field
of mutual recognition, instead of from a position of cheap middle-class
morality. The spectator of Hidden is invited to act as an intermediate for
the multiple positions that shape both the self and the Other as they
participate in each others' realities: Georges and Majid, Georges and
Anne, Anne and Pierre, and finally the sons of both Majid and Georges
who are brought together in the brilliant final shot of the film (this shot
is a static establishing shot of the school Georges's son attends that
relates it to the secretly filmed footage constantly recurring in the film
but especially to the opening shot). Here lies the possibility of the
circulation of shame as a cinematic experience. It is these interactions
that are the coming-of-being of ethnic conflicts, instead of some local of
global structures. By directing our attention to these interactions, Hidden
enables the spectators to grasp the larger, more complex framework of
the unresolved racial issues still at hand (appropriately enough, Haneke
won the best director prize for his film at Cannes just few months before
the 2005 riots in France in October and November) even those specta-
tors that do not have first-hand knowledge about the ethnic conflicts that
Haneke addresses in his film. In this way, Hidden creates an emotional
space where shame could be understood as a failure of French nation in
living up to its ethical standards (Hiberte, egalite, fraternitei\ or at least
what should be its ethical standards.

44
Stam et al., 1992: pp. 150-1. See also Laine, 2001.

59
Shame and Desire

Reciprocal intersubjectivity could then be politically constitutive,

and in Sartre's thinking it is the look of the Other (and the basic struc-
ture of shame) that characterises the manner in which we are intersub-
jectively connected to each other, and the manner in which we attempt
to make objects of each other. To live in the social world means that we
are compelled to see ourselves through the eyes of the others, and that
we cannot flee an identity that is being enforced upon us from without
ourselves. Comprehending this risk of being seen by the Other is experi-
enced as shame. Consequently, shame reveals the human situation in
which we are connected to others, the situation that we cannot escape.
However, Sartre's notion of the look of the Other that compels the
subject into an objective apprehension of him- or herself is often criti-
cised as being ontological-individual rather than socio-historical. The
Sartrean subject has been declared as being solid, essentialist, and self-
sufficient "prisoner of the cogito."45 Sartre's concept of consciousness
has been seen as a Cartesian construct, "with all the attributes of abso-
lute autonomy" but little need in acting to improve the social circum-
stances in which one lives.46 According to Nik Farrell Fox:
In this respect, Sartre's social theory in Being and Nothingness remains ab-
stract and incomplete since he does not go beyond a dyadic account of self
and Other, which [...] is insufficient for the explanation of 'macro-
phenomena', such as institutions, languages, and collective structures.47
Yet underneath the 'Cartesian surface' of Being and Nothingness
there were important undercurrents which indicated a more contingent
notion of the subject that Sartre later outlined in his Critique of Dialecti-
cal Reason.49 In this account, Sartre attempts to understand subjectivity
through a dialectical plane; for Sartre 'dialectical reason' is a way of
understanding the objective dimension of history at the same time with
the subjective, individual experience. Where Being and Nothingness
provides an abstract and in itself incomplete or partly deficient matrix
for the subject's self-realisation as a social subject, in Critique of Dia-
lectical Reason subjectivity is imposed not by some ontological struc-
tures, but by its socially and historically conditioned frameworks. This
theoretical mode of intersubjective constitution could also serve in
thinking about the film and its spectator as social beings in a historical
context.

45
See, for instance, L6vi-Strauss, 1966, p. 249.
46
Marcuse, 1983, p. 174.
47
Fox, 2003, p. 56.
And, as Fredrick Jameson points out, this new book changed the old, and Being and
Nothingness can no longer be read in the same way after the appearance of Critique
of Dialectical Reason. See Jameson, 1971, p. 209.

60
 CHAPTER 2

Intersubjectivity and Otherness

Dialectical Spectatorship
As we have already seen, in order for shame to occur, there must be
a relationship between the self and the Other. Shame is 'shared' by
everyone who has the concept of the Other, and therefore reveals that
the structure of self-consciousness is necessarily intersubjective. This
structure of intersubjectivity, however, could be criticised for being
essentialist and asocial: especially (post)structuralist thinkers such as
Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan condemn Sartre's existentialism
in favour of the decentred subject that is mastered by, rather than the
master of, language and thought structures.1 For instance, in his treatise
on the development of an intersubjective world for the subject, Lacan
extends Sartre's discussion of shame and the look of the Other in the
following way:
Sartre [...] brings [the gaze] into function in the dimension of the existence
of others. Others would remain suspended in the same, partially de-realising
conditions that are, in Sartre's definition, those of objectivity, were it not for
the gaze. The gaze, as conceived by Sartre, is the gaze by which I am sur­
prised - surprised in so far as it changes all the perspectives, the lines of
force, of my world, orders it,fromthe point of nothingness where I am, in a
sort of radiated reticulation of the organisms.2
The problem with Sartre's formulation, according to Lacan, is that it
defines the subject as the unique centre of reference, and does not take
into account the symbolic nature of subjectivity, the way in which the
individual is subjected to the order of language and the societal impera­
tives of his or her environment. In this process, the look (or 'the gaze' as
Lacanian scholars usually translate the term le regard, whilst in connec­
tion with Sartre one usually talks about the look) is of fundamental
importance. The look/gaze does not originate from one's human coun­
terpart, as in Sartre's thinking, but from the realm of the linguistic
unconscious.

See, for instance, Howells, 1992a and 1992b.

2
Lacan, 1994, p. 84.

61
Shame and Desire

Lacan is thus not wholly in agreement with Sartre's view of the

look/gaze and its role in the development of intersubjectivity. Sartre's
analysis of the gaze is not a correct phenomenological analysis, Lacan
argues, because Sartre defines the gaze as a presence of other persons.
For Lacan the gaze pre-exists the subject (in the same way as it might be
said of language) and is, in this respect, the manifestation of the Sym-
bolic within the field of vision. In Sartre's example of the voyeur he
speaks of being seen peeking, but according to Lacan, it is not merely a
gaze that the voyeur apprehends, but "a gaze imagined by me in the field
of the Other," a gaze that reveals that the voyeur is a "subject sustaining
himself in a function of desire."3 Lacan provides a different account of
intersubjectivity by introducing two notions of otherness. There is the
Other(A) with the capital letter (le grand Autre), the one who sees
without being seen (not a person), and before which all others are
merely others with lower case letters (the other persons, the Sartrean
Other).4 Lacan illustrates this with a story of himself in his early twen-
ties, on a boat with a group of Breton fishermen, when one of them
points out a sardine can to him:
It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun [...] it glittered
in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me - You see that can? Do you see it?
Well, it doesn't see you! [...] [I]f what Petit-Jean said to me [...] had any
meaning, it was because in a sense, it was looking at me, all the same. [...]
I, at that moment - as I appeared to these fellows who were earning their
livings with great difficulty, in the struggle with what for them was a pitiless
nature - looked like nothing on earth. In short, I was rather out of place in
the picture.5
The sardine can looks back at Lacan, because it is situated at the
level of 'the point of light', the point at which everything looks back at
the subject. The sardine can looks back, because it is situated at the
point at which the subject cannot have a point of view, the gaze in the
field of the Other(A). By this example, Lacan establishes shame ("I
looked like nothing on earth") as the operation of the gaze in the field of
the Other(A), on the field of the Symbolic, which, for Lacan, is the
foundation of intersubjectivity. The Lacanian notion of the Other(A)
thereby assigns considerable importance to the Symbolic: our visibility
is not merely a brute condition but a consequence of our possession of a
symbolic system. Our original relations with others come into existence
at the time of the subject's entry into the Symbolic order, the order of

3
Ibid., p. 85, italics added.
To distinguish Lacanian Other from the Sartrean Other I shall from now on follow
Betty Cannon's style and refer to the former as the Other(A).
5
Lacan, 1994, pp. 95-6.

62
 Intersubjectivity and Otherness

language and culture. This occurs simultaneously with the birth of the
unconscious, and this is the reason why (to quote Lacan's famous
phrase) "the unconscious is structured like a language."6 However, the
entry into the Symbolic splits the subject from the 'primal object', the
infant's original experience of wholeness (Sartre would say that the
subject loses his or her 'original spontaneity'), leading to the emergence
of a desire for fullness (in this sense, Lacan's concept of desire is very
close to that of Sartre, since it is associated with lack of being) or the
desire for the Other(A). As already said, the Other(A) is not a person but
the linguistic unconscious, "the locus of the signifier"7 that can be
equated with discourse and the Symbolic Order. The subject's desire for
the Other(A) is frustrated since there is a fundamental absence at the
centre of language. Since every sign indicates the absence of the object
it stands for, this intensifies the frustration of the infant, since the infant
now has to accept his or her essential lack: we never acquire what we so
passionately desire. Hence, we are compelled to seek substitute objects
for our desire.
For Lacan, the origin of the gaze itself is non-human, but the gaze is
nevertheless socially codified through what Lacan calls the 'cultural
screen'. The gaze assists the subject's psychic processes of introjective
and projective identification, through which the subject assimilates what
is desirable about him- or herself to the self, and exteriorises what the
subject cannot accept about him- or herself outside the self. Therefore,
the gaze functions also in ego-constitutive activities. As Kaja Silverman
explains it:
[T]he gaze also comes into play in a range of other activities whereby the
conventional subject fortifies him- or herself against lack, activities which
are also constitutive of 'difference'. Most classically, the subject procures
for him- or herself a fantasmatic identity, whereby he or she attempts to fill
the void out of which desire proceeds. The mirror stage [the stage at which
the subject (mis)recognises his or her self in his or her mirror image] gives
us, of course, our primary model for conceptualising this particular visual
misrecognition, which denies the alterity and exteriority of the constituting
image.8
Yet despite Lacan's insistence on the significance of intersubjectiv-
ity, he has lost the Other as another subject. The Other as another sub-
ject does not appear anywhere here, merely as an object with an ego-
constitutive function. Furthermore, Lacan has not only lost the Other, he
has lost the subject as well. As Lacanian ego is purely and simply an

6
Ibid., p. 149.
7
Lacan, 1977, p. 310.
8
Silverman, 1996, p. 169.

63
Shame and Desire

imaginary mirage (a subjectivity based on identification with a 'mirror'

image that gives the subject an illusion of a bodily integrity which he or
she in fact does not possess), there is an adoption of the image of the
Other in the place where there should be the self. Since the subject
literally takes (misrecognises) the mirror image for him- or herself, the
Lacanian mirror refers not to the discovery of the other person as a
subject, but to the alienation of subjectivity in the Other.
This means that Lacan regards both the self and the Other as objects,
not conscious subjects like Sartre. This is why, in Lacanian thinking,
there can be no subject-object alteration (the self is always the 'subject'
that uses the Other as an object) and no connection with the world.
Everything in human subjectivity is reduced to unconscious linguistic
structure without intentionality. Even the subject's entrance into the
Symbolic order does not provide him or her with a connection to the
world. For Lacan language 'speaks' the person, and the subject is
merely a "plaything of linguistic structure,"9 whilst for Sartre language
arises with the subject's need to express him- or herself in a world
where there are others.10
Whilst in Sartre's account of intersubjectivity there is an eternal con-
flict, a separation between the subject and the Other, in Lacan there is
an obliteration of boundaries, a confusion of identities between the
subject and the Other. Both Sartre and Lacan's view of intersubjectivity
is quite pessimistic: either the subject cannibalistically consumes the
Other in an attempt to overcome his or her fundamental lack (as in
Lacanian thinking) or the subject aims to possess the freedom of the
Other who has the power of making the subject into an object (as in
Sartrean thinking). Thus whilst Lacan finally maintains an integral
transcendental subjectivity, escaped into a merger with a self-same
Other, Sartre's subject is doomed to unbearable loneliness.11
Is there no solution from this conflict of self with the Other? Is there
no way to dissolve this classic opposition of subject and object, and to
formulate a model of intersubjectivity that would respect the externality
of the Other and at the same time connect with the Other? Even though
in Sartre's account the constitutive function of the Other to the self is to
9
Cannon, 1991, p. 256.
In Search for a Method (Questions de methode) however, Sartre comes closer to the
Lacanian conception of language, defining it as the "objedification of a class, the
reflection of conflicts, latent or declared, and the particular manifestation of alien-
ation." Sartre, 1957, p. 113.
And, either way, there is no way out of shame, as shame always carries a sense of
naked isolation from community, a sense of being before community without being
part of it. The subject is either caught between the state of freedom with anxiety and
shame, or bondage with shame but no anxiety. See Lewis, 1995, pp. 231-2.

64
 Intersubjectivity and Otherness

some extent limited to a threat, Roland Aronson has noted that there are
two opposing impulses in Sartre's philosophy formulated in Being and
Nothingness, "one leading towards the world and the other away from
it."12 Whilst in popular conceptions of Sartre's philosophy the latter
impulse is emphasised, Sartre elsewhere (especially in his Critique of
Dialectical Reason) moves away from it and replaces the idea of self-
sufficient consciousness with the idea of the subject in a socio-material
field that influences the subject's sense of self through a dialectical,
collective-based logic. As Nik Farrell Fox puts it, in Critique of Dialec-
tical Reason,
Sartre [...] moves towards a more dialectical understanding on subject and
object in which the subject is engaged, immersed, and permeable to the
world, both transcendent and material.13
To what extent, then, could we get new insight into cinema specta-
torship through the dialectical logic? In what ways could cinema epito­
mise the intersubjective, dialectical relationship between the self and the
Other in a socio-material field? In what ways does the film spectator
participate in this process? And to what degree is it possible to recognise
and respect the subjectivity of the Other in one's field of vision in the
dialectical process? Sartre's notion of communality is an answer to these
questions insofar as it shows how the process of identification in the
cinematic experience could be dialectical instead of a two-way mirror, a
'common project' that recognises and respects both the freedom of the
self and of the Other, and that allows for authentic relations with the
Other.

Sense of Communality
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre claims that even though the subject
can experience a feeling of 'we', it is an individual feeling rather than
"an intersubjective consciousness and a new being which surpasses and
encircles its parts as a synthetic whole."14 This means that one does not
encounter the other subject in the we-experience, but that the two sub­
jects are united in a purely external way (for instance in interest or a
shared action toward a common goal). Yet in his book Critique of
Dialectical Reason Sartre extends his analysis of intersubjectivity from
dyadic self/Other relationships to triadic social and community relation­
ships. In this book, Sartre writes that the community, like subjectivity, is
dependent on the look of the Other. If I am walking with a person in the

12
Aronson, 1980, p. 89.
13
Fox, 2003, p. 17.
14
Sartre, 1956, p. 536.

65
Shame and Desire

street, and we are looked at by another, we become a community in a

sense of community-as-object. This means that a community is consti-
tuted as such by the subjective awareness of a third party, be it a "mas-
ter, [...] a feudal lord, [...] a bourgeois or a capitalist."15 This means that
whilst dyadic relations are the necessary ground for subjectivity (as
described in Being and Nothingness), "the real relation between men is
necessarily triadic."16 This is so because it is the third party that "makes
reciprocity visible to itself,"17 providing the social context and perspec-
tive which allows for authentic relations with others.
Consider, in this light, the following case of shame. In November
2001, the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA)
showed a Finnish documentary The Idle Ones (Joutilaat, 2001) by
Susanna Helke and Virpi Suutari. The documentary deals with youth
unemployment in Kainuu, the underprivileged area at Finland's eastern
border, at the turn of the millennium, when the economy was thriving in
the rest of Finland. The documentary concentrates on the experiences of
three young men, Hapa, LStko and Bodi, who fill their days with shoot-
ing rats at the refuse dump, cruising around the town centre, drinking,
playing video games, and fishing. The documentary starts with the
portrayal of Hapa, who is still sleeping at noon when his mother comes
to visit. She is now on vacation, so she dusts, cleans the windows, and
changes the curtains, while Hapa is getting up. In the next sequence,
L6tk5 is waking up, and without even getting out of the bed he lights a
cigarette, turns on the television and calls his buddy on the telephone:
"Morning! Are you still sleeping? How long will it take? Come get the
car keys and get me a pizza. I'm starving. Get me a pizza. I'm starving,
and there's no food here."
As the documentary from the very beginning took a rather unvar-
nished dive into the daily lives of these three young men, I, in the audi-
ence, was sinking down in my seat, ashamed that my countrymen were
confirming all the negative cultural stereotypes Finns have to deal with
everywhere. Furthermore, I was ashamed to be associated - through my
nationality - with these negative stereotypes. This is not merely a ques-
tion of identification with the characters either in a positive (introjective)
or negative (projective) sense. On the one hand there is too much of my
own self involved in these boys for me to project them outside of myself
as others. On the other hand there is too much distance between me and
these boys for me to 'use' them as the construction material for my
identity. Rather, this is a question of identification with oneself as a

15
Sartre, 1982, p. 421.
16
Ibid.p. 109.
17
Ibid, p. 116.

66
 lntersubjectivity and Otherness

member of a community (Finns) as seen by the 'Third Other' (other

Europeans). But my moment of shame can also be traced back to the
national-romantic cultural discourse (discussed below) that constructed
the Finnish shame and sense of inferiority before other ('more civi-
lised') Europeans. My identification with Hapa, L6tk6, and Bodi con-
firms that I too am a lazy child of nature that is living day by day and
has a tendency towards drinking, and justifies the cultural discourse
according to which Finland is incompatible with the rest of Europe.
My moment of shame is an example of the way in which the sense of
self and identity are rooted in emotions, and of how they can emerge in
intersubjective relationships. But it is also an example of the way in
which cultural identities are profoundly embedded in emotions, and of
how emotions work to engage individuals with cultural practices, medi-
ating the relationship between the individual and the collective.18 Ac-
cording to Norman K. Denzin, "many of the feelings people feel and the
reasons they give for their feelings are social, structural, cultural, and
relational in origin".19 Furthermore, cultures favour certain emotions,
which may lead to the exaggeration and intensification of the valued
emotion within a culture. Cultural identities are emotionalised identities,
as emotions involve an interweaving of the individual and the social. As
Carolyn Vogler states, cultural identities and discourses are rooted not
only in political, economic, and geopolitical processes in the external
social world, but also in basically psychological processes and strong
feelings.20 Ruth Benedict talks about 'shame cultures' and 'guilt cul-
tures'; Japan, for instance, has historically placed a great deal upon the
feeling of shame, whilst most European cultures regulate socially the
activities of their members through guilt.21
Like guilt, shame is an emotion most inevitably embedded in a
socio-cultural matrix. Shame has a strong cultural salience with an
obvious social function as it motivates norm-conforming behaviour. In
complex ways, shame frames discourses about social relations and
events. Furthermore, both shame and its obverse, pride, are related to the
evaluation of the individuals' actions, feelings, or behaviour.22 The
difference is in the feeling: in pride we feel 'puffed up' whilst in shame
we feel that we are no good, inadequate, unworthy. Shame is a fear of
disgrace, but also an attitude of awe or respect about the values central
to culture. Shame arises out of the tension between how the individual

Ahmed, 2004, p. 42.

Denzin, 1984, p. 54.
Vogler, 2000.
Benedict, 1984.
Lewis, 1995, p. 34.

67
Shame and Desire

wants to be seen and how she or he is.23 Shame, then is very much a
cultural emotion that as a mode of social engagement and intersubjective
'bonding' has a long history, and perhaps nowhere more so than in
Finland. Finnish national identity has in rather specific ways been
shaped in the 19th century around notions of shame, which are well-
understood by the Finns themselves but not always by outsiders. This is
not merely a question of identification, but concerns the status of shame
as a 'frame' in the web of Finnish psychosocial existence as a whole.
At least when compared to other European nationalities, the Finnish
national self-image has been exceptionally belittling, to the point of
'self-racism', at least when compared to other European nationalities.24
In the value-laden comparisons between Finland and other European
nations, made at the mythical and stereotypical level, the Finnish 'back-
woods culture' has been represented as uncultured, uncommunicative,
impolite, culturally and biologically pathological, too straightforward,
and far too serious compared to the civilised and well-behaved urban
cultures of other European nations. As a result, the Finns are often
discontent with their nationality, ashamed of themselves and their fellow
countrymen. There seems to be a tradition of self-stigmatisation in
Finland, resulting form the fact that 'Finnishness' has long been defined
as being inferior to the rest of Europe. Ever since the Finnish National-
Romantic movement in the late 19th century and the civilisation process
of the common people, the Finns have been regarded by the 'European
elite' as separate, mentally colonialised 'others'.25 Or better, the Finns
often feel like they are being regarded through stigmatising, negative
stereotypes supposedly attributed to them by other Europeans. After all,
as Fredric Jameson has noted, what else is cultural identity but "the
ensemble of stigmata one group bears in the eyes of other group (and
vice versa)"26
The Finnish shame discourse, then, is closely related to the fact that
the 'construction' of Finnishness took place from above to below;
Finnishness was seen by the national elite as an opposite of European-

" Wurmser, 1981, p. 76.

24
Apo, 1998.
In his comprehensive research of Finnish psychohistory, Juha Siltala traces Finnish
cultural discourse back to two turning points - religious and political - as moments in
the history of cultural development that rooted shame, shaming, anxiety, humiliation,
and jealousy in Finnish mentality. The religious turning point is situated in the first
half of the 19th century, in the Finnish revivalist movements and in the changes in the
conditions of subjective self-esteem within them. The political turning point is situ-
ated in the late 19th century, in the awakening of national consciousness and the
changes in subjective ideals and needs. Siltala, 1992; 1994; 1999.
Jameson, 1993, p. 33.

68
 Intersubjectivity and Otherness

ness (particularly Swedishness), Finnish language was seen as undevel-

oped, and the Finns themselves were seen as slow and ridiculous, al-
ways a few steps behind other Europeans who have enjoyed a long
tradition of urban culture. As a result, Finns had to be 'tamed'; their
positive attitude of life, their own forms of sociality, sensuality and
sexuality had to be rejected. On the other hand, the Finns were eventu-
ally granted positive traits too, but given the lack of admirable ancestors
and other national heroes, the place of the Finnish 'ego ideal' was
defined by the features of a sports hero and a courageous soldier.
As Satu Apo argues, the characteristics that the Finns themselves at-
tach to Finnishness are not radically different from the characteristics
from Finland's neighbouring countries. Instead, what is typically Fin-
nish is the negative evaluation of these national characteristics - whether
they are imagined or actual. For instance, what the others regard as
Finnish honesty, the Finns themselves regard as Finnish stupidity com-
pared to craftiness that can be found among southern Europeans. If the
others appreciate Finnish industriousness and conscientiousness, the
Finns themselves call it workalcoholism. Modesty and unassuming
behaviour among the Finns is by the Finns generally considered a lack
of civilised manners (but not necessarily by the others). As is the case in
Finnish culture, then, the subject is humiliated and oppressed by a sense
of inferiority because the subject experiences not being regarded in
terms of how he or she wishes to be seen by the others. Finnish shame,
then, is not first and foremost a result of violating the social norms, but a
result of a denial of social respect. Yet as a result of having his or her
'identity claims' disregarded, the subject may come to realise that his or
her sense of self is constitutively dependent on the acknowledgements
of others. This realisation may become a political motive for a struggle
for approval.27
This was (and is) the cultural discourse within the Finnish commu-
nity that both described and prescribed how its members should engage
with it, and what roles they should envisage for themselves. These kinds
of subject positions deliberately obscure the diversity of the people, as
well as their actual experiences, in favour of constructing an idealised
model of a 'citizen'. It is therefore interesting to investigate how this
culture, with its strong reliance on shame in order to police and disci-

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for instance, argues that shame can have this kind of
transformational political power. Sedgwick, 2003. Yet, as Kathleen Woodward ar-
gues, it is not the shame by itself that may carry that power, although it may serve as
a catalyst for change. Furthermore, she argues that not all shame can be transforma-
tional, for instance the modes of enclosed, traumatic shame that loops back upon it-
self as depicted in Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye (1970). Woodward, 2000,
p. 227.

69
Shame and Desire

pline, but also to subjectify its communal life has developed a special
kind of intersubjectivity, and how its artists and filmmakers have re­
sponded to the new ways of looking and seeing in order to produce more
permissive modes of subjectivity, as will be done in the following
chapters.

Triadic Communality
But the 'Finnish shame' that I am describing also reveals the dialec­
tical nature of human relations: the subject identifies with the commu­
nity as well as with the Third Other outside of the community. This
means that even though the community is dialectically opposed to the
Other, it is nevertheless dependent upon that Other. Furthermore, this
Third Other provides the basis for the structure of interiority for the
community: in the dialectical process whereby the community modifies
its bonds in response to the Other: "the bond of exteriority [...] is itself
interiorised by practical multiplicities."28 This means that the communal
individual internalises the "adopted inertia, function, power, rights and
duties, structure, violence and fraternity" of the group and actualises
these new reciprocal relations as "his new being, his sociality."29 Our
subjectivity is then defined by our historical situation, and our relations
with others are socially conditioned; indeed, as Fredric Jameson notes,
all action takes place against a background of society, and "human life
is, in its very structure, collective rather than individualistic."30 Further­
more, these internalised social relations are often understood in visual
terms; we define our subjectivity according to how we are being seen by
the Other in a certain social situation. As Hazel Barnes puts it:
Our only genuine sense of community comes in the form of an Us-object
when we perceive ourselves along with other forming the object of the gaze
of an Other. Our attempt to feel ourselves one with all of the mankind ne­
cessitates the presence of a Third who looks at us collectively but upon
which no outside gaze may be directed.31
According to Thomas Elsaesser, the films of Rainer Werner Fass-
binder in particular are centred on intersubjective relationships and the
question of social identity through a heavy investment in visuality,

Sartre, 1982, p. 57. Sartre's term for this kind of community is the 'fused group'. The
fused group is based on the positive forms of reciprocity and collectivity unlike the
'institutional group' that is based on conflict and 'vertical otherness'.
Sartre, 1956, p. 632.
Jameson, 1971, p. 207.
Barnes in Sartre, 1956, p. xxxviii.

70
 Intersubjectivity and Otherness

especially in the exchange of looks and the problem of voyeur-

ism/exhibitionism:
One is tempted to say that in Fassbinder's films all human relations, all bod-
ily contact, all power structures and social hierarchies, all forms of commu-
nication and action manifest themselves and ultimately regulate themselves
along the single axis of seeing and being seen.32
In his analysis of Fassbinder's AH - Fear Eats the Soul {Angst essen
Seele auf, 1974), Elsaesser suggests that the behaviour of the protago-
nists, AH and Emmi, is defined by how they wish to appear in the eyes
of others:
They play the roles with such deadly seriousness because it is the only way
they know to impose an identity on aimless, impermanent lives. [...] They
discover that they cannot exist without being seen by others, for when they
are alone, their own mutually sustaining gaze is not enough to confer or con-
firm a sense of identity.33
This means that the field of vision presents itself to the Arab-German
couple as a contradiction. On the one hand they cannot be seen together,
because there exists no social space in which they would not be objects
of aggressive, hostile, disapproving looks. On the other hand they
cannot exist without being seen by others - the social eye - because
being seen by others means possessing an identity in the field of vision,
the social world to which they want to belong. Any act of being seen is
thus communal and - since it requires recognition by another - neces-
sary in order to 'belong' and to have a subjectivity. It is precisely being
seen breaking the rules that makes somebody a rebel, but this is first and
foremost so to the rebel him- or herself. This is why the disapproving
looks discounted by Ali and Emmi confirm "what they already know:
that they are 'different' and not ashamed of it. Their sense of identity is
supported by a 'negative' look."34 This means that in order to exist, one
has to be perceived, and in order to be perceived, one has to be an
image, a recognisable representation in the socially conditioned field of
vision.
According to Elsaesser, most of Fassbinder's films can be seen illus-
trating the way in which subjectivity is formed by specific social rela-

" Elsaesser, 1986, pp. 539-40.

33
Ibid,p. 542.
34
Ibid, p. 65. In the biography of Jean Genet, Sartre describes in a similar manner the
way in which Genet achieved identity, after being seen in the act of stealing. After
hearing his whole home village chanting the words "You're a thief," Genet decided
to be the thief they said he was, to be what crime made of him. By storing the Look
(and the voice) of the Other in his consciousness Genet becomes what he is being
seen as. This makes Sartre conclude that "I is another." Sartre, 1952, p. 138.

71
Shame and Desire

tions in the field of vision that is organised by the gaze. Fassbinder's

protagonists are characterised by their desire to attract someone to play
the spectator who would confirm them as subjects. In fact, Elsaesser
goes so far as to claim that, in the films of Fassbinder, the spectators are
inscribed as voyeurs, since the characters "are so manifestly exhibition-
ist."35 The spectators, then, are invited to enter into the film as the
bearers of the gaze, through primary identification (the infant's feeling
of oneness with the mother before he or she has discovered the other-
ness of objects) with the camera. Fassbinder's cinema, then, is
a cinema in which all possible subject matter seems to suffer the movement
between fascination and exhibitionism, of who controls, contains, places
whom through the gaze or the willingness to become the object of the gaze.
It is as if all secondary identifications were collapsed into primary identifi-
cation, and the act of seeing itself the centre of the narrative.6
I agree with Elsaesser insofar as subjectivity and belonging are de-
pendent on the social look, but I have a problem with his claim that the
manner in which the spectator experiences the characters' interaction
within a social reality would be conditioned by primary identification
with the camera, thereby adopting the role of the gaze as a social eye
(either in its approving or disapproving mode). By comparison, what
Sartre shows us is that the question of social identity in an intersubjec-
tive, visual field is dependent on the subject's identification with the
Other as well as with the Third Other outside the social community that
the subject and the Other have formed. In this structure, both the specta-
tor and the film character are conditioned by an intersubjective triad, and
the process of identification is three-dimensional. Furthermore, this kind
of communal identification should not be regarded in ontological-
individual terms, as it is produced by a dialectical relation between an
(oppressive) Third Other (be it the 'European presence' or the system-
atic nature of contemporary global capitalism) and the progressive
integration of subjects into a totality which comes to be the (oppressed)
group (Arabs, Finns, the unemployed). In this relation, the Other is no
longer a threat; no longer the only foundation for social existence, but a
'mediating' Other who potentially provides an affirmation for the
subject's existence without becoming an objectifying, transcendent
Other.
This model is intriguingly similar to psychoanalytic criticisms of
Metz's theory of primary identification: it is not that the subject first has
to identify with some transcendent, all-seeing eye in order to be able to

35
Elsaesser, 1986, p. 542.
36
/£/</., p. 540.

72
 lntersubjectivity and Otherness

recognise him- or herself as an image within a symbolic field. Rather,

the subject first has to identify with him- or herself in order to become
conscious of him- or herself as seen by the Other.37 As Kaja Silverman
writes in her The Threshold of the Visible World: "[T]he subject can
only successfully misrecognise him- or herself within that image or
cluster of images through which he or she is culturally apprehended."38
What is determinative for the social subject is thus not how the subject
sees or would like to see him- or herself, but how the subject apprehends
the operation of the gaze of the Other(A) upon him- or herself in the
field of vision. This structure is epitomised in the ending of the first,
highly praised Dogma 95 film Celebration {Dogme #1 -Festen, 1998),
directed by Thomas Vinterberg, where the paedophile father (Henning
Moritzen) asks forgiveness from his family and friends, knowing he will
never see any of them again. The self (the spectator) identifies here with
the Other (the father), negatively exposed before the Third Other (the
family), and can thereby relate to his shame (and sorrow) even when he
or she condemns the father's actions. If identification were a two-way,
instead of a three-way process, an emotional response to a character this
unpleasant would be impossible indeed.

Idiotic Communities
The triadic structure of identification described above is the driving
force in the second (less acclaimed than the first) Dogma 95 film as
well, namely in Lars von Trier's The Idiots {Dogme #2 - Idioterne,
1998). In this film, a group of middle-class people attempt to find their
'inner idiot' in order to set themselves against materialistic society. In
other words, the film deals with a concept of identity that is dependent
on identification with the Other as well as with the Third Other outside
the group that the subject and the Other have formed. By 'othering
themselves' (marginalising themselves in the society by identifying with
its others) 'the idiots' strive to form an alternative 'symbolic home' or

In fact, Metz's thesis of primary cinematic identification has already been rejected on
the grounds that Lacan's theory of the mirror stage does not support it. In Lacan's
thinking, primary identification means in particular the child's identification with the
image in the mirror stage. The child first has to identify with his or her own (mirror)
image; and from this first identification the child becomes conscious of him- or her-
self as being seen by the others, and this is the precondition for all the following
identifications through which subjectivity is being constituted in the symbolic order.
It is only through an identification with its own image from the outside point of view
that the subject recognises and 'identifies with' the gaze, after which the symbolic
starts to function as a signifying practice in the subject's psychic life. See, for in-
stance, Cowie, 1991 and Wright, 1999.
38
Silverman, 1996, p. 18.

73
Shame and Desire

indeed an 'imagined community' in the sense of Benedict Anderson.

The triadic relation between the self, the Other, and the Third Other is
established from the very beginning. The story evolves around a
woman, Karen (Bodil Jorgensen), who is on the run after the tragic
death of her little son. Instead of attending the funeral, she has lunch in
an expensive restaurant where she is insulted by the waiter: "Can we
afford a mineral water? Or shall we use the tap?" Elsewhere in the
restaurant sits a group of seemingly mentally disabled people that call
themselves 'the idiots'. A connection between Karen, 'the idiots' and
the waiter/other patrons in the restaurant is made visible through succes-
sive, triangular shot-reverse-shots which throughout the film imply a
triadic structure of the self, the Other, and the Third Other. 'The idiots'
cause a commotion and become objects of disapproving looks by the
other customers (the social eye). Karen, whose identity in the social
field is disturbed by the death of her son, is drawn to the otherness that
'the idiots' represent. As a result, she joins their mental game of idiot-
ism which soon becomes for her a question of negotiating identity
within this intersubjective triad.
The narrative unfolds within the negotiations and conflicts between
the self, the Other, and the Third Other in different social situations. It is
no accident that 'the idiots' fake mental disability very much in public
(and not, for instance, only privately): in restaurants, public swimming
pools, and neighbouring businesses. They need to be seen by the social
community outside of which they have placed themselves in order to be
able to withdraw themselves from it. In the film, two types of triadic
relations can be found: ones that occur within the group and others that
occur in the interactions between the group and the society. Most often
(especially in the beginning of the film), Karen represents here the self
that simultaneously identifies both with the Other ('the idiots') and the
Third Other (the 'normal' people). She has trouble identifying fully with
either position as she feels that she is not accepted in the socially condi-
tioned field of vision (she has abandoned her family at a moment of
crisis), but she cannot live without its support either. She is drawn to
'the idiots' but suffers from guilt because she feels that they are poking
fun at people that are truly mentally handicapped. Another central figure
in the film is Stoffer (Jens Albinus), the self-proclaimed leader of the
group. He is the one that negotiates both the inner and the outer conflicts
of the group. These conflicts manifest themselves as the exchange of
looks within the intersubjective triad, for instance in the scene where
Stoffer's uncle Svend (Erik Wedersoe) visits the community. The scene
is composed of a series of shots where a hand-held camera moves
between Stoffer, Svend and 'the idiots' "doing the garden" with a
vacuum cleaner and walking around naked. The camera moves triangu-

74
 Intersubjectivity and Otherness

larly, like a pendulum that organises the conflict of seeing and being
seen within the intersubjective triad. In this conflict, Stoffer now has to
occupy the position of the self that seeks affirmation for his existence
from the Other (he is one of 'the idiots'), but that needs to be supported
by the look of the Third Other as well (he is financially dependent on his
uncle).
In the film The Idiots, the confirmation of subjectivity through inter-
subjective triad is doomed to fail. The conflict between their self-
acquired otherness and the expectations of the social field becomes too
hard to bear for most members of the group. The meeting of 'the idiots9
with a group of really mentally handicapped people is the first moment
of subjective crisis in the film. This turns the triadic relations upside
down: the group cannot identify with themselves as 'idiots' (the Others)
anymore. Instead, they are now forced to occupy the position of the
Third Other and, as a result, lose their sense of community that had been
defined against it. After having been denied the identification with the
Other, the members of the group now see themselves being seen from an
unfavourable point of view. This is the cultural apprehension of the self
that brings them closer to the image they so desperately want to escape
from. But more importantly, this 'intrusion' of an actual group of men-
tally disabled people is a confronting moment for the spectators as well,
as it forces them to re-evaluate their own engagement with the film. (It
is also not surprising that several critics have expressed disapproval of
Von Trier 'exploitative' usage of really mentally disabled people in the
cast.)
Paradoxically, for Karen, this instant becomes the moment of finding
an inner idiot within herself. She becomes the Other through which the
group can now find a temporary reaffirmation for its existence outside
of the established order: the members of the group can now identify
with her instead of with the social eye outside the group. But at the same
time the triadic conflicts become more violent and extreme, as the Third
Other threatens to swallow the self completely. The more 'the idiots'
seek to escape the Third Other, the more desperate and extreme forms
their identification with the Other take. The challenge now becomes to
be 'an idiot' in another context where the Third Other really matters on
a personal level. This is a challenge only Karen is capable of facing. The
others cannot continue possessing an alternative identity outside the
social world where they belong, and, as a result, the group falls apart.
The film ends with Karen and Susanne (Anne Louise Hassing) visiting
Karen's family for the first time after her disappearance before her son's
funeral. She puts on a performance of idiotism in action in front of her
family and Susanne, only to receive a sharp blow to the face by her
husband. Susanne, here, is the observer, the self that is negotiating

75
Shame and Desire

between the Other and the Third Other. She sees Karen as she would
like to see herself, but is unable as she cannot escape the operation of
the social eye upon herself in the field of vision. This, again, manifests
itself visually in the organisation of the POV shots, close-ups and the
reaction shots into a triangular space. Also the pendulum-like movement
of the camera establishes an intersubjective triad between Karen, her
family, and Susanne. Only Susanne can observe the drama of seeing and
being seen that Karen's husband violently disrupts, since only she can
apprehend Karen's idiotism simultaneously from the position of the self,
the Other, and the Third Other. Her character, therefore, epitomises the
way in which the film spectator too could be conditioned by the inter­
subjective triad, and how the process of identification often is a three-
way instead of a two-way process. Furthermore, it is a process where the
intersubjective tensions between the self, the Other, and the Third Other
can become visible. The abrupt ending seems to propose that as soon as
one loses one's sense of belonging within a visual field, there is no point
of return, but the film provides no answers to the question of what
happens to the subject when this occurs.

Intersubjectivity and Solidarity

As stated above, the film could invite the spectator into a dialectical
process, where the spectator identifies with the Other (as seen by the
Third Other) as well as with the Third Other (as the carrier of the social
look). In this model, it is both the spectator and the character that are
under the regime of the social eye, in an intersubjective relationship
with each other. So instead of identifying with some transcendental
camera as the privileged subject of the look in the film The Idiots, the
spectator identifies with 'the idiots' (the Other as being seen) as well as
with the disapproving patrons in the restaurant, visitors at the swimming
pool and the potential buyers of the house where the community resides
(the look of the Third Other). In the context of national cinema, the film
also needs to invite the spectator into this kind of dialectical process in
order to address the spectator as a historical subject. This is an important
aspect in the concept of intersubjectivity which becomes visible in the
emotion of shame: the capacity of the subject to shift his or her view­
point 'outside' him- or herself in a specific cultural context.
In this light, let us consider Aki KaurismSki's Drifting Clouds
(Kauas pilvet karkaavat, 1996). Drifting Clouds tells about Ilona (Kati
Uotinen) and Lauri (Kari VMnanen), a happily married Finnish couple,
whose life and happiness take a turn as they both lose their jobs in the
dark years of recession in the Finland of the 1990s. The narrative struc­
ture of Drifting Clouds resembles an Elizabethan tragedy a la Christo­
pher Marlowe, where a courageous and ambitious subject is forced to
76
 Intersubjectivity and Otherness

struggle against greater forces, and where the narrative structure is not
completely unilinear and causally determined, but which follows the
principle of a chronicle. Relatively separate sequences follow each other
in a chronological order: Ilona and Lauri are living happily together -
Lauri loses his job - Lauri searches for work - Ilona loses her job -
Ilona searches for work - Lauri gets work - Lauri loses his job - the idle
life - Ilona gets work - Ilona loses her job - Lauri is assaulted and
disappears for a week - Ilona decides to set up her own restaurant -
Ilona does not get a bank loan - Lauri gambles all the money that is left
- Ilona and Lauri receive an eviction notice - Ilona meets Mrs. Sjdholm
- Ilona sets up the restaurant. The hope and despair alternate, evoking
compassion and also pity in the spectator. And it is through this emotion
of pity that the moment of triadic intersubjectivity sets in. Unlike com-
passion, which signifies feeling with the Other in a manner of "emo-
tional telepathy" as Milan Kundera has described it,39 pity not only
signifies feeling sad about the Other's bad luck, but may involve looking
down upon the pitied. Pity, then, is a sign of lack of social value and of
being vulnerable to shame, and both the person who pities and the
person pitied know this - nobody wants to be pitied. In pity the subject
identifies both with the Other and with the Third Other, who refuses to
respond to the Other's identity claims. This is followed by the emotion
of shame, which, again, is the result of seeing oneself being seen by the
Other but now through the process of identification with the Other. The
subject imagines the shame that he or she would feel in a situation
where he or she is being looked down upon.
However, the spectator's emotional reaction demands certain cultural
knowledge about the importance of work for the Finnish subject. This
does not mean that, say, an African or a Latin-American spectator could
not understand the 'message' of the film. Neither does this mean that my
(Finnish) reading of the film is the only accurate one. For instance,
Drifting Clouds could be seen as 'cinema of irony'; a definition that
Elsaesser has used to characterise the modernist European cinema of the
1960s and the 1970s, but that could also be seen characterising the films
of postmodern European directors like Pedro Almodovar, Michael
Haneke, and Lars von Trier. According to Elsaesser, the cinema of irony
is cinema that uses self-reflective attitude and emotional detachment as
techniques to comment on and parody itself.40 Postmodern cinema of
irony takes a step further insofar as the films of this kind often use
modernist techniques of detachment and self-reflection, while they
simultaneously have strong emotional undercurrents. The 'Brechtian

39
Kundera, 1984, p. 20.
40
Elsaesser, 1973.

77
Shame and Desire

paradox' in Haneke's Funny Games is a textbook example of this:

through empathy, the spectators occupy the same emotional level as the
tortured family in the film, while at the meta-narrative level (through
Brechtian techniques) they are invited to share the point of view of the
psychopathic killers. By combining elements of Brechtian distanciation
with elements that encourage identification with and empathy towards
the protagonists, Funny Games appears to be more efficient both in its
emotional impact and in its ethical pursuit than what it would have been
had it stuck to only one of the tactics.41
Drifting Clouds is even more complicated than this. It has ironic sen-
sibility insofar as it is emotionally detaching in its avoidance of psycho-
logical realism. Both the tragicomic and the melodramatic elements in
the film are portrayed with the same self-reflective and laconic neutral-
ity that reminds the spectator of the artificial nature of the film. Kauris-
maki's protagonists often articulate with an over-restrained and formal
manner, which adds to the general atmosphere of the film an absurd
trait, and the cinematography is close to immobile, except for a few,
nearly invisible pans and zooms. The emphasis lies in the carefully
chosen camera angles, lighting and setting which results in stylised and
in its simplicity often breathtakingly beautiful mise-en-scene. All this
draws the spectator's attention to the composition of the film, and it
would seem that the film appeals to the spectator at the level of aesthet-
ics rather than on the level of identification.
Nevertheless, despite of the ironic elements in the film, the misfor-
tunes of Kaurismaki's protagonists are treated with empathy and authen-
ticity. Furthermore, a large part of the spectator's emotional reaction to
the film depends on specific cultural knowledge. There are emotional
signs and clues in the film that say something only to people who share
the same cultural memory. Particular cultural symbols appeal to particu-
lar individuals not because people's psyches resonate with some cultural
meanings but because they can personally employ these symbols with
their own psychobiographically particularised cultural meanings. Cul-
tural symbols operate on the intersubjective level, simultaneously on the
collective and the individual plane; neither can be reduced to the other.
The concept of intersubjectivity pays attention to these 'macro-
phenomena' that are related to specific cultural institutions, languages,
and collective structures that often become visible in the emotion of
shame. This is why the way in which Kaurism&ki deals with Finnish
shame cannot be discussed in isolation from the Finnish culture espe-
cially if we accept the assumption that shame arises through an intersub-
jective encounter in a specific social context. The way in which Drifting

For an extended argument on this point, see Laine, 2004.

78
 Intersubjectivity and Otherness

Clouds deals with shame is closely connected to a Finnish understanding

of shame caused by unemployment. The reason for this is that Finnish
identity is primarily based on work. Given the lack of admirable ances-
tors and other national heroes, the place of the 'ego ideal' has been
defined by the features of an honest, hard-working subject. Whilst
Sigmund Freud defined a normal individual as one who is able to love
and to work, in Finnish culture normalcy is only defined through one's
ability to work. And indeed, in Drifting Clouds the basis for one's sub-
jectivity is one's work; it is not one's 'independent' features, but work
through which the subject is accepted as a member of the collective. For
a Finn, work signifies not only bare necessity but also acceptance by
one's environment. If a Finn fails to create an acceptable interaction
with his or her environment, he or she feels - deeply ashamed - that for
him or her there is no place in the world. According to the Finnish
sociologist Pekka Ylostalo and the psycho-historian Juha Siltala, it is
through work that the Finnish subject escapes shame, gains control of
his or her own life, and claims the right to existence. Furthermore,
through work the Finnish subject takes under his or her control not only
the hostile outside world, but also his or her personal emotions that he or
she finds hard to deal with.42
This is why losing their work becomes a catastrophe for Lauri and
Ilona in the film, a catastrophe that they are so ashamed of that they
cannot admit it even to themselves. The denial of shame is so extreme
that Lauri, for instance, becomes voluntarily marginalised by cutting all
ties with society. He refuses to apply for unemployment benefit ("I
won't live with unemployment benefits, I am 7") and as he loses all hope
of finding a new job, he shuts himself up completely in their apartment
and starts spending his days playing solitaire and solving crossword
puzzles. Other characters in the film deal with shame by developing a
'false pride' in their marginality. This is why, in Finnish style, they take
their marginality to the extreme, and many of them end up as alcoholics
- according to Siltala, a solution to a crisis for a Finn is to escape either
into work or into alcohol.43

42
Ylostalo, 1986; Siltala, 1994.
The reasons for why this should be so are several. In Finnish culture, alcohol is, for
instance, an instrument of (momentary) equalisation of the disparities in social and
communal life. Being intoxicated is a sign of being a man who could handle his own
affairs. Alcohol is also an expression of a male-bonding type of solidarity (the pres-
tige and social value of alcohol is very much tied to masculine honour). Or the reason
can be a simple counter reaction to the traditional alcohol culture in Finland that is
very much in harmony with the social structure (the social right to consume alcohol
is earned through labour). See, for instance, Apo, 2002.

79
Shame and Desire

The emotion of shame is almost intolerable for Ilona and Lauri, even
though they become unemployed through no fault of their own. It is the
social life that has thrown them into a new situation which they interpret
and are forced to act upon. Restaurant Dubrovnik, in which Ilona works
as a maitre d\ is driven to bankruptcy by the bank; and Lauri, a tram
driver, is forced to leave his job as tramlines are being closed. It seems
as if fate itself is putting them to shame and dragging them into despair
as they also lack the confidence to believe that their circumstances
eventually will change. The scene in which Lauri loses his job illustrates
their sense of helplessness before their fate. Lauri hears that some of the
tram drivers have to leave their job, but the decision is being made by
choosing a card. Thus, it does not matter how well or badly Lauri has
done his job, he becomes unemployed because he picks up a low card
from the pack, because he has bad luck, because it is his fate. The
spectator sees a close up of his hand as he turns the bad card into view,
followed by a close up of his seemingly expressionless face. But a kind
of 'Kuleshov effect' (it is not a real one as there is an establishing shot
present, but the impact is similar) of the shots makes the spectator share
Lauri's awareness of the meaning of his new situation. In one second,
everything has changed; he has become an unemployed person. Fur-
thermore, the spectator comes to understand Lauri's awareness and
shame of how he is being seen from now on: a marginalised figure, a
loser, the one with the bad cards - even though he has had no control
over his fate. It seems like the whole world is against him and his self-
respect.
From the moment Ilona and Lauri lose their jobs their life becomes a
struggle for winning back their subjectivity, their identity as a working
person. As they have lost their subjectivity they have become just a
name and a number in the wheels of bureaucracy, at the mercy of the
unemployment office and the bank. Furthermore, their struggle is the
desire to take part in the community again, and to be seen as members of
the community, without having to feel shame. In this desire Lauri
suffers the most serious setback as he gets beaten up by Ilona's dubious
employer and his sinister friends. After this incident Lauri feels that he
has lost face so completely that he has to avoid being seen by disappear-
ing 'out of the picture' for a week.
Finally Ilona and Lauri are left with only two options: to abandon all
hope or to become self-employed. As the owner of the former Dubrov-
nik is willing to finance their dreams, Ilona and Lauri decide to set up
their own restaurant: 'Restaurant Work'. They bring back all the old
employees from Dubrovnik - some of whom first have to come via the
sanatorium for the alcoholics - and start the business. The opening day
becomes the turning point of their lives, the moment which determines

80
 Inter subjectivity and Otherness

which direction their lives will take. The silent, immobile shots of the
staff as they are waiting for the first customers render the emotions of
anticipation and fear for failure and shame almost palpable for the
spectator. When the restaurant in the end is full of customers, it is a big
moment of relief that in one stroke restores Ilona and Lauri's sense of
self-esteem and subjectivity. Yet something has changed in comparison
to the past. Whilst their subjectivity previously was conditioned by the
demands of society - which let them down - and the style of living
which expects everybody to contribute to economic growth, they have
now themselves created the conditions for their subjectivity, through
solidarity between the marginalised.
The spectator participates in Ilona and Lauri's attempt to win back
their sense of self-esteem through a process of identification that is
based on an intersubjective triad. The spectator identifies both with
Ilona and Lauri (the Other as seen by the Third Other) and the social eye
(the Third Other as the bearer of the look). This triadic model constantly
recurs at the visual level of the film: in the beginning of the film the
approving look zooms into the close up of Ilona's pleased face. The look
is approving, as it is clear that Ilona in her work is a responsible person
who with the same efficiency takes care both of the customers and the
emergency situations in the kitchen. A same kind of zoom into a close
up of the face takes place when Lauri picks up a three of clubs from the
pack of cards offered him by the director of the tram line, but in this
case the social look is disapproving. A disapproving look is implied also
after the elliptical montage sequence that shows Ilona looking for a job
in different restaurants and coffee bars: the sequence ends with a close
up of Ilona in the rainy street, Tchaikovsky's Pathetique on the sound-
track, camera zooming out.
In the final image, Ilona and Lauri are looking together at the sky in
a medium close-up, now independent from the approving or disapprov-
ing look of the Third Other (there is no zoom that would imply the
presence of such look). It would be tempting to claim that the use of
zoom would invite the spectator to a primary identification with the
camera, the function of the camera being to act as a look of the Third
Other. Yet the spectator does not identify with the camera as the look of
the Third Other, but the fixed point of identification both with the Other
as the Third Other is in the faces of the protagonists. The face is the site
of shame, and the face is also the 'space' in which the subject can
identify with the Other as well as the Third Other.44

44
See, for instance, Nathanson, 1987, p. 30: "Shame operates at the locus of the zone of
perceptual-expressive interaction, which is defined in terms of the face and facial
interaction." Michael Lewis takes a similar stance: "Because the face is the seat of

81
Shame and Desire

In this example it can clearly be seen how the subject constitutes

him- or herself as a part of the community through identifying with the
Other (other unemployed) under the determining look of the Third Other
(the social eye). Ilona and Lauri see themselves as losers, because they
know how the unemployed are seen in the Finnish society; they identify
both with the community of the unemployed and with the Other outside
the community. Yet this process is not limited to the characters within
the film: the spectator participates in it also by identifying with Ilona
and Lauri as well as with the Third Other: the spectator's emotional
response (shame and pity) is based on imagining being looked upon by
the Other in a social situation. This process of identification is not
cannibalistic, but triadic, and it presumes the separateness of the Other.
Here, shame reveals the intersubjective structure of social existence, and
especially the Other's impact on the self within a community. The
shame revolves around the question of how the subject would like to be
and appear (the so-called ego ideal in psychoanalytic language), of how
the subject actually is being seen by the Other, and of what effect the
Other has on the subject's sense of self. Consequently it could be said
that shame reveals that all subjects exist in a world with other subjects,
within a community with established values and norms of behaviour,
thinking, and feeling. According to Sartre, shame demonstrates that
human life is intersubjective - without a relationship to the Other there
would be no shame - but this relationship between the subject and the
Other does not have to be based on a struggle over the control of the
look, but it can be based on communality where the subject and the
Other look together in the same direction.
Drifting Clouds thus evokes an emotional response in its spectators
by inviting them to identify both with the Other and the Third Other, at
the same time as the object and the subject of the look: the spectators
and the protagonists in their shame (caused by unemployment and the
loss of human dignity) are the same in the eyes of the 'onlooker'. Yet
this ontological solidarity does not remain bound to the look of the
Third Other (although in the beginning it comes to being against this
Third Other). Eventually the members of the newly formed community
will all become 'thirds', serving as unifiers and supporters of each other.
Now the community carries its own source of being within itself as its
members become both observers and participants at the same time.45
This kind of community also protects the subject (from shame) by

one's identity, and one wishes to conceal [one's face] during shame, the face be-
comes the locus of the shame." Lewis, 1995, p. 23.
See also Jameson, 1971, p. 253: "We both feel the group as something larger than
ourselves which we are able to observe in the others from without and at the same
time [...] we feel ourselves so observed as making up the group in question."

82
 lntersubjectivity and Otherness

joining him or her with others similarly committed, thereby moving the
subject from the unbearable loneliness of the self absorbed with itself to
the freedom of a community of shared values. In Drifting Clouds - as in
Sartre's thinking - communality thus manifests itself also in a positive
way, in a solidarity that aims at social change, and the viewing position
it invites its spectators is supporting, not objectifying. In this model of
communality no subject has to give up his or her self-determination for
the group, since his or her individual desire coincides with the desire of
the group, and since the subject finds an affirmation for his or her action
in the actions of others: "everyone continued to see himself in the Other,
but saw himself there as himself."46

46
Sartre, 1982, p. 354.

83
 CHAPTER 3

An Appetite for Alterity

Otherness Within
We have already seen that in order to exist, one has to be perceived,
and in order to be perceived, one has to be an image, a recognisable
representation (positive or negative, 'similar' or 'different') in the
socially conditioned field of vision. But what about the subjects who are
denied recognition in a community, who do not possess an identity in
the visual field in the sense that they should, according to the prevailing
conventions, not be seen at all, not even as 'different'? As Kathleen
Woodward has shown in her analysis of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
(1970), not being seen, not being acknowledged as a member of the
community, produces shame just as does Sartrean voyeur's being seen
discussed in chapter one. But whereas in Sartre's example this is merely
a matter of losing one's status as a subject, in Morrison's novel it be­
comes a matter of what a black subject cannot become in white Amer­
ica.1
The work of the Finnish photographer Pekka Turunen evokes this
question by creating an asymmetry and instability of identification in his
viewers. Turunen's images elicit a crisis of identification in the viewers
by addressing them with images of themselves as non-idealised subjects.
This non-idealised subjectivity, however, extends beyond the concept of
Other, because it is a denied and forgotten subjectivity; an otherness
within the self. Turunen's collection Against the Wall (1995) portrays
people from Northern Karelia in Eastern Finland, close to the Russian
border. Northern Karelia is one of the poorest regions in Finland and the
unemployment levels are high. Houses there - half of which are derelict
- are scattered at long intervals beside empty roads, in the shadow of a
tamed and subdued nature:
We live in an unplanned area, which is like a fallen-down multi-storey
block. In one village there is about the same number of inhabitants as in a
normal-sized suburban multi-storey block, but the houses are spread out

Woodward, 2000, p. 222.

85
Shame and Desire

higgledy-piggledy throughout the forest. Our farm was spread out between a
rocky outcrop and a bend in the river.2
The Northern Karelian people in Turunen's photographs are por-
trayed 'against the wall' of a radical change of lifestyle - of a shift from
traditional local culture to being part of an international market. Home-
made furniture and wooden houses built by one's own hands are gradu-
ally being replaced by brick houses and industrial products. But aside
from showing this transformation, the photographs bespeak a contradic-
tion between the lifestyle mediated by television, cinema, or periodicals,
and the lifestyle of the portrayed people. This contradiction can be
traced back to the same cultural-historical discourse of Finnish national-
romanticism from the 19th century onwards discussed above, where the
ideal image of a 'Finn' was presented by the cultural elite from the
outside, with the other European people as model. Everything about
Finnish culture that was not seen in an idealising light by the elite was
seen as a threat to the 'new' Finnish subjectivity, and was therefore
placed outside as the Other. Unfortunately enough, it was often every-
thing 'typically Finnish' that had to be excluded, which led to the sense
of national inferiority and apologetic shame:
All the features unsuitable for a world citizen have been projected onto the
image of a yokel [= a typical Finn]: asociality, the tendency to with-
draw, boasting, violence, self-destruction, rough materialism and non-
sensuousness, inability to indulge in small talk and to express and to recog-
nise deeper emotions. In this enlightened discussion about [a Finn] one can
trace back the concern of the national revivalists in the 19th century that the
Finno-Ugrians would not after all be able to combine an organised social
life and individual liberty in a way proper to a civilised European nation.3
The non-idealised others that become such a threat to the Finnish
subjectivity were thus the Finns themselves. The Finns learned to see
themselves as the Other, but they also learned to deny their sense of
otherness, to project it outside of the self - and this is why the Finnish
shame is restrained at the level of subjectivity and excluded from public
discourse. Since for a Finn the cultural imaginary is imbued with the
desire not to be Finnish, images that question the cultural ideal are not
framed in the field of vision.
It is this negative identification with the community that Pekka
Turunen's Against the Wall is playing with. Take for instance the
photograph of two newlyweds (figure 7). The married couple is por-
trayed having their wedding picture taken. When the photograph is

2
Turunen, 1995, p. 10.
3
Siltala, 1994, p. 462, quote translated by TL.

86
 An Appetitefor Atterity

'snapped' the couple is just on a break from the 'official' shooting

session or they are just preparing themselves for it- In the picture all the
usual props can be seen: the white cloth on the studio floor, the
flashlight on the left of the image. The bride is inhaling the smoke from
her cigarette - which makes the viewer (hink about everything else but
the sweetness of the bride - the expressions are informal and even tfte
studio seems to be just an old factory hall, And who is the man in the
picture next to the wedding couple in his casual working clothes? A
friend of the couple perhaps — but surely in those clothes he is not going
to participate in the wedding reception!? Or is he the man who is taking
the wedding picture?

Figure?: Vckc Aalto, Jaan* Aalto ja Esa lmmonea,

Tinuils Tohmajarvi 199Z. Courtesy of Pekk* Toruneu

87
Shame and Desire

This obvious discrepancy between the newlyweds - clearly indicated

by their clothes - and the context in which they are portrayed makes the
viewer imagine the actual wedding picture and its difference from this
image. Usually wedding pictures are conventional, and their function is
to confirm the new social status of the wedding couple in the cultural
network in which they live. However, the discrepancy between this
image and the 'official' wedding picture - which thus exists only in the
viewer's imagination, evoked by this image - questions the conven-
tional ftinction of the 'actual' wedding picture, which frames the couple
in the field of vision. The image does not live up to any traditional,
romantic expectations of weddings (as the famous Sinatra line goes, "the
faint aroma of performing seals") and furthermore it clearly shows that
the photo shoot is staged, 'false,'4 which indicates that the couple does
not really belong to the field of vision. The couple is trying to be some-
thing else than what they 'really' are, something they might have seen in
the media, but they do not seem to realise that 'there is something wrong
with the picture'. But still they demand to be recognised, acknowledged,
framed and seen: both of them are looking at the camera smiling, not
ashamed of the lack of sense of expectations that are usually associated
with weddings, ignorant of the fact that they are not framed in the field
of vision. Instead it is the viewer who feels confused, uncomfortable,
ashamed.
The picture of a body builder presents the same kind of discrepancy
between expectations and what is being portrayed (figure 8). The viewer
looks at the image with the background knowledge of fashionable
fitness clubs and gyms. Yet in this image he is confronted with a fitness
culture of another kind: instead of a fashionable gym outfit the man who
is lifting the weights is wearing an old-fashioned sweatsuit, knit cap,
leather mittens and rubber shoes. He is following the trend, although he
does not go to the gym; instead he is doing his training in a wood shed
with a soiled floor. This is a hilarious picture, because it is a very sad
picture that bespeaks otherness in the context of a European high tech
lifestyle. Sad, painful, and hideous things are indeed often also the
funniest ones, and joy is often inseparable from the threat of shame it
evokes. Therefore, watching this picture for the first time, shame was
what I felt. But why? According to Silvan Tomkins:
[S]hame operates only after interest or enjoyment has been activated; it in-
habits one, or the other, or both. The innate activator of shame is the incom-
plete reduction of interest or joy. Such a barrier might arise because one is

Of course one could say that all wedding pictures are false and staged, but not in all
of them do we see the context of the photo shoot. Yet usually the artificial nature of
the wedding picture is accepted if it meets the viewers9 expectations.

88
 An Appetitefor Atterlty

suddenly boked at by another who is strange; or because ooe wishes to look

at, or commune with, another person but suddenly cannot because s/he is
strange; or one expected him to be familiar but be suddenly appears unfa­
miliar; or one started to smile butfoundooe was smiling at a stranger.*

Figure 8: Eero Kurviaen, Niarva Nimjuisl 1987.

Courtesy of Pekfc* Turnnefl
This means that my moment of shame was not related to some viola­
tion of social norms. Furthermore, 1 was not ashamed of myself even
though it was J who fell the emotion. It would be more precise to say I

* Tomkins, 1995, p. 399.

89
Shame and Desire

was ashamed for the unfamiliar other, or perhaps I was ashamed for the
estranged self that was lost in the ecstasy of economic growth and
europeanisation of Finland. As the quotation above suggests, shame is
located at the moment when recognition is disturbed, when the familiar
Other fails or reftises to be recognisable to, or recognising of, the indi-
vidual who exists in the signification of that Other. In this moment,
emotions are privately negotiated and acknowledged before one can
look again. Turunen's photograph interrupted my pleasurable flow of
looking as if it had first encouraged me to look and then treated me as a
gatecrasher at a party where everyone else is invited.6
According to Tomkins, shame represents the failure of contact with
the other, epitomising social isolation and indicating the need for release
from that isolation. Shame enters into being as a disruption in the circuit
of identity-constituting moments of seeing and being seen, and at the
same time it expresses desire to reconstitute that circuit. This picture of
the weightlifter subjects its viewer to unwilling, painful and shameful
identification that combines sensed inability to take control of one's self
with seeing oneself from the standpoint of others. By doing this, the
picture shows how shame and identity stand in a dynamic relation to one
another. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has noted, one of the strangest
features of shame is the way in which someone else's humiliation that
seemingly has nothing to do with another individual, can so easily enter
him or her. Shame is simultaneously contagious and isolating, a double
movement 'toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable rela-
tionality."7 This is how shame can aid us to define who we are and who
we wish to be; in shame identity both derives from and aims toward the
social. When shame occurs there is not only a sudden withdrawal of the
individual's incorporation from his or her cultural environment, but also
a raising self-consciousness to his or her identity.
In another photograph, the two boys on mopeds have certainly stud-
ied all the films portraying motorbikers: their expressions in the picture
are directly from Easy Rider-, but they have a different landscape in their
background: petrol pumps covered with thick drifts of snow (figure 9).
This lifestyle does look different than the one that is portrayed in glossy
magazines. These people are trying to live according to the ideals circu-
lating in the field of vision, but in the process something is always going
wrong. They do not have a place in the field of vision, they should not
be in the picture, because the people in these photographs too loudly

On photography, shame, and looking practices, see David Benin and Lisa Cart-
wright's interesting discussion on Diane Arbus's Masked Woman in a Wheelchair
(1970). Benin and Cartwright, 2006.
7
Sedgwick, 2003, p. 37.

90
 An .Appetite for AUenty

question the * positive image* of die European high tech lifestyle (which
is very much the result of the worldwide success of Nokia from the end
of the 1980s forward) through which the Finns want to see themselves.
Tney should not be seen, because they should not be identified with. Yet
it is not truly in the viewer's power not to identify with these images. A s
the object-relational theorist Jessica Benjamin puts it:
Merely by living in this world, we are exposed to others and subjected to
unconscious, unwilling identification with others (on television, if no* beg­
ging on the streets). Whether we will or not, the world exposes us to the dif­
ferent others who, not only in their mere separate existence as separate be­
ings reflect our lack of control, but who aiso threaten to evoke in us what ite
have repudiatedin order ioprotect the self: weakness, vulnerability, decay,
ot perhaps sexual otherness, transgression, instability - the excluded abject
in either Kristeva's and Butler's sense*

Fignre 9: Marko ja Pertti Sutiucn, Hattuvaara, Itomaatsi 1986.

Courtesy of Pekka Turnneo

8
Benjamin, I99S, p. 95, italics added.

91
Shame and Desire

The images of Pekka Turunen expose the viewers to the otherness

within themselves, thereby operating though a similar but reverse logic
of what Kaja Silverman calls the 'productive look' - a look that alien-
ates the subject from his or her own subjectivity. Silverman argues that
through the productive look the subject can engage in 'identification-at-
a-distance'. This kind of identification does not incorporate the Other
into the self but goes beyond one's self and one's cultural identity in
order to align oneself, through displacement, with the Other. This
Silverman calls 'heteropathic identification'. The productive look of
heteropathic identification goes beyond 'the given to be seen' and
displaces the incorporative look of self-sameness it sees in favour of "an
appetite for alterity."9 The heteropathic identification disallows an
overappropriative, cannibalistic identification that makes the differences
disappear, creating too available, too easy an access to a particular
subjectivity. As examples of artworks that produce the productive look
Silverman studies, for instance, Cindy Sherman's photographic art and
Hanon Farocki's and Chris Marker's films.
Turunen's photographs, by contrast, evoke similarity between the
non-idealised Other and the idealised self by presenting the Finnish
viewers' non-idealised doppelgdnger in the image in an idealising light.
By doing this, they question the politics of communal identification in
Finnish culture: since (for the Finnish subject) there is no Third Other,
no social eye whatsoever that would return the identity demands of the
people in these photographs and recognise them (not even as 'different'
or 'unwanted') in the field of vision, the viewers need to invent that
Third Other for themselves. As a result, the viewers cannot use these
images as negative construction material for their own subjectivity, but
are invited to sense the richness of different subjectivities that live next,
not opposed to each other. The images generate a productive look that
allows the viewers to travel beyond the borderlines of opposing subjec-
tivities, because in the world of these images the oppositions have lost
their significance. The distortion of triadic identification in Turunen's
photographs first results in the emotion of awkwardness and shame
(what reflects the viewers' difficulty to identify without the support of
the Third Other), but this nevertheless opens up a new subject position
for the viewers that takes place beyond the self/Other opposition and
that invites the viewers to find the Other within themselves. This kind of
'distorted identification' resembles the psychoanalytic concept of abjec-
tion which resists the points of ego ideal in the symbolic order.

Silverman, 19%, p. 181.

92
 An Appetite for Alterity

Images of Abjection
In his analysis of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931), Michel Chion
has pointed out the fundamental discrepancy of the figure of the tramp.
At the end of film, the blind flower girl, the tramp's love interest, her
physical sight restored, can now see her Prince Charming as he really is.
Through the flower girl's fantasy formation, the tramp has accidentally
occupied an ideal place in the symbolic network (the rich man), and now
becomes the object of the look aimed at somebody else; he is positioned
between the look and its 'proper' object. But as the flower girl "can see
now" that she has made a mistake, the tramp turns into a 'disturbing
stain', an abjection whose presence in the point of her ego ideal cannot
be accepted anymore.10 According to Slavoj Zizek, Chion's analysis
illustrates one of the elementary insights of psychoanalysis that every
one of us is identified with a certain fantasy place (the ego ideal) in the
symbolic structure of the Other(A). When we cease to act out the place
of the ego ideal in the symbolic structure of the Other(A), a gap opens
up between the point of ego ideal and our presence 'outside' the sym­
bolic structure, converting us into a leftover, an abjection in the sym­
bolic order.11 This analysis indicates an overlap between Chionian/
Zizekian psychoanalysis and Sartre's theory of communality: in both
there is a triadic structure of identification, and in both there is an as­
sumption that the Other has an impact on the subject's sense of self.
Consequently, they presume an intersubjective relationship between the
subject and the Other, which nevertheless can be disturbed in a moment
of abjection.
Abjection is a theoretical notion that has an ambiguous relationship
with the psychoanalytic concept of the Symbolic, and touches on the
concept of intersubjectivity.12 The notion of abjection originates from
Julia Kristeva, who has defined it as "violent, dark revolts of being,
directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant
outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable,
the thinkable."13 Through the concept of abjection, Kristeva challenges
Lacan's theory of subjectivity, where in order to become a subject, one
needs to separate from the 'mother' with the help of the 'father', after
which the symbolisation begins. It is after one has been placed in the
'law of the father' that one can become a desiring subject that can be in
10
Chion, 1989.
11
Zizek, 1992.
12
And it certainly resembles a Sartrean concept of slime, introduced in Being and
Nothingness, insofar as it is discovered in between the world and the psyche, repre-
senting a point of conjunction between the subject's psyche and the world.
13
Kristeva, 1982, p. 1.

93
Shame and Desire

possession of objects. In order to challenge the idea of normative sub-

jectivity, Kristeva argues that in the moment of abjection the subject can
move back and forth between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, and thus
has access to the period before symbolisation and the dominance of the
law of the father. The moment of abjection - which can occur because
of a disturbance in the law of the father - bursts through the symbols
and the discourse, interrupting the subject's history bound to the sym-
bolic order, and substitutes the discourse "for maternal care."14
This means that in the moment of abjection there is a simultaneous
fascination and fear, pleasure and pain.15 Since the 'maternal care' in the
moment of abjection contains redemptive qualities, abjection captivates
the subject (pleasure). But the moment of abjection also reminds the
subject of the period where one was not yet the subject that one must
become, and that must again find a way to separate from the devouring
mother (pain). Abjection is then "a jouissance in which the subject is
swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, leaps the subject from
foundering by making it repugnant."16 Abjection is situated in between
the Imaginary and the Symbolic, pleasure and pain, fascination and
disgust, attraction and repulsion, and the attraction of the maternal in
abjection is always inseparable from the threat it poses:
The fantasy of incorporation by means of which I attempt to escape fear (I
incorporate a portion of my mother's body, her breast, and thus I hold on to
her) threatens me none the less, for a symbolic, paternal prohibition already
dwells in me on account of my learning to speak at the same time.17 [...]
[D]evotees of the abject, she as well as he, do not cease looking, within that
flows the other's 'innermost being', for the desirable and terrifying, nourish-
ing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body.18
For the same reason, Judith Butler considers abjection "not as a per-
manent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpet-
ual failure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate
the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility."19 This means
that the concept of abjection offers a tool of analysis that is able to

14
Ibid, p. 45.
The Lacanian name for similar kind of "pleasure in pain9 is enjoymenl/jouissance,
and it is introduced by objet petit a: "[T]he objet a prevents the circle of pleasure
from closing, it introduces an irreducible displeasure, but the psychic apparatus finds
a sort of perverse pleasure in this displacement itself, in the never-ending, repeated
circulation around the unattainable, always missed object." Zizek, 1992, p. 48.
16
Kristeva, 1982, p. 9.
17
Ibid,p.39.
18
Ibid, p. 54.
19
Butler, 1993, p. 3, italics added.

94
 An Appetite for Alterity

negotiate the series of dichotomies that structure subjectivity. In her

analysis of Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game (1992), Tina Chanter
has shown that - in its ambiguous relationship to the symbolic - abjec-
tion can be used productively in (feminist) film analysis. According to
Chanter,
The ambiguity of abjection neither situates the subject as entirely in thrall to
the image, as if cinema spectators passively and uncritically consume the
idealised and ideologically loaded versions that confront them, unwittingly
colluding in their victimisation, as upholders of the status quo. Nor does it
entirely negate the powerful fascination of the image, its capacity to seduce,
its ability to fascinate.20
The scene of abjection in The Crying Game, according to Chanter, is
the scene where Dil (Jaye Davidson) reveals his sexual identity to
Fergus (Stephen Rea); where Fergus comes to realise that the person he
has fallen in love with is anatomically a man and not a woman. This
encounter with the unacceptable Other renders unstable the boundaries
that structure Fergus's self-understanding. The heterosexual norms
Fergus had assumed were his own collapse with his violent, threatened,
and sickened outburst at Dil, whom he still loves ("Even when you were
throwing up I could tell you cared," comments Dil to Fergus, ironically).
According to Chanter, Fergus vomits because he finds intolerable not
Dil's sexual identity, but his own unconscious "transgression of the
gender boundaries he was assuming were fixed in place according to the
societal boundaries to which he adheres."21 After the moment of abjec-
tion, as his prior assumptions have come tumbling down, Fergus now
must re-negotiate his identity and accept who he loves and what he will
become.
Like abjection, shame is a moment of subjective crisis that assumes a
subject already identified with the societal norms and ideals, but re-
lapses into his or her incompleteness before those ideals. And like
abjection, shame could be a critical resource to rearticulate the terms of
self-obsessed societal norms and ideals. The photographs of Pekka
Turunen, for instance, can be seen as producing the kind of structure of
abjection that Kristeva, Butler, and Chanter are suggesting, but then
through the emotion of shame. At first sight, the subjects of the photo-
graphs seem to be 'disruptions', 'stains' in the viewers' field of vision.
The absurdity of some of the images hits the viewers in the face, evok-
ing discomfort and shame. The viewers are tempted to project outside
themselves for instance the young, happy couple whose living room is
so colourful and rich in ornament that it would be avant-garde were it

M
Chanter, 2000.
21
Ibid

95
Shame and Desire

not accidentally so (figure 10). Prom the image of a boy pulling an udder
of a (dead?) cow that lies on the ground whileridingon H the viewers
are drawn to find 'the Other*ratherthan 'the self (figure 11). For the
Finnish viewers, in an ecstasy of economic growth and europeanisation
of Finland, identification with these images would mean a symbolic
suicide.

Figure 10: Leena MaksJmainen Ja Mauri Pesonea, Hattavaara,

ILoroantsi 198$. Courtesy of Pekka Turn lien
Yet through demanding recognition and identification from the
viewers with the people in the photographs, the viewers are challenged
to abandon the position of identification with normative ideals, and to
find the Other within themselves. The viewers are positioned beyond the
self/Other opposition, beyond ihe look of the Third Other, the social

%
 An Appetite for Altsrtty

eye. The viewers cannot project Ihe people in Timinen's photographs

completely outside of themselves: there is too much 'self in these
photographs but there is also a threat, to which the viewers respond with
shame. This shame, then, expresses a disturbance in the interiorised
norms and ideals of the community with which the historicaJ subject
strives to identify in the same manner as abjection expresses a negative
symptom of discursivity that cannot be placed within the Symbolic.
Works of art like the photographs of Pekka Tunmen can activate and
mediate shame as the moment of disruption in the viewers* relationship
with the community by distorting the viewers' identification with the
interiorised communal norms and values. This disruption may invite the
viewers to question the communal act of identification and idealisation,
allowing the viewers to identify with the Other within themselves. This
kind of disruptive identification resembles the 'double-outskieuess'
theorised by Paul Willemen and based on Bakhttn*s dialectical mode: in
double-outsideness the spectator "relates both to her or his situation and
to the group 'elsewhere' as an other *n

Figure 11: Marko Mustoaeo, KoU 1993.

Courtesy of Pekka T*nme*

" Willemen, t994, p. 217.

97
Shame and Desire

In the same way as the concept of abjection, shame could negotiate

the politics of communal identification; shame, for me, is what the
abject is for feminist theorists inspired by Lacan. Like abjection, shame
is a negative emotion that is attributed to oneself and that could lead to a
critical revaluation of the self. In other words, shame is a critical
resource that allows the subject to re-negotiate his or her identity and the
societal norms he or she has adhered to, producing in the subject an
understanding of his or her own conditions of existence. By interposi-
tioning the viewers in-between distance and proximity, otherness and
sameness, or pleasure and displeasure through shame, the photographs
of Pekka Turunen are playing with the concepts of identity and belong-
ing, reminding the viewers of their long forgotten roots of subjectivity.
On the one hand, the photographs maintain their distance from the
viewers by confronting them with something that is being unrecognised,
denied, and considered shameful. But on the other hand, the photo-
graphs activate the forgotten traits of subjectivity in the viewers, allow-
ing the Finnish viewers to remember their own struggle for recognition
(and the sense of inferiority) within the field of vision. The photographs
therefore invite the viewers to identify with these images of otherness,
yet not through idealisation but through mechanisms of shame as an
interruption of the interiorised communal values that exists beyond the
specular, since it is felt through senses like abjection. The images repre-
sent the forgotten otherness that both fascinates and is threatening, and
that the viewers are supposed to find within themselves. In Turunen's
photographs, the forgotten, threatening Other becomes the mirror at
which the viewers look and with which they identify, thereby transform-
ing themselves into an Other, a loved and hated double of themselves;
and this transformation manifests itself in the negative forms of dis-
pleasure and shame.
On the other hand, some of the images form a contradiction to other
images in the collection. Next to the portraits of families living in brand
new brick houses decorated with loud kitsch, we see portraits of men on
their way to collect fish from their traps, riding in a sleigh pulled by a
horse, standing in front of the Midsummer bonfire in their best Sunday
clothes, sitting on a snowplough on a bright winter morning (figure 12).
In one picture, there is a naked, steaming man with his young son
coming out of a sauna to the yard, on a dark and wintry December
evening (figure 13). The man holds his laughing son up, their white
bodies glow against the dark background, giving the viewers an impres-
sion of two angels fallen from heaven. The steam rising from their
bodies bespeaks that short moment of refreshment after a hot sauna,
when your body is still warm enough to resist the coldness of the
weather; the father and the son are 'frozen' in the state of pleasure of

98
 An Appetite for Alterisy

being in-between two extremes, in the background there is a Christmas

tree to be seen, which gives the picture a narrative dimension. We can
imagine that after the sauna they go indoors and have their Christmas
dinner, we can hear the laughter and feel the warmth. The peacerulness
that radiates from these images bespeaks innate dignify and comfort
with one's subjectivity, even though it is not 'framed' in the field of
vision. By not struggling for recognition in the field of vision, the
people in these images do achieve it - even though it might be unde­
fined - and this suggests that despite the Finnish sense of inferiority and
shame, Nokia, Linux, Finnish design. The Rasmus, and the people
"against the wall' could and should live in the same field of vision.

Figure 12: Artturi Vnahanen, NBrsikkflLl, Kitee 1992.

Courtesy of Pekka Turunem
These images can be seen as comments on Finnish communal iden­
tity on two levels. On the one hand, they question the societal norm of
the sense of unity between different social classes in Finland, in which
all the members of Finnish culture are required to believe even though
many of them have never actually experienced it- On the other hand they
question the way in which the Finns project their sense of inferiority to
others in an attempt to get rid of their * fundamental shame1. Often it is

99
Shame and Desire

indeed possible to get rid of shame by projecting and destroying one's

own 'forbidden* and shameful features on and in others through projec-
tive identification. However, the images under discussion torn the
mechanism of this kind of negative protective identification upside
down by projecting the forbidden features from the image to the view­
ers. This reverse projective identification produces a projective look that
allows the viewers to find the Other within themselves; or rather, the
photographs address the Other within the viewing subject and thereby
satisfy his or her appetite for alterity.

Figure 13: Aleksis ja Jonna Laakso. Joensuu 1987.

Courtesy of Pekka Tinnnm
Identification plays a crucial part in the formation of subjectivity and
communal identity. As Sartre shows us, the subject creates a bond with
the community and mteriorise its values through triadic identification;
the subject identifies simultaneously with the community and with the
approving or disapproving Third Other outside of the community. What
the subject does not accept in him- or herself, what the subject feels that
does not affirm his or her sense of subjectivity, he or she normally
projects outside him- or herself as the Other By inviting the viewers to

100
 An Appetite for Alterity

identify with the Other within themselves, Turunen's photographs invite

the viewers to question the conventional frames of their subjectivity, and
to see themselves in the picture differently beyond the communal values
and the accustomed field of vision.
Our subjectivity, and our relations with others are socially condi­
tioned, and the structure of our existence is intersubjective rather than
intrapsychic. The emotion of shame can momentarily reveal this struc­
ture, as it at the same time binds us to the community and detaches us
from it: if the subject had never interiorised the communal norms,
shame would not occur in the first place, but simultaneously the disap­
proving look of the Third Other causes the subject's identification with
the community to dissolve. The origins of shame, therefore, lie in the
intersubjective structure of human life, in between the subject's internal
and external existence. But precisely because of this, shame may also
function as a disruptive element, a critical moment that could invite the
subject to re-define his or her relationship with the community. Shame
momentarily breaks up the subject's bonds to the community, but in the
recovery of this break-up there is a possibility for a new kind of com­
munal relationship to emerge that questions the self-obsessed values of
the community and endorses alterity rather than uniformity.
Pekka Turunen's Against the Wall is a series of alternative images
that resists communal uniformity through the emotion of shame. This
shame renders visible the subjective crisis that the Finnish identity is
based on, but that also invites the viewers to abandon the space of
identity fixed on social ideals. The shame in Turunen's photographs
functions as a kind of intersubjective space that allows the viewers to
use identification to encounter otherness, to inhabit alternative subject-
positions, to tolerate difference rather than to deny either the status of
the self or the status of the Other. Turunen's photographs show that
shame could have a liberating function that could encourage the 'iden­
tity-fixated Finns' to abandon the communally given position of identi­
fication and allow for a 'new' kind of subjectivity with an appetite for
alterity to emerge.

Love and Abjection

As stated above, works of art could elicit a crisis of identification by
inviting the spectator to identify with and emote towards subjects who
are denied recognition in the socially conditioned field of vision and to
find the Other within themselves. This could open up new subject
positions where the viewer must re-negotiate his or her identity and
accept the disturbance in the societal norms with which the viewer
normally strives to identify. Emotions could also aid us in understanding

101
Shame and Desire

intersubjectivity in the context of transnational, as my following reading

of Fatih Akin's award-winning film Head-On (Gegen die Wand, 2004)
aims to show. Needless to say, my approach to the film is not without its
problems as it suggests that through emotions (love and shame) one
gains 'immediate' access to the cultural identity of the Other. My objec-
tive, however, is not to produce 'all-owning' spectatorship (that aims to
make the unfamiliar familiar), but spectatorship that de-familiarises the
self. Emotions may work as embodied human affects with ontological
structures, but they are always translated through culture.
Like the people in Turunen's photographs discussed above, in Head-
On the experience of being 'against the wall' (the literal translation of
Gegen die Wand) is resonant of how the protagonists feel. In the film, a
Turkish-German couple, Cahit (Birol Unell) and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli)
meet at a mental institution after they have both attempted to commit
suicide. They are both self-destructive but for different reasons. Cahit is
too rootless in the free-thinking culture that is Germany, while Sibel is
too free-thinking in the conservative society that is her conformist
Muslim family. Sibel convinces Cahit to marry her so that she can get a
legitimate reason to move out of her childhood home. As a Turkish
couple in Germany, Cahit and Sibel exist on the edge of society, in-
between two social and cultural contexts where they both do not fully
belong. Both protagonists find themselves in an unstable cultural matrix
that they have yet to learn to negotiate. The film is driven by a highly
self-conscious exploration of the politics of ethnic and gendered identity
in the context of the transnational. In this sense, both protagonists are
abject figures whose feelings of being out-of-place can be read in the
light of shame.
The film opens with a bright, colourful still shot of a Turkish orches-
tra playing a traditional folk tune filmed before an image of Bosphorous
in Istanbul. This scene is interrupted violently by a cut to the turning on
the spotlights in a sleazy, dark punk club in Hamburg after the closing
time. We witness Cahit getting drunk, picking a fight, and finally driv-
ing his car straight into a concrete wall, with a Depeche Mode song
playing loudly in the background. This is a body in anguish. The cul-
tural boundaries to which Cahit adhered seem to have been collapsed,
and, as a result, he reverts to drugs, alcohol and aggression in order to
numb his pain. The moment of abjection is the moment where Cahit is
faced with his abyss; two things that Kristeva suggests are inseparable
from one another.
Sibel, on the other hand, feels being imprisoned by her cultural boun-
daries where she cannot find her way out, so she creates her own abyss
by attempting suicide. This, however, does not bring her any redemp-
tion, only shame. "The shame you have brought upon us is unforgiv-

102
 An Appetite for Alterity

able," asserts her father, and her brother continues: "Can't you see what
you are doing to him? It's killing him. If anything happens to the old
man you are dead meat." This scene shows how shame is a powerful
and potentially violent way to control the borders of normality, disci-
pline and punish. Furthermore, it shows how shame can secure a 'nor-
mative' form of family by assigning to Cahit who fails to measure up to
its ideals the origin of shame ("the shame you have brought upon us").
In this way, Cahit's identity becomes stigmatised within the familial
order of her culture.23
The marriage with Cahit becomes an escape from this situation as
well as a compromise: simultaneously a flight from and an embrace of a
traditional female role. In other words, Sibel has to assume the role of a
housewife (the traditional role of a woman both in Germany and in
Turkey) in order to escape that role into sexual promiscuity (a role that
is not accepted for a married woman either in Germany or in Turkey).
But even though Sibel finds her ethnic background suffocating, she
nevertheless does have some affinity with it - this becomes evident for
instance in the way in which she lovingly prepares a traditional Turkish
dish for Cahit. In fact, as the film progresses she even feels the urge to
return to her Turkish 'roots'; as one of her lovers tries to pursue her in
the street she cries at him: "I'm a married Turkish woman. Try anything
and my husband will kill you."
In the film, right after their wedding, Cahit throws Sibel out of his
messy apartment, after which she goes to a bar in her wedding gown and
ends up having sex with the bartender (and supposedly losing her virgin-
ity). The discrepancy in this scene is reminiscent of the wedding picture
of Pekka Turunen discussed above, and its function is to rearticulate the
terms of heterosexual love. It is a moment of social disruption that
challenges the limitations of a given culture. By now, we also have
learned that Cahit is a widower. This, rather than his cultural in-
betweenness, is offered as an explanation for his agony. It would seem
that Cahit renders himself abject not only due to the lack of belonging
but also due to the loss of love. In this context, it might be useful to turn
to Elspeth Probyn's notion about the connection between shame and
love. Probyn bases her reasoning on Silvan Tomkins's idea introduced
above where shame can appear only when the subject has felt interest
and when that interest has been stolen from him or her. Interest involves
a desire for connection which is love reciprocated. Therefore, love
always involves the fear of love not being mutual, and this contains the
possibility of shame. The catastrophe in losing one's love is not neces-

On shame as a result of departing from the normative family forms, see, for instance,
Ahmed, 2004, p. 107.

103
Shame and Desire

sarily the loss itself but the deeply shaming experience of the interrup-
tion of interest, the state of 'what-would-have-been'. According to
Probyn: "Being shamed is not unlike being in love. The blush resonates
with the first flush of desire. It carries the uncertainly about oneself and
about the object of love; the world is revealed anew and the skin feels
raw. Shame makes us quiver."24 Even though Cahit has lost his loved
one by death and not by abandonment or by a falling-out, he still feels as
if he were abandoned, the shameful and painful 'what-would-have-
been' to which he reacts by rendering himself abject. And, as we know,
according to Kristeva the dead body is "the utmost of abjection. It is
death infecting life."25
Cahit's love for his deceased wife Katharina was for him a sense of
intersubjective presence that defined his sense of self to himself. Ac-
cording to Robert Solomon's definition:
We define ourselves not just in our own terms but in terms of each other.
Love determines selfhood. Love is just this determining of selfhood. When
we talk about 'the real self or 'being true to ourselves' what we often mean
is being true to the image of ourselves that we share with those we love
most.26
Derailed from his love for Katharina that is his determining of self-
hood, Cahit is confronted with the unacceptable Other in Sibel. Sibel is
the Other because she is not the woman Cahit took her to be: not quite
Turkish, not quite German, not easy to sort out and certainly not some-
one Cahit wishes to fall in love with, because this would require a
redetermination of his self. This conflict is translated in terms of music:
Sibel and Cahit get high listening to a Sisters of Mercy song (Temple of
Love), sung by Ofra Haza. But it would be wrong to assume that these
genre elements (gothic punk and Yemenite) assimilate each other in a
kind of hybrid form of world music. Instead, both elements preserve
their unity after which an encounter between East and West, modern and
traditional, masculine and feminine becomes possible in a mutually
enriching way. But moments like this can make people 'vulnerable' to
falling in love. The song forms a sound bridge to the next scene where
Sibel is shown dancing in a punk club. The way in which camerawork
and editing is organised in this scene is very suggestive. First we see a
long shot of Sibel from Cahit's point of view. The reaction shot that
follows zooms into a close up of Cahit's face seen from the right angle.
The next POV is a medium shot of Sibel, followed by a reaction shot in

24
Probyn, 2005, p. 2.
25
Kristeva, 1982, p. 4.
26
Solomon, 1991, p. 512.

104
 An Appetite for Alterity

which the camera makes a circular tracking movement of about

90 degrees. The last POV shows Sibel in a close up, followed by a close
up of Cahit seenfromthe left angle. This insinuates a transformation in
Cahit, an experience of falling in love.
But Sibel leaves Cahit standing on the dance floor in order to "get
laid" by another man, after which Cahit smashes the apartment Sibel has
cleaned up and redecorated with all her savings ('it's like a chick-bomb
exploded in here" commented Cahit earlier on) only to clean up the
mess immediately afterwards. Cahit is now faced not only with the fear
of his love not being reciprocated. He is also torn between his desire for
connection (with Sibel) and his dread for the loss of autonomy and
independent agency. "She has bewitched me!" cries Cahit at his friend
Seref, smashing his hands in the broken glass. Sibel continues to see
other men until she, too, realises that she loves Cahit. Again, circular
camera movement signifies Sibel falling in love, this time in a Turkish
club. The scene ends up in violence after Cahit attacks someone who is
insulting Sibel. After they return home, they almost make love, but Sibel
withdraws at the last moment since the consummation of their marriage
would really make them husband and wife. "If we do it then I'm your
wife and you are my husband," says Sibel. The circular movement by
the camera is here significant, since it calls attention to the growing
affective affiliation between Cahit and Sibel. "Love is a merry-go-
round," says Cahit's friend Seref, "Put your money in and it starts to
spin. But it only goes in circles." (Appropriately enough, it is in a
merry-go-round that Sibel finally realises that she loves Cahit.) This
would seem to suggest that to a certain extent love is a question of
choice that enables the individuals to be 'caught up' in the game of love,
after which it is inherently beyond any individual control.
Sibel, therefore, is now torn between her desire for unity and her fear
of losing her newly found independency. And before she gets to make
up her mind, Cahit's explosion of jealousy in a bar ends in the violent
death of Sibel's lover. Cahit is sent to jail and, after another suicide
attempt and after her family has denied her, Sibel flees to Istanbul,
fearing for her life. She is now definitively 'cut off from her family; she
cannot cross the bridges that she has burnt. This is depicted quite liter-
ally in the film through intercutting between the close-up shots of
stitches in Sibel's wrists and the shots of burning family photos that her
father is throwing in thefire,with traditional Turkish music tying up the
shots.
In Istanbul, the narrative repeats itself, but now Sibel is Cahit, in
shame and self-destruction due to her loss of love (and the loss of her
family), looking for drugs that would numb her pain. She accepts a job
in a shady punk club that resembles the German one Cahit used to work

105
Shame and Desire

in before going to jail. Soon afterwards, we witness her getting drunk on

the dance floor to the same Depeche Mode song as Cahit did in the
beginning of the film. While in the beginning of the film Sibel was in
command of herself, her movements and her gestures, she is now spin-
ning around recklessly. The handheld camera and rapid editing under-
score her confiision. This is an abject body out of control. Her state of
abjection takes the form of violence turned inwards when she deliber-
ately provokes three men in a dark alley to beat her up and to almost kill
her. The dance floor that in the middle of the film was the place to fall in
love has now become the scene of abjection that represents the disrup-
tion of the conventional matrix of love and desire. What Sibel finds
unbearable is the involuntary collapse of her identity boundaries that she
assumed were controllable and unchanging, and that allowed her to
express unconventional femininity that is now denied her. This has
thrown her into a crisis of love, crisis of identity.
Towards the end of the film, Cahit is released from the prison. He
flies to Istanbul in search of Sibel. Even though she now lives with
another man and has a daughter by him, Sibel agrees to meet Cahit in
his hotel where they spend two passionate days. They can now make
love since their affection for each other is no longer tied to some social
norms of attainment, but a way of exposing themselves to one another
intersubjectively. Their love is now free from the fear of dependency
and the fear of shame. This is a form of authentic, intersubjective love
that avoids the desire for 'mutual identity' and possession in favour of
open totality and reciprocal enrichment. But, perhaps precisely for this
reason, their love cannot last. This kind of love predicts its own destruc-
tion, because its constancy can only be found in inconstancy, or it
changes form and becomes something 'familiar'. Waiting is the condi-
tion of inconstancy of love; in the film Cahit and Sibel constantly and in
anxiety wait for each other to arrive, but the arrival offers them only a
momentary release from that anxiety since it soon transforms into the
anticipation of loss. As Ronald Barthes has defined it, this loss is the
origin of love:
Similarly, it seems, for the lover's anxiety: it is the fear of a mourning which
has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I
was first 'ravished'. Someone would have to be able to tell me: "Don't be
anxious anymore - you've already lost him/her."27
Cahit and Sibel's love marks an impossible constancy, because the
instant they arrive in the same place together is merely a moment of
singular belonging, after which they both need to re-negotiate their

27
Barthes, 2001, p. 30.

106
 An Appetite for Alterity

identities, come to terms with who they are, what they have done, whom
they love, and what they will become. But the film does not resolve the
issue of how successfully they do so.
In this way, the emotions of love, shame and abjection could create a
kind of 'third space' for intersubjective understanding, and making
visible the contradictory system of cultural values within the context of
transnational cinema. This does not mean, however, that the spectator
would have a direct access to these values. The scenes of abjection
described above do not confront the spectators with the clashing of some
intercultural values in itself, but rather with their own desire for belong-
ing and love, and their own fear of shame. The scenes of abjection
emerge as disruptions in the moments of identity constitution, while
they express a desire to reconstitute identity. This is due to the ontologi-
cal structure of shame and desire; shame epitomises our intense desire to
be connected with others and the fear of failing in our attempts to make
those connections.28 In other words, when desire is denied, shame is
activated, and this is why shame and desire go hand in hand. The self
that emerges through this kind of representational practice is a de-
familiarised, a moving concept in the context of the transnational.

Probyn, 2005, p. 14.

107
 CHAPTER 4

Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

The Bodily Subject

As has been stated throughout this book, intersubjectivity is a con­
nection of the subject with the world; a commitment in which the world
is not 'projected' or 'created' as being, but in which it is encountered as
being. The manner in which film epitomises this intersubjective bond­
ing, and the manner in which the film spectator relates to the film in an
intersubjective relationship, could serve as a basis for gaining insight
into the modes of engagement of the cinema spectator and also its socio-
historical dimensions. In this model, emotions are viewed as an inter­
mediary of one's relationship with the world as illuminated by intersub­
jective interaction. Yet in order to understand how the subject can
engage with others in the world, one needs a concept that goes beyond
the concept of consciousness (since the world is not a Cartesian projec­
tion) and that concept is the body. It is the subject's body that expresses
and reacts to the world through emotions: "the experience of the emo­
tions is an experience of being intertwined within the body enmeshed in
the world."1 This is why, in order to describe the cinematic experience
too, it is necessary to acknowledge that the spectators access and emote
towards cinema in and through their bodies. As Mark Hansen puts it:
Affectivity [...] is more than simply a supplement to perception [...] and it
is more than a correlate to perception [...]. Not only is it a modality of ex­
perience in its ownright,but it is that modality - in contrast to perception -
through which we open ourselves to the experience of the new. In short, af­
fectivity is the privileged modality for confronting technologies that are
fundamentally heterogeneous to our already constituted embodiment, our
contracted habits and rhythms.2
But how does the interaction between the body and the world take
place? In Sartre's thinking, the body is not simply a physical object, but
an intentional subject that can see as well as be seen, and touch as well
as be touched. Needless to say, these two modes of embodiment are not
1
Mazis, 1993, p. 38.
2
Hansen, 2004, p. 133.

109
Shame and Desire

opposed but intertwined: we are simultaneously our physical bodies and

our lived, experiental, phenomenological bodies (even though we might
not be able to be aware of both of these modes simultaneously; our
reflective consciousness can only 'flip-flop', sequentially, between the
two modes of embodiment). Furthermore, the body is a means of under-
standing the human order: the actions of the body can be interpreted by
others and that experience teaches the subject who he or she is. The
awareness of self is inseparable from the awareness of others, and, in
part, our sense of embodiment (the ontological state of being and having
a body) assists us in understanding the self or the Other. In the cinematic
experience, too, the relationship between the film and the spectator is
based on the mutual capacity for and possession of experience through
common structures of embodied vision.
In order to understand the socio-corporeal logic of intersubjective
spectatorship, then, we need another kind of subjectivity apart from the
concept of a conscious subject: a bodily subject. According to Sartre, it
is the body that is the subject of consciousness, a point of view in the
world and a centre of all action and encounter with the world. To be a
point of view in the world, to be a conscious being, one must be in the
world as a bodily subject. Furthermore, the body is the locus of both
objective (social) and subjective (personal) space through which the
subject experiences and acts in the world. This involves the subject's
awareness of him- or herself as an embodied actor in the social world.
There can be no consciousness of the world without consciousness of
oneself as embodied in the social world. It is within this objective and
subjective space that the self and the Other appear subjectively and
objectively to each other: "My body as a thing in the world and the
Other's body are the necessary intermediaries between the Other's
consciousness and mine."3 Our existence as subjects and objects, as
lived bodies and bodies touched and looked at, is intertwined in the
world where we are located; and the body is the fundamental connection
with the Other that is constitutive of each consciousness.
At first sight, the Sartrean 'bodily subject' seems to resemble the
Freudian/Lacanian 'bodily ego'. In The Ego and the Id, Freud argues
that the ego is "first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface
entity, but is itself the projection of a surface."4 The bodily ego is de-
rived from bodily sensations that are projected onto the surface of the
body, and integrated into the bodily life. This means that, as in Sartrean
thinking, our subjective experience always originates from and is medi-
ated by the body. This bodily ego, according to Lacan, comes into

3
Sartre, 1956, p. 303.
4
Freud, 1961, p. 27.

110
 Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

existence in the mirror stage, where the infant makes an imaginary

identification with his or her bodily reflection in the mirror. This identi-
fication with one's mirror image is the first of many ego-structuring
identifications through which the subject acquires his or her identity
with respect to others, either through similarity (the principle of the self-
same body) or difference. It is here that we can see the difference be-
tween Sartre, Freud and Lacan: whilst in psychoanalytic thinking the
bodily ego is most importantly a focal point for the subject's visual
identity within a Symbolic order, which makes the concept of body
constituted by and constitutive of cultural hierarchies, the Sartrean body
is an intentionally lived body that rules the subject's relations with the
world and that signifies his or her engagement with the world.
In psychoanalytic film studies the question of bodily ego is worked
out in terms of visibility and representation, identification and perform-
ance, where the emphasis lies for instance on studying body images in
films,5 on calling the culturally accepted notions of ideal bodes into
question,6 or on the way in which the body is constructed in society
through certain technologies (i.e. the way in which we internalise the
bodily images in the cinematic experience and act upon them).7 In other
words, it is all about the body as site of representation. Scholars, such as
Linda Williams and Christine Noll Brinkmann, speak of 'visecral' or
'affective mimicry' (providing a contrast to identification, or 'imaginary
mimicry') in which a sort of 'feedback loop' is created between the
viewing and the viewed body, but, as Anne Rutherford points out (and
as will be shown below), embodied cinema spectatorship does not
necessarily require a body on the screen.8 The so-called somatic film
theory, as developed by Steven Shaviro, argues that film images 'catch'
the spectators directly, in a state of prereflective, bodily affect, rather
than through a reflective cognitive processing (I shall return to the
notions of prereflective and reflective shortly). Cinema addresses the
spectator through overwhelment and fascination, and, for Shaviro,
cinematic perception is radically passive:
Images literally assault the spectator, leaving him or her no space for reflec-
tion [...] When I watch a film, images excite my retina, 24 times a second,
at a speed that is slow enough to allow for the impact and recording of stim-
uli, but too fast for me to keep up with them consciously. Perception has be-

See, for instance, Doane, 1991.

6
See, for instance, Silverman, 1996.
7
See de Lauretis, 1989 and Butler, 1993.
8
This discussion about the so-called 'body genres' starts with the assumption that the
way in which certain film genres (melodrama, pornography, horror) represent the
body is closely connected to a decidedly corporeal address of the spectator. See
Williams, 1991; Noll Brinkmann, 1999; Rutherford, 2003.

HI
Shame and Desire

come unconscious. It is neither spontaneously active nor freely receptive,

but radically passive, the suffering of a violence perpetrated against the eye.9
By comparison, the film scholars that have adopted the phenomenol-
ogical model strive to find the intentional bonds between the spectator
and the film, the same bonds that connect the subject with the situational
world.10 In this model, the body cannot be explained through (inner or
outer) causal relations. This means that the body is not seen separately
from the world, but as a phenomenon that reaches out to the world
including the other bodies in it that reach back. In cinema, too,
... our perception is shaped by more than our physical bodies: it is also in-
fluenced by cinematic technology and by the position and attitude of the
filmic body in relation to the narrative it is perceiving and articulating.11
In her ground-breaking book The Address of the Eye Vivian
Sobchack has convincingly taken on the phenomenological concept of
bodily subjectivity (which is, however, based on Maurice Merleau-
Ponty and not on Sartre) in her theory of cinema spectatorship. Accord-
ing to Sobchack, a film is an expression of experience by experience.
The film makes itself emotionally and intellectually manifest by making
itself seen, heard, reflectively felt and understood. This means that the
relationship between the spectator and the film unfolds on two levels: on
the conscious level (where the spectator perceives the cinematic expres-
sion knowing that it is 'only fiction') and on the bodily level (where the
body of the film and the body of the spectator meet in the cinematic
experience; the spectator comes to embody the cinematic expression):
The film presents an analogue of my own existence as embodied and sig-
nificant. It is perceptive, expressive, and always in the process of becoming
that being which is the conscious and reflected experience of its own ex-
pressed history.12
For Sobchack, the relationship between the film and the spectator is
based on the mutual capacity for and possession of experience through
common structures of embodied existence, through similar modes of
being-in-the-world that provide the intersubjective basis of objective
cinematic communication:

Shaviro, 1993, pp. 49-50. In Shaviro's reasoning, however, traces of Cartesianism

can be found inasmuch as Descartes too considers affect as involuntary, suffered in a
passive mode (contrasted with actions of the mind such as reasoning); he writes
about passions "by which the will has [...] allowed itself to be conquered or led
astray." Descartes, 1985, p. 347.
10
See, for instance, Casebier, 1991; Sobchack, 1992 and 2004; Marks, 2000 and 2002.
11
Stadler,2002,p.241.
12
Sobchack, 1992, p. 143.

112
 lntersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

The film experience, therefore, rests on the mutual presupposition of its in-
tersubjective nature and function, based on the intelligibility of embodied
vision. Its significance emerges from a shared belief and from shared evi-
dence that the substance and structure of cinematic perception and expres-
sion (however historically and culturally qualified) are inherently able to
reflect the universality of specific scopes of experience.13
Sobchack thus considers film thus to be more than merely a viewed
object, namely a viewing subject. Even though film has been objectively
constituted as a technology (the cinematic viewing subject does not
mean the same as a human subject), it also has been subjectively incor-
porated, enabling a perceptual mode of embodied 'presence' and/or
'agency'. In its existential function, film shares a privileged equivalence
with its human counterparts in the film experience. The film manifests a
competence equivalent in structure and function to that same compe-
tence performed by human subjects. Furthermore, the film is able to
make visible the invisible intersubjective structure and foundation of the
encounter of the spectator and the film, in a specific cultural framework
by which the spectator's vision is informed and charged, and through
which the film appears intelligible.
The idea of the film as a viewing subject allows or invites us to rec-
ognise the cinematic look (film as a subject of its own vision) on us, as a
look of the Other that is present as 'visibly absent'. Although the film
spectators cannot see film as a viewing subject, they can see its pres-
ence. The cinematic look does not visibly appear as 'the other side of
vision' but as a vision lived through intentionally; emotionally and
visually embodied. The intersubjective relationship between the film
and the spectator is thus twofold: even though the cinematic Other is not
'me' (in the sense that it does not live my body nor occupy my situa-
tion), it is not entirely Other either (like other seeing persons) since its
vision (and significance) is given uniquely to me from within, from the
'inside out'. This means that the spectators are able to experience the
cinematic look as their own, even though it is not performed by them
(nor do they believe that it is):
[T]he film is engaged by our vision directly, as the intersubjective and inten-
tional experience lived by an other. Thus, the film is never contained in our
vision as merely the significant object of our sight, but is always also sig-
nificant and signifying as the intentional subject of its own sight.
It is necessary for the spectators to embody the cinematic vision in
order to experience it from within, but this does not mean that the

13
Ibid,p.5.
14
Sobchack, 1991, p. 140.

113
Shame and Desire

spectators mistake the cinematic vision for their own (as it was assumed
in apparatus theory). Instead, the purpose of cinematic communication is
to share - to share the sight, to share the emotions - but there is always a
distance between the spectator and the film that necessitates communi-
cation in the first place and subsequently sets up the dialogue between
the two types of vision. The spectator is inserted into a shared operation
of visions of which neither the film itself nor the spectator is the creator.
Laura Rascaroli calls this sharing an 'intersubjective layering' of em-
bodied vision, wherein the visual agencies of a number of viewing
subjects are intertwined: the body of film, the bodies of characters and
the body of the spectator.15 In this operation, the spectator, the characters
and the film co-exist through a common world, just like the subjects
exist in the world always and already together with other subjects. In the
economy of spectatorship, affective embodiment unites the perceiving
subject and the perceived object.

Carnal Perception
The interest in the body and the interaction of the senses was already
present in the early cinema and historical avant-garde practices, such as
the cinema of attractions and the early films of Sergei Eisenstein. But
the issues of embodiment, sensation, experience, and (the transgression
of) sensory perception could also be seen characteristic to post-classical
cinema that often aims at a totalising or synthesizing effect of image and
sound, such as Gaspar Noe's controversial film Irreversible (Irreversi-
ble, 2002). The film is spectacular, fierce and sensational; it very much
aims to effect immersion in the spectator's experience and, as a result,
becomes intelligible through carnal rather than visual perception. Critics
have often defined the film as offensive, provocative, shocking; in other
words, affective in a very primal way. The film features a number of
scenes that employ tactics of aural and visual, spatial and temporal
displacement and disruption in order to elicit an emotional response.
This film is also about bodily immediacy and the loss of equilibrium.
The film itself is a succession of sequences in reverse chronology. This
narrative structure places the violent climax at the beginning of the film
and the idyllic equilibrium at the end. It is disturbing to watch these last
scenes of happiness with the images of horror from the beginning of the
film still in memory. This feeling of uneasiness, however, comes not
only from the violent content of the film, but also, and more impor-
tantly, from the way in which the film disturbs and displaces the spatial
and temporal bodily coordinates of the spectator.

15
Rascaroli, 1997, p. 234.

114
 IrUersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

The film opens with an eerie aerial long take where the camera
makes constant circular, upside down movements in space, moving from
one narrative realm to another as if there were no boundaries.16 Spatial
specificity is torn apart. The narrative starts unfolding from any spatial
point, and no place is just one any more. This is a scene of haptic dis-
placement that is designed to bring the spectator into a state of spatial
disequilibrium. The scene is disequilibrating, since here the so-called
proprioceptive bodily system outweighs the exteroceptive (the sense of
sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste and balance).17 This kind of cinematic
immediacy requires that the spectators acquire new ways of engaging
with the film through their own body living in the cinematic space
instead of through narrative identification.
While the camera continues to make the same movement, a constant
pulsing, hypnotic score starts to emerge which intensifies the haptic
immediacy of the film. This brings along a new transition that is not
only spatial but also temporal as we now move back in time to a loca-
tion that seems to be some kind of sadomasochistic gay club. The
gyrating camera moves from one tortured body to another accompanied
by the pulsating sound and the flashing red light. We have landed in a
Dante-esque world of sex, pain and horror. We witness the two male
protagonists, Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel)
enter the club, looking for someone called Le T6nia ('tapeworm') and
apparently seeking revenge. In the previous sequence we saw them
being taken away respectively by the ambulance and the police, so now
we know for sure that we have moved back in time. Marcus gets into a
fight and gets his arm broken, after which Pierre attacks Marcus's
assailant (who is not Le T6nia but his friend) and bashes his head in
with a fire extinguisher. The sound of this incident is excessively ampli-
fied and made more disturbing by the rotating camera that nevertheless
draws the spectator's attention closer to this act of extreme violence.
This is truly an immediate, visceral and nauseating experience, not only
because of the brutal nature of the scene, but also because it catches the
spectator in the vulnerable moment of bodily disorientation which
increases the emotional impact of the scene.
The pulsating score that accompanies the rotating cinematography
dominates the first 45 minutes of the film, until the notorious and much-

16
These scenes are composed of several separate shots tied together digitally.
17
The proprioceptive system can be defined as a link between 'body space' and
'exterior space' that provides feedback on the status of the body internally - the ref-
erencing of the body to itself. Proprioception is the sensitivity to the body that envel-
ops the subject's sensuous contact with the external world into the body. See, for in-
stance, Gibson, 1979, p. 183; Massumi, 2002, p. 58.

115
Shame and Desire

discussed rape/assault scene of Marcus's pregnant girlfriend Alex

(Monica Bellucci). We witness (in this order) a raging Marcus and
Pierre looking for their way to The Rectum (the gay club), driving a cab,
harassing a taxi driver and stealing his cab, tracking down Le Tenia's
whereabouts, being investigated by the police and seeing badly injured,
passed out Alex being taken to a hospital by ambulance. In contrast to
the previous scenes, the rape/assault scene that follows is being shot in
one take with a static camera, filmed in medium close-up from a low
height with a straight-on angle and a sense of deep space (although not
all the planes in the frame are entirely in focus). No nondiegetic sound is
added to the scene. However, it would be wrong to assume that this
tactic would render the scene less immediate, especially given that the
spectator already is in a vulnerable state of embodied mind. In an inter-
view about the film, Gaspar Nog himself has stated that the static cam-
era forces the spectators to stay with Alex who is being victimised,
instead of granting them the 'luxury' of occupying the position of a
distant observer.18 This is a representation of horror that gets under one's
skin so that it literally hurts. Towards the middle of the scene we wit-
ness a distant figure entering the underpass, observing the scene for a
few seconds and then sneaking out, without attempting to help Alex.
This moment intensifies our experience of being embodied to the level
of apperception. Helen Donlon has made a similar observation in her
analysis of the scene:
This act of supreme cowardice is such a real-life situation, and inserting this
moment made the scene all the more effective, moving it even further away
from the necessary parameters of scopophilia. This one moment of coward-
ice was so hopeless it became almost as ghastly as the rape itself. The spec-
tator has now felt that cowardice and is still there, alone again with Alex and
the rapist, but, unlike the guy who slipped away, we have to stay, and we are
suddenly made very aware of this entrapment.19
Towards the end of the film, Alex is lying in Marcus's arms; they are
both happy, but as their future is already written and therefore irreversi-
ble, the spectators watch this scene with involuntary terror in their heart,
knowing what is yet to come. The scene ends with Alex taking the
pregnancy test which turns out to be positive. The camera starts spin-
ning again (accompanied by Beethoven's 7th Symphony), scanning the
poster of Stanley Kubrick's 2007 - The Space Odyssey (1968) on Alex
and Marcus's bedroom wall, moving to a close-up of Alex lying on the
bed with her hands on her belly and then again tilting to the foetus in the
2007 poster. This is a direct reference to the ending of 2007 and its

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A939666, accessed 5 May 2006.

19
Donlon, 2004.

116
 Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

underlying Nietzschean concept of eternal return and the notion of time

as being not linear but cyclical. This is also suggested in the book Alex
is reading in the film. The book is J.W. Dunne's An Experiment in Time,
in which he suggests that the past and future are constantly there in the
present even though in the experience of time they are felt as existing
separately.
Therefore, when Alex wakes up in the afternoon before the horrible
events, she recalls having a dream about being trapped inside a red
tunnel that then broke around her (the rape takes place in such a tunnel).
Marcus, similarly, is unable to feel his arm when he wakes up, which
also turns out to be a kind of premonition of his arm being violently
broken in The Rectum nightclub. An important part of the significance
of (the structure of) Irreversible, then, has to do with the nature of time:
it invites us to remember the future. But even more importantly, the film
is about intersubjectivity and embodiment. The film ends with a scene
of Alex reading Dunne's book in the park surrounded by children. At
this point, the camera flies into an overhead shot and then into a thrilling
gyroscopic spin while the lawn sprinkler in the middle of the frame
spins to another direction. This gives way to a strobe effect of black and
white frames alternating in a split-second speed and a roaring sound that
is reminiscent of the film running out of the projector gate. A final title
card reads: "Le temps detruit tout" (Time destroys everything).20 This
scene is designed to have a hypnotic, disorienting and dizzying effect in
the spectators and bring them to the state of disequilibrium until they
almost literally hit the ground. This forces the spectators to acknowledge
the way in which their perception is always enveloped in the body
tending toward equilibrium. Furthermore, it forces the spectators to
acknowledge that the cinematic experience takes place not outside on
the screen or inside in the spectator but somewhere in between, in the
texture of the whole intersubjective operation between the inside and the
outside. (This notion might find support also from Michel Serres's
thinking. In his Les Cinq sens, for instance, he writes that we really exist
'beside' ourselves on the side of the world, but this is not some kind of
'addition' to our experience but an essential part of the human condi-
tion, including cinema spectatorship).21

0
Especially in the context of avant-garde and experimental cinema, this technique of
rapid alteration on the screen of light and dark is referred to as 'flicker film'. The
term of the technique originates from Tony Conrad's 'structural' film The Flicker
(1965) and it is often deliberately used to explore visual perception and cognition,
sometimes leading to bodily disorientation, fear, or even epilectical seizures it the
viewer is susceptible to epilectic tendency. Anderson and Small, 1976.
21
Serres, 1985.

117
Shame and Desire

In her discussion on 2001, Annette Michelson has argued that the

film spectator has a longing for bodily immediacy.22 By constantly
disrupting the experience of outer space of the cinema in the inner space
of the body, Irreversible confronts the spectators with this longing. With
the techniques of disorientation, the films brings the spectators to a state
of disequilibrium, forcing them to make constant bodily adjustments in
order to re-establish their balance.23 This cinematic challenge makes the
spectators conscious of their intersubjective bodily engagement with the
film, but at the same time it renders them incapable of distancing them-
selves from it. The film addresses the spectator as an appropriator of
'carnal knowledge', since the horrors it depicts are too incomprehensible
for visual perception to take in. The spectators discover, with a thrill of
disgust, that they are the meeting place of the eternal return of violence
in the film. In this way, the cinematic technologies that Irreversible
employs deconstruct the binary opposition of perceiving subject and
perceived object, rendering them in active and embodied participants in
their mutual construction.

Inside/Outside
As stated above, in the cinematic experience, the relationship be-
tween the film and the spectator is based on the mutual capacity for and
possession of experience through common structures of embodied
vision. This realm of bodily intersubjectivity is also the origin of (cine-
matic) emotions as it is of perception and sensation, displaced from the
perceiving subject and the perceived object. In other words, the specta-
tor's emotional response to cinema is an (active) form of bodily con-
sciousness, grounded in "the capacity of the body to experience itself as
'more than itself.'"24 The 'intersubjective space' from which the specta-
tor's emotional response emerges is both external and internal to the
spectator's lived body, and therefore emotion as a mode of bodily
consciousness oscillates between the self and the other, the inside and
the outside, the private and the public. As Michelle Rosaldo writes:
Emotions are thoughts somehow 'felt9 in flushes, pulses, 'movements' of
our livers, minds, hearts, stomachs, skin. They are embodied thoughts,
thoughts seeped with the apprehension that 'I am involved9.25

Michelson, 1969.
And, in fact, in his theory of cognitive development, Jean Piaget has argued that the
understanding of reality consists of continual mechanisms of disequilibrium that re-
quire constant readjustments.
Hansen, 2004, p. 7.
Rosaldo 1984, p. 143.

118
 Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

In his book Emotions, Sartre teaches us that it is through an emotion

that the bodily subject encounters the world. Emotion is not entirely
subjective but an all-embracing phenomenon: through emotion the
bodily subject reaches out to the world in its entirety: "[W]ith our body
[...] we live and undergo [the] signification [of an emotion], and it is
with our flesh that we establish it. But at the same time it obtrudes itself;
it denies the distance and enters into us."26 But emotions are not given
from without - even though they might be experienced as 'external
force' - since they arise from within the self: the subject is filled with
emotion by its individual, psychological force. The emotional experi-
ence is therefore not to be found in the external world or in the 'essence'
of the subject, but in the texture of the whole intersubjective operation.
This means that self, emotion and meaning are always and already both
external and internal phenomenon: it is through emotion in and through
which the subject and the social world intertwine: "The behaviour which
gives emotion its meaning is no longer ours. [...] Simply, the first magic
and the signification of the emotion come from the world, not from
ourselves."27
Yet in most readings of Sartre's theory, emotion is considered a form
of consciousness. Or better, emotion is seen as a transformation of the
world, a 'magical act' that originates from the subject's inability to
tolerate a certain (changed) situation in the world. For instance, the
emotion of joy is a magical behaviour, which tends by 'incantation' to
realise the possession of the desired object:
The joyous subject behaves rather like a man in a state of impatience. [...] It
is because his joy has been aroused by the appearance of the object of his
desire. He is informed that he has acquired a considerable sum of money or
that he is going to see someone he loves and whom he has not seen for a
long time. But although the object is 'imminent', it is not yet there, and it is
not yet his. [...] [W]e shall never get to the point of holding [the object of
our desire] there before us as our absolute property. [...] [Through joy] the
object of or desire appears near and easy to possess.28
According to some scholars, the problem of this theory is the role of
consciousness in it.29 The centre of emotion is the transformation of the
world, which is fundamentally a change of consciousness. Sartre indeed

Sartre, 1993, p. 86.

Ibid. Maurice Merleau-Ponty shares this view when he writes that "If I try to study
love or hate pure from inner observation, I will find very little to describe: a few
pangs, a few heart-throbs, in short, trite agitation's which do not reveal the essence of
love or hate." Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 52.
Sartre, 1993, pp. 68-9.
See, for instance, Fell, 1965 and Wollheim, 1999.

119
Shame and Desire

sometimes makes it sound as if consciousness was something disembod-

ied, but he is not a solipsist. In Sartre's philosophy, there is no thinking
of 'the subject' in the sense of the final closure in itself of a for-itself.
Consciousness, for Sartre, is essentially relative and it refers to the
world from the start: "all our personal determinations suppose the world
and arise as relations of the world."30 But how? Through the human
body that is the subject of consciousness. Without the body conscious-
ness could have no relation at all with the world. Consciousness is
always directed toward the world; in fact, human consciousness is
always consciousness of the world as perceived through the senses. But
consciousness does not have senses. Consciousness is present in the
world through the senses, and the world has meaning for the conscious-
ness with the body as a centre of reference: "Thus to say that I have
entered into the world, come to the world, or that there is a world, or
that I have a body is one and the same thing."31
Emotion, then, is indeed a form of consciousness, but one must note
that it is a bodily form of consciousness. The body is not merely an
'aspect' of consciousness in Sartre's theory of emotions; it is through
emotion that consciousness is being embodied. This means that con-
sciousness is rooted in the body, yet consciousness cannot be reduced to
the body or vice versa; instead consciousness and body are fully embed-
ded in each other. Through his or her emotions the subject reaches out to
the embodied foundations of his or her self: emotion is a form of bodily
consciousness of the world.32 The subject that undergoes an emotion is
bound to the affective object in the world in an inherent symbiosis; the
bodily subject unreflectively knows or anticipates what kinds of emo-
tional responses and bodily actions are now expected from him or her,
and therefore emotion is a certain way of apprehending the world.
Furthermore, emotions gain their significance in the context of social
life, being a synthesis of personal psychodynamics on the one hand and
a socio-historical framework on the other.33

Sartre, 1956, p. 415.

Ibid.,pA\9.
Here Sartre criticises psychologists who assume that, after the emotion has been set
up by cognition, it is fed by the same cognition, and is absorbed into itself and with-
drawn from the object towards which it is directed. For Sartre, on the contrary, the
emotion returns to the object at every moment and is fed there.
Throughout this book, I have been following common practice in employing 'affect'
and 'emotion' interchangeably. In this chapter, I focus on 'emotion' in Sartre's sense.
On the difference between affect and emotion, see, for instance, Tomkins, 1995. Ac-
cording to Tomkins, affect is the bodily mechanism that underlies all emotion, and
that gives meaning to information that derives from our bodily system - our senses.
However, when affect is combined with the subject's memory of previous experience
of that affect, it becomes an emotion through which he or she experiences the world

120
 Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

The psychic interiority of the bodily subject, then, is necessarily de-

pendent on the subject's bodily exteriority (the subject's 'social being').
There is no strict separation between mind and body, self and Other, as
the body is the limit for both the subject's perceptual (social) outside as
well as his or her most intimate (psychic) inside. This means that the
subject and the social world must exist and appear for each other: the
relation between the subject and the world is intersubjective and recip-
rocal, and not determined by either one of them. The bodily subject is,
on the one hand, an object in the world, but on the other hand something
directly lived by consciousness, in a dialogical relationship with the
world. Through his or her lived body, the subject has a position in and
relation to the world, and emotion is a way to 'bind' the bodily subject
to the world in an "indissoluble synthesis."34 The 'magical act' in the
state of emotion is then the act of the bodily subject who, in a new
situation, adjusts his or her relation with the social world. In emotion,
the subject 'sets up the magical world' using the body as a means of
'incantation'. And since the body has a twofold ontology - on the one
hand it is an object in the world, on the other hand it is something
directly lived - an emotion is not merely a projected affective significa-
tion onto the world, but an intentional phenomenon through which the
subject assumes his or her subjectivity and forms a relationship with the
world. For Sartre, experiencing an emotion is thus to apprehend and to
live the world in bodily action; in emotion the world becomes part of the
bodily subject at the most inward level.
Through emotion the subject thus exists in the world 'internally out-
side and externally inside'. This means that, through emotion, the subject
assumes for him- or herself a subjectivity separate from the outside
world at the same time as the subject embodies the outside, social world
from the inside, as a bodily subject. In a state of emotion, the subject
experiences a bodily sensation, but the significance of emotion arises
from without the subject, in the context of social life. This texture of
bodily subjectivity unfolds in the cinematic experience as well. Eija-
Liisa Ahtila's films and video installations, for instance, shape this
bodily interaction between the inside and outside. They exemplify how
cinema could be seen as a means of relating to the world, and how
cinematic emotions arise from the intersubjective conditions of human
existence.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila is an acclaimed Finnish artist who describes her
video installations as 'human dramas', fictional narratives (even though

as particularly, historically, and culturally relevant. Or, as Brian Massumi puts it,
"Emotion is contextual. Affect is situational." Massumi, 2002, p. 217.
34
Sartre, 1993, p. 52.

121
Shame and Desire

her work often adopts the techniques of documentary film) about human
relationships and the powerful emotions that underlie them. The relation
between the 'self and the 'Other' is often investigated in her work as
the spectator is invited to engage with the mind of a subject caught in a
moment of psychological and emotional vulnerability. For instance, her
three audio-visual narratives Me/We, Okay and Gray (1993) re-define
the borders of subjectivity through collision of visual and aural informa-
tion. These three short films - each approximately 90 seconds long -
have been presented both as independent works at galleries, as trailers in
cinemas, and on various television channels between advertisements and
programs.
The first of the narratives, Me/We, studies the balance of attachment
and detachment of the individual identity in society: in this case a father
in a four-person nuclear family. The story is told through a monologue,
a stream of consciousness narrated by the father that is partly voice-
over, partly diegetic voice. The stream of consciousness extends to the
visual level as well: a lot of point of view shots are used, which are then
interrupted by sudden changes of viewpoint. The father mirrors himself
through his family members. When he tries to see them, he sees himself
instead, and allows their voices to speak in and through him, embodying
his family. But at the same time he sees himself from the outside point
of view, as a separate subject from his family members, uttering the
words from Maurice Blanchot's short story Who: "Somebody looking
over my shoulder (me perhaps) says: 'You will return to that faraway
time when you took your high school exams.' - 'Yes, but this time, I
will fail.'" As he is addressing his words to the viewers, and simultane-
ously allows them to see from his point of view, the film is playing with
the borders of subjectivity and identity both inside and outside of the
film. The spectators are invited to engage with the father's point of
view, to experience the film from the inside, but they are also detached
from the film into the role of the outside observers.
As in Me/We, in Okay the protagonist speaks in the voice of the op-
posite sex. A woman walks back and forth in her room, telling a story
about her sexual relationship, which involves both physical and psycho-
logical violence. The story is told in the first person, but as the story
progresses, the voice changes, and the female protagonist is suddenly
made to speak in a male voice. The desires and frustrations in the sexual
relationship are uttered with various voices through a single person in
order to dissolve both the subjectivity and the gender of the protago-
nists. According to Kari Yli-Annala, this is a characteristic feature in the
world of Ahtila's imagery: "[T]he relationship between the self and the
Other is not one of fixed differentiation, but one that is caught up in a
process of spillage and mutual exchange. Someone else's words and

122
 Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

thoughts seem to be put in the character's mouth, portraying the manner

in which power is wielded in human relationships."35 At the same time
the characters in Me/We and Okay address the camera directly, ac-
knowledging the process of narration in the film and thereby transcend-
ing the cinematic screen. This results in the dissolution of the bounda-
ries of subjectivity both within and beyond the frame: the borderline that
separates the spectator outside the world of fiction is crossed and the
spectator is invited to interact with the film beyond the inside/outside
dichotomy.
Today (Tdnddn, 1997) deals with the relationship of a father and a
daughter after a dramatic event: the father has accidentally run over and
killed his own father by car. The narration consists of three episodes
titled Today, Vera, and Dad, divided into three screens on three sections
of a rectangle in a dark space, and they run in a continuous loop (but not
simultaneously) on each of the screens. First we see the film on screen
one. The daughter is throwing a ball in the yard, the father is crying in
the bedroom. The daughter's monologue - which is alternatively simul-
taneous on-screen sound and non-simultaneous, off-screen voice over -
tells about her father, her grandfather, and their relationship. In the
second episode, on screen two, an elderly woman expresses her views of
contemporary society. And in the third episode, on screen three, the
father is conducting a dialogue with the camera, re-living his relation-
ship with his father and his daughter, recognising that he is both a child
and a parent at the same time. Ahtila herself has described this work as
exploring the concept of self and Other through time: seeing one's own
movements in the gestures of other family members dissolves the bor-
ders between the self and the Other. The first episode ends with the
daughter asking whose father it actually is that is crying in the bedroom:
Maybe it's not my dad who's crying - but somebody else's dad. Sanna's
dad, Mia's dad, Marko's dad, Pasi's dad - or Vera's dad. I'm in an arm-
chair. I have a boyfriend. I have something on my lap. I am 66 years old.
The next episode, Vera, begins with a medium close-up of an elderly
woman sitting in an armchair, smoking, with an ashtray on her lap,
talking to the camera. Her monologue ends with the sentence, "A rat-
tling tram pronounces my dad's name," which brings us to the last
episode, Dad. According to Taru ElfVing, this jump means that the
daughter embodies the self that is in constant flux, always already gone
or about to come, embodying the future (Vera), the past (Dad) and the
present (Today): "The girl situates herself as older, creates a bridge - or
maybe she creates the future, as if it were another simultaneous layer of

35
Yli-Annala,2002,p.221.

123
Shame and Desire

her being."36 But the girl is 'becoming' in the figure of the father as
well, thereby inhabiting the border space between the self and the Other,
the inside and the outside. As the father proclaims in the last episode of
the film: "I have a daughter. She throws a ball and asks me to watch.
And these throws look like the anger I had swallowed. And I don't
know whether to run towards her or away - or whether to teach her
what's good and what's bad. When I ask her, 'how do I look?' - she
says, 'you look like a dad.'"
As in Me/We and Okay, in Today the spectators are drawn into the
world of fiction beyond the screen that separates them from the film; in
fact, in the gallery space the spectators are expected to occupy the
'fourth wall' of the installation. This contributes to the function of the
spectators in bringing closure to Ahtila's words and images. It is the
spectators who have to act as a bridge between the 'speaking selves' in
Today: it is the spectators' embodiment of the cinematic expression and
their emotional reactions to it that makes the encounter of the 'girl',
'Vera' and 'dad' possible. As a result, the physical time and space
occupied by the spectator is fused with the fictive time and space of the
installation.
Like Me/We, Okay, and Today, the film installation Consolation Ser-
vice (Lohdutnsseremonia, 1999) mirrors the twofold nature of bodily
subjectivity as a site where the self and the Other, the inside and the
outside interact, but through experiencing and expressing emotions. The
installation is a two-screen projection. The story unfolds through two
adjacent images: the screen on the right takes the story forward while
the screen on the left concentrates on showing the emotions (through
reaction shots), scenery, and other details relevant for the story. Since
the adjoining images are non-linear, and since the spectators are refused
one privileged point of view, they are invited to take the position of an
active observer towards the film, making choices from the audio-visual
material. As a result, the spectators' reaction to the film are multi-
dimensional, more complex than in a 'conventional' narrative film: on
the one hand they are encouraged to recognise the 'cinematic Other' as
visibly absent, beyond the level of perception, but on the other hand
they are invited to embody the cinematic expression through their
emotional reactions: the spectators reach out to the cinematic world by
reacting to it emotionally, incorporating the cinematic expression to
their own bodily presence. And at the same time the spectators also
remain aware of the gallery space and the people walking in and out of
the room.

Elfving,2002,p.210.

124
 Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

Consolation Service is a story about the divorce proceedings of a

young couple, Anni and J.P., told in three parts. The story is told from
Anni's point of view, but it is narrated by their 'neighbour' who exists
within the diegetic world of the film, but who nevertheless 'creates'
events in the process of narration. As J.P. explains the narrator's func-
tion to the therapist: "Our neighbour is the babysitter - the one who is
writing this story." The first part of the film takes the spectator to a
counselling session, where the couple tells their therapist that they have
decided to break up. Their relationship has reached the point where they
cannot have emotional intimacy with each other anymore. They cannot
encounter each other, but are both absorbed in their own emotions. As
Anni explains to the therapist: "I feel like some enormous breast that has
to take care of everything."
When the therapist encourages the couple to express their feelings
toward each other, they are only able to quarrel or to bark at each other
like dogs, until Anni collapses. We hear her voice as a non-simultaneous
distant cry; as a kind of internal diegetic sound that invites the people
from the waiting room to come to her aid. Neither the couple, nor the
therapist can 'see' these people; they are 'transparent' - only the narra-
tor is able to comment on their presence: "The therapist, Anni, and
J.P. cannot see them. The people are transparent." This blurs the bound-
ary between the diegetic (the world within the film) and the non-diegetic
(the world beyond the film), inviting the spectator to inhabit that in-
between space.
In the second part the couple is at a birthday party. Later they leave
for a restaurant across frozen water, but while they are walking the ice
breaks, they fall into the water and drown. In this part, Ahtila deliber-
ately confuses the inner psychic life of Anni's character ('fantasy') with
the material outside world ('reality'), since the drowning in the icy
seawater takes place only in Anni's imagination. Only her inner mono-
logue - uttered in a voice over while in the image we see either her
drowning or an underwater shot from 'her' point of view - suggests that
the drowning illustrates the way in which the couple has turned numb to
each other like in death:
For the last time we show each other how we lost contact. I don't care. And
you pretend not to notice. [...] There is nothing, time does not pass. Can we
still say that this won't do? Can we still put a stop to it, quit, leave? What
kind of fingers undress us here?
In the last part, Anni's husband J.P. appears to her as a hallucination.
J.P.'s materialisation and his bowing gesture to which Anni responds
enables her to finally give up the relationship - hence the consolation
service. Here the woman's fantasy has the fiinction of preventing the

125
Shame and Desire

metaphorical death of the couple in the second part of the film, as Yli-
Annala has argued. Yet the fantastic and hallucinatory elements in
Consolation Service seem to suggest that intimacy with the Other as
another subject is not possible; it is not accomplishable to encounter the
Other as another subject, but only as a hallucinatory projection. It would
seem to me that Ahtila's later work examines the question of what
happens to the subject when his or her relationship to the world and the
others in it is permanently disturbed, but that is a topic I have explored
elsewhere.37
In this kind of displacement of the self/Other and the inside/outside
in Ahtila's work, then, it is the structuring function of the spectator that
keeps the multidimensional structure together. In Ahtila's later work,
especially in her installation Anne, Aki, and God (1998) and her film
Love is a Treasure (Rakkaus on aarre, 2002) the multiplicity of the
cinematic 'flows' starts to live its own autonomous life, which the
spectator cannot absorb in a linear fashion, but is forced to experience as
a delusion. According to Daniel Birnbaum, in Anne, Akit and God there
is "clearly a question of a severe breakdown of the mental apparatus as a
whole. This is madness." The installation "pushes things further and
clearly represents a kind of mental disintegration," producing "a multi-
layered and mazelike narrative, or rather a maze of narratives, that
transgresses the mental capacities not only of so-called normality but
more radically [...] of finite subjectivity."38 The co-existence and the
intimacy of the self with the Other has become impossible and madness
is a consequence of this and, in a sense, Anne, Aki, and God as well as
Love is a Treasure could be seen as a logical development of the theme
in Ahtila's work.

Intersubjectivity, Sexuality and Gender

As we have already seen, shame is an emotion that is profoundly
embedded in the social. Shame promotes continuous, dynamic exchange
between the 'outside' (the social) and the 'inside' (the personal) of the
subject's world, shame is a mode of embodying the social world. But
precisely for this reason, shame is also a possibility for re-negotiating
one's relation with the social world. This, however, necessitates special
motivation, for instance films that challenge the intersubjective limita­
tions of a given culture. According to Sartre, art that leads to reflection
reveal the images which society tries to hide from itself: "If society sees
itself and, in particular, sees itself as seen, there is, by virtue of this very
fact, a contesting of the established values of the regime. [The artist]
37
Laine, 2006a.
38
Birnbaum, 2002, p. 202.

126
 Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

presents [the society] with its image; he calls upon it to assume it or to

change itself." Shame could serve as means for the spectators to reflec­
tively direct their attention from thefilmto the conditions of apprehend­
ing the film. This reflection is essentially bodily in its nature.

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Courtesy of Crystal Eye
As mentioned above, the intimacy between the self and the Other is
in many ways disturbed and disturbing in Ahtila's work. In her If 6 Was
9 (Jos 6 olis 9, 1996) this is the case because the self/Other relationship
is epitomised through the emotion of shame as a reaction to the estab­
lished and internalised cultural values of female sexuality. In this film
installation she deals with sexual fantasies, habits, activities and wishes
of five teenage girls during their 'metamorphosis' into adult women as
sexual beings. Remarkably direct in its approach, If 6 Was 9 is based on
interviews and empirical research: as a result the touch of documentary
and direct cinema is apparent in the film, but the realisation and the
stories told by the girls are nevertheless fictional. Like Today, If 6 Was 9
is structured as a triptych: three aurally and visually non-linear, adjacent
images create an audio-visual flow on three enormous screens (fig­
ure 14). The non-chronological, non-linear narrative fabric unfolds in
both parallel and contrasting movement across the screens. The three
screens may show a different perspective on the setting, or they may
converge in order to form a single screen. The sound is projected from
where it appears to emerge, and the soundtrack follows the horizontal,
simultaneous movement between the three screens of the triptych. In the

127
Shame and Desiw

gallery screening, the screens together with a comfortable sofa, are

organised so (hat the three screens and (he spectators, sitting on the sofa,
form a four-cornered space (figure 15). Since the audio-visual flow on
the three screens is often non-simultaneous, the spectators are again re-
fused one privileged point of view. But through the size and the organi-
sation of the screens the spectators are compelled to absorb the audio-
visual flow not only aurally or visually, but also with their whole body.

Figure IS: Tke gallery screening. Coartesy of Crystal Eye

The film begins with an empty, black screen; only lines that refer to
sexual acts and that are spoken by immature voices of young girls can
be heard. On the screen, nothing can be seen, not even the owners of the
voices, which penetrate into the consciousness of the spectator, thereby
breaking the battler of distance between the spectator and the film. The
spectator is invited to share the subjective experiences of the narrator
from the inside. But in a split second, the intimacy between the spectator
and the film is disrupted as images of everyday Life occupy the screen,
combined with voices that articulate a seemingly meaningless stream of
consciousness in the following fashion:
When f was not yet at school age 1 used to play a game. 1 went under ibe
cover and played doctor. Alone. 1 was a patient, and the doctor examined
my bottom. I had to open my anus while they stood around... the doctor
nurse, and maybe some other people. The doctor cured me by sticking me in

128
 fntersubjecttvlty and Embodied tfjett

the ass, in ibo middle of the bole. And I twisted aid turned under the cover,
sweating all oven

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F^nre 16: if 6 Was 9. Conrtesy of Crystal Eye

The following passage makes use of a documentary/interview style,
inviting the spectator into yet another relationship with the film. On one
screen. a young girl is sharing her masturbation fantasy/memoty with
the spectator in a close-up, sitting on a cosy chair and looking directly at
the camera, in the mode of a confession. Yet this familiar convention of
documentary - 'safe intimacyfroma distance* - is in contradiction with
the fact that it is a young girl who is sharing 'her' sexual, almost porno-
graphic fantasy - and it is here that the emotion of shame sets in, re­
minding the spectators of their own sense of shame about their sexual­
ity. Indeed, as Leon Wurmser has noted, "shame about exposing one's
sexual organs, activities, and feelings [...] is of such cardinal import that
in most Western languages shame is practically synonymous with sexual
exposure and the sexual organs themselves.**3 In ff6 Was P, during the
'sexual confession' two other screens 'open up1; screens that are divided
into a point of view shot of the young girl» and an establishing shot of
the whole setting (figure 16). The spectators occupy ait these three
perspectives at once, not only on the visual level but also on the subjec­
tive level, through the emotion of shame. As many theorists of shame,
including Sartre, have shown, in the emotion of shame there exists a
consciousness of self as existing for oneself and for others: shame
makes the self present as an object in the world, as an object for the

i?
Tlie psychoanalytic explanation of why this should be so \s thai lite development of
objective self-awareness predisposes the child to integrate the parental criticism of
sexual censure Through the sense of shame. Wurmser, I9J}|, p. 32. But Imking sexu­
ality and shame is in no way an invention of psychoanalysis: it appears in recorded
i Oteckyjudaeo-Oiristian) history at least as early as Genesis in the Old Testament. la
Plato and in classical G*eek {physical) sexual desire was considered shameful and
degrading {in contrast to platooic love). The 17th' and I3**ceatury English Puritan­
ism made moral abstinence a core virtue. See Tomkhfc. 1987. And in Finland, con­
trolled sexuality was a direct continuation of the naye^at-roniflotic movement
Siltttla, J999,p.438.

129
Shame and Desire

Other.40 Shame involves consciousness of the self that has been exposed
for others to see as an object in the world from an outside, objective
viewpoint which the subject can recognise as him- or herself (even
though that objective dimension of oneself, the being-for-others, essen-
tially escapes the subject). But at the same time shame is a shameful
apprehension of something and this something is the subject self: "I am
ashamed of what I am."41 Shame, therefore, realises an intimate relation
of oneself both to oneself and to others; an exposure of oneself to others.
This means that shame is not originally a phenomenon of self-
reflection, but the subject's original apprehension of the two modes of
his or her being (existing for oneself and for others) occurs pre-
reflectively:
It is certain that my shame is not reflective, for the presence of another in
my consciousness, even as a catalyst, is incompatible with the reflective atti-
tude; in the field of my reflection I can never meet with anything but the
consciousness which is mine. But the Other is indispensable mediator be-
tween myself and me. I am ashamed as I appear to the Other.42
But a reflective consciousness can always direct itself upon emotion,
upon shame. In this case, shame appears as a structure of consciousness.
So whilst shame as pre-reflective consciousness is directed toward
something other than itself (shame of what one is and of what one is for
the Other), shame as reflective consciousness shifts its attention to itself
and becomes consciousness of an act of consciousness (consciousness of
shame of what one is and of what one is for the Other). Sartre has shown
us that emotion (i.e. shame) is a state of consciousness of the world in a
state of emotion, the subject is immediately and spontaneously con-
nected with the social world, and it is precisely this unreflective condi-
tion that constitutes the possibility for the reflective consciousness the
subject has of him- or herself.
This reflection, however, is rare and necessitates special motivation,
because reflective consciousness involves both a unity and a duality at
the level of reflection. According to Sartre, on the one hand there must
be an absolute unity of reflective consciousness with the consciousness
on which it reflects, but on the other hand "the reflected-on must neces-
sarily be the object for the reflective; and this implies a separation of
being."43 In shame I am conscious of myself as an object of values for
the Other, but there is a separation between me and that object, since I

40
See Sartre, 1956; Taylor, 1985; Lewis, 1995; Katz, 1999.
41
Sartre, 1956. p. 301.
42
Ibid., p. 302.
43
/*>/</., p. 213.

130
 Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

cannot take the Other's point of view on that object (duality). In reflec-
tion, my consciousness of consciousness is separated from the con-
sciousness reflected on by a nothing that is itself (duality within unity).
This is a complicated matter (if there is no 'self at the pre-reflective
level to be found, how is that self-consciousness? If consciousness is
always of something and implies a separation of being, how can the
reflective be that which is reflected on?), and, according to Kathleen
Wider it cannot be thought without taking the level of bodily intention-
ality into consideration.44
According to Sartre, all consciousness is self-consciousness, we all
have a deep-rooted intuition of whatever we do both at the level of pre-
reflective and reflective consciousness. Even at the level of pre-
reflective consciousness (awareness of, say, a glass on the table) I am
conscious of my state, but this consciousness does not occur reflectively
(I am not 'positionally' conscious of my state, my attention is not di-
rected towards my state). Consciousness of an object is consciousness of
being conscious of an object. Thus, ontologically all consciousness is
self-consciousness. According to Wider, this is a question of processing
bodily data. At pre-reflective level, my self-consciousness is present in
processing bodily data, blending the 'input'fromboth self and the social
world. At reflective level, my self-consciousness shifts its focus from
processing bodily data onto the self-input only (the bodily feelings and
sensations). According to Wider, this interpretation preserves Sartre's
belief that all consciousness is self-consciousness, and that in reflection
there is a unity within a duality: reflective consciousness is and is not
separatedfromits object since it simply involves a shift in focus: "noth-
ing would divide consciousness from what it reflects on, because as
Sartre says, consciousness is the body, and reflective self-consciousness
is the body's reflective awareness of itself."45 This does not mean trying
to attempt the bodily input from a third-person point of view (the so-
called 'impure reflection'), but attending the bodily input as lived, not
objectified. Furthermore, since all consciousness is bodily consciousness
of something in its both prereflective and reflective mode, it is impossi-
ble to be simply conscious of the act of being conscious, as Steven
Connor points out.46
The cinematic experience is primarily pre-reflective: in my engage-
ment with afilmI, as a subject for-myself, am conscious o/it, I perceive
it as external to my body whilst all my attention is directed towards it.

44
Wider, 1997.
45
Ibid, p. 155.
46
"One can never be simply aware of the act or fact of being aware, one can only be
aware indirectly, through being aware of something." Connor, 2006, p. 2.

131
Shame and l>e&ire

My emotional response H a result of apprehending the film, a mode of

consciousness of the film at the pre-reflective level. Or better, in the pre-
reflective mode, my consciousness is cinema inasmuch as 1 am not
posirionaily conscious of the film. Similarly, by experiencing shame as a
result of thereturnedlook of the Other in the fitm, I become conscious
of myself as the object for that Other at the pre-reflective level: I am not
conscious of my shame, my consciousness is shame. Here, my bodily
consciousness is a subject and an object for-itself- pre-reflectively. At
the reflective level, in my engagement with the film 1 am still conscious
of it, and my emotional response is still a result of apprehending the
film, but the focus of my attention is on my emotional response (I am
positionally conscious o/my shame),
In If6 Was 9 it is intriguing to notice how the film invites the specta­
tors to reflect their emotional experience through allowing the spectator
to direct their attention to understanding the conditions of apprehending
the film. This is done by addressing the spectator and inviting them to
experience the film from within at the pre-reflective level (at the level of
bodily intentionalityx and simultaneously encouraging them to observe
thai lived experience from without (duality within unity), hi one scene
in If 6 Was 9 one of the girls is telling her memory of a children's toy
called the view master and the Piper fairytale she used to watch with it.
In this scene, die triangular space of three screens consists of a close-up,
point of view, and the establishing shot In the scene, the girl addresses
the spectators widi the following lines: "1 heard that the Piper led chil-
dren inside a mountain, which then closed. 1 run the pictures back and
forth. First there was an opening, then there was no more. It was amaz-
ing. It was equally amazing to see in a porn magazine that men had no
hole behind the testicles."

figure 17:1/6 Was 9. Courtesy of Crystal Eye

The three screens — where the images are projected in an alternating
order - and the sound of the changing images in the background resem­
ble the childhood experience of changing the images of one's view

132
 lntersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

master (figure 17). Suddenly this cosy memory, which the spectators
have been able to 'experience from the inside,' is disrupted by a porno-
graphic image portraying male sexual organs. The shock of the sudden
encounter with the pornographic image is equivalent to the sudden
appearance of the Other's look which the subject experiences as the
revelation of the existence of his or her body as an object for the Other,
and is experienced as shame. But why? As pornography usually is
defined in terms of visibility (and not of vision) and the spectator's
implicit desire for (visual) mastery, why is it that the spectator here
lacks the mastery and becomes an object of the look?47 Because the
sudden encounter with the pornographic image is humiliation, an attack
aimed at the way in which notions of male and female sexuality are
ordered and defined. Robert Stoller has investigated the role of shame
and humiliation in sexual fantasy. His point of departure is unambiguous
although provocative: at the centre of the dynamics of pornographic
sexual excitement is humiliation:
For the men, the game is: "I humiliate in order to undo my humiliation."
Women, more subtle in their pornography, think: "I let myself be humiliated
in order to humiliate" or, to use gentler phrasing, "in order to humiliate, dis-
arm.
At first glance, Stoller's point of view about humiliation as a force in
all pornography seems to be somewhat 'totalitarian', but it is by no
means essentialist or ahistorical. Pornography can be seen as humiliat-
ing because it touches on one's uncertainties about one's gender and
sexuality that are culturally too strictly defined through opposing posi-
tions (woman as a projection of man).49 The pornographic image in If 6
Was 9 is humiliation, because it is an attack on gender-bound intersub-
jective relations whose meanings male and female bodies carry, and
whose meanings mark the limits of male/female relations: women are
not allowed to be openly curious about male sexuality or even about
their own.50 Furthermore, it echoes what Kathleen Woodward calls a
'double standard of shame':

On pornography as a form of visual mastery see, for instance, Williams, 1999.

Stoller, 1987, p. 301.
Simone de Beauvoir had a similar starting point in her famous work, The Second Sex
(Le Deuxieme sexe), in which she worked with the idea that women are the Other for
men and that woman is not born, but made. See De Beauvoir, 1997.
It is precisely against the wish for expression of sexual impulses that Sigmund Freud
viewed shame as a reaction formation; according to Freud shame is socially useful as
it directs sexual energy away from the self and toward tasks necessary for the evolu-
tion of the mankind. Freud, 1953.

133
Shame and Desire

[I]n the emotional economy of patriarchy men are not expected to feel
shame when they do something for which they should be ashamed [...]
while women are unfairly denounced as "shameless9 for behaviour that is
routinely accepted in men.51
In this way, the pornographic image functions as the look of the
Other, returning the spectators' look and giving their lived experience an
outside. The pornographic image disturbs the spectators' relation with
the film, the shame sets in at the pre-reflective level, and the spectators
apprehend their presence in the social world (my consciousness is
shame of my presence in the social world). The shock of sudden disrup-
tion with a pornographic image throws the spectators out of balance, out
of their taken-for-granted sense of being in the world, and enables the
spectators to shift their attention from their presence before the image to
the shame itself (I become conscious of my shame). The reflective
shame crystallises the dialectical elements of human subjectivity that the
subject normally experiences as aligned. Reflective shame, then, is a
moment of clarity that separates the inner and outer dimension in human
subjectivity that ordinarily appear as unified, but that in reflective shame
can for a moment be perceived separately. As Sartre has taught us,
shame stands between the self and the others, but neither simply inside,
nor simply outside, since the reference to other people in shame arises
from within. In If 6 Was 9, reflective shame simultaneously engages and
distances the spectators from the viewing experience allowing them -
through contrasting images - to experience from the inside and to
perceive from the outside, and vice versa.
In this revelation, the subject's body is not merely lived, but this
lived experience becomes "extended outside in a dimension of flight
which escapes me. My body's depth of being is for me this perceptual
'outside' of my most intimate 'inside'."52 The experience of one's body
as an object for the Other is made in and through shame. Shame means
that the subject is intensely and constantly conscious of his or her body
for the Other, seeing his or her body as it is through the Other's eyes,
learning his or her social being through his or her relation with others.
The body, then, has two ontological dimensions: I exist for myself as
my body, and I exist for myself as a body known by the Other. The
world has meaning to me with my body as a centre of reference, but my
body can be ordered from a radically different point of view, the point of
view of the Other, in the context of the social world. Women, for in-
stance, often experience their bodies not existing in their own right as
desiring bodies, but ordered from a social (male) point of view. In this

51
Woodward, 2000, p. 216.
52
Sartre, 1956, p. 461.

134
 Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

social order, female sexuality is split into two opposing complementari-

ties: a sexually promiscuous 'slut' and a decent, sexually inactive 'vir-
gin' that limit women's possibilities to fulfil their sexuality as active,
desiring subjects.
This phenomenon is deeply rooted in the values and the basic struc-
tures of systems of gender, economics, and society in the Western
world. In Finnish culture, the historical background of slut/virgin polari-
sation lies in the ideology of family and the nation: in Finland, sexually
'pure' women have traditionally been acknowledged as unifiers of the
nation. According to Arja-Liisa R&s&ien, all the social questions of the
19th and the first half of the 20th century were in one way or another tied
to the question of gender relations. A woman could achieve subjectivity
by subjugating her sensuousness into a sense of duty towards the com-
mon good (either at home or at work), or by surrendering to it. By
conceiving of their body, Finnish women conceive the whole nation.
This polarisation is characteristic of Christian thinking, in which
women's agency and active sexuality is seen threatening to the cultural
order and that has to be controlled through collective shaming and
labelling. As a 'virgin' a woman has to sacrifice her own sexuality, as a
'slut' she loses her social face. This polarisation based on Christian-
heterosexual ideology has not ceased to exist in Finnish culture. There is
no culturally accepted model of woman as sexually active that would
exist outside of a man/woman relationship (woman as a projection of
man). The project of sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s seems
from the 1990s onwards to have become an attempt to deregulate com-
mercial sex and pornography. However, this trend seems to advance the
slut/virgin polarisation in the Finnish culture, since one now defines
what kind of (female) sexuality is culturally acceptable against the
background of commercial sex and pornography. In any case, women's
bodily relation to the social world (inside) is still defined from a male
point of view (outside).54

R&sanen, 1995, pp. 67-73. There are, of course, countless examples of how notions
of the female body are influenced by the nation. Often a literary metaphor (like Helen
of Troy), the woman is a symbol of nation: when she is strong, the nation is strong;
when she is weak, the nation is weak; when she is raped, the nation, too, has been
invaded and violated. In colonialist discourse, 'virginity' underlines the 'availability'
of the land, calling for an inseminating 'penetration'. Against the background of
these male-produced paradigms, women have conceived their gender and sexuality,
either happily fulfilling their communal duties, or feeling exploited by the nation, but
never existing in their own right as desiring subjects. See, for instance, Pettman,
1996; Shohat and Stam, 1994, pp. 137-70.
54
Canaan, 1986; Nare, 1995; Saarikoski, 1998.

135
Shame and Desire

It is this interaction of the inside and outside in female subjectivity

and sexuality that the split images in If 6 Was 9 mirror, the interaction
that manifests itself in the emotion of shame and that are epitomised
through sexuality and sexual norms. In If 6 Was 9 the girls' curiosity
about sexuality is in conflict with societal, (masculine) sexual norms,
and this conflict between inside and outside, private and public, is
apparent in the emotion of shame. Indeed, everything about the film is
about that conflict, thereby telling the story of the inside of a woman's
body. By embodying the installation, the spectator embodies the female
gender 'from the inside'.55 The film ends with a series of close ups
showing girls' hands holding scissors, cutting images from pornographic
magazines and fashion journals, making a collage. In one screen, a girl
addresses the spectator, saying:
A couple of years ago I read an article about Helsinki. It showed 24 places
around the city where people make love outdoors. In every picture a couple
showed how to do it in public places.
By making the pornographic images their own and by giving the im-
ages a female face, the girls forcibly re-define the concept of female
sexuality and bring this newly defined concept into a public sphere from
where it has been excluded (this is also suggested in the film through
contrasting shots of the girls that mostly take place in an indoor setting
with a series of establishing shots of the city of Helsinki). In this way, If
6 Was 9 moves from the realm of 'sexual visions' to that of spatiality,
cultural anatomy of the space, and the way in which gender shapes one's
spatial imaging. Ultimately, the film demonstrates Giuliana Bruno's
argument of film as a practice of representation written on the body
map, a corporeal process that produces space negotiated over a woman's
body.56
Reflective shame in If 6 Was 9 is the subjective element in film that
invites the spectators in between themes of distance and proximity,
inside and outside, allowing them to realise the intersubjective texture of
subjectivity. Reflective shame is created through a tension between the
content and the form: familiar environments like cosy living rooms or
impersonal shopping malls are contrasted with a detailed and objective
pornographic dialogue coming from the mouths of the young girls, who
are at the same time playing a piano, eating, or casually varnishing their
toenails. Private sexual fantasies are being brought into a public sphere,

A viewing position which, ultimately, is not reserved to the female viewers only. As
Tania Modleski has convincingly shown in her reading of Hitchcock's Rebecca
(1940) male identification with a female position is possible, because of the male
infant's original identification with the mother. Modleski, 1988.
56
Bruno, 2002, pp. 62-4.

136
 Intersubjectivity and Embodied Affect

and the spectators are placed at the crossroads of these spheres. On the
one hand, the spectators are invited to share the girls' intimate sexual
fantasies. On the other hand, Ahtila's experimentation with images and
sounds - confusing the author, the narrator and the characters by putting
stories where adult women (including the artist herself) recall their
sexual awakening into the mouth of teenage girls; multiplying the voices
and separating them from the images; interrupting the linear representa-
tion - renders the concept of stable spectatorship incoherent. The specta-
tors are compelled to remain outside of the representation at the same
time as they are invited to experience it from within. The spectators are
made conscious of the contradiction between the private nature of the
fantasy and the public context in which it is told. The spectators9 shock
about entering into a relationship with the film in which they are invited
to experience a private sexual fantasy and to observe it at the same time
enables reflective shame to emerge, in which one's body is lived percep-
tively, as well as engaged intentionally with the world. With this tech-
nique, Ahtila examines the texture of selfhood in relation to others,
which is then given a socio-political dimension as well: the critique on
the cultural taboo of female body and sexuality. As one of the girls,
sitting on a banister with her legs apart and shot from a low angle de-
clares:
Here I sit with my legs apart like a small girl who has not learned anything
about sex. Who has no idea of the fact that a woman must hide her private
parts and lust.
The straightforward manner in which the girls talk about sexuality is
a way to re-interpret female sexuality from a third position which exists
outside the negations of masculinity - lacking, passive - through which
femininity has traditionally been described. For ElfVing, the third posi-
tion is 'the Girl' that resists the systems of representation based on
negation:
The girls actively look, think and speak this imagery of thresholds, con-
stantly reinterpreting them, and themselves. The signification of female
sexuality and the subjectivity of the Girl as lack(ing) is spatialised, repeated
[...] until it is loaded with meanings and dynamics of its own. [...] [This]
allows for endless associations and wild leaps that create ground for differ-
ence and for the new to emerge.57
In the same way, reflective shame in If 6 Was 9 can be seen as a third
position that is able to bridge the dialectical poles of subject and object,
self and Other, active and passive, seer and seen, inside and outside in
the cinematic experience. Reflective shame can be seen as constituting a

57
ElfVing, 2002, p. 211.

137
Shame and Desire

new kind of intermediate position between the spectator and the film, a
position that maintains the tension between the self and the Other, the
inside and the outside, rather than attempts to incorporate the Other
(woman) within the self (man). In this way, If 6 Was 9 invites the spec-
tator to a creative process where the spectator's body becomes a transi-
tional space through which the representation emerges intersubjectively.
This means that it is the bodily self of the spectator that encounters the
film in a dialogical interaction, as an active subject, through establishing
an emotional relationship with it whilst remaining aware of the tension
between the inner and the outer.
By confronting the spectator with sexuality and reflective shame, If 6
Was 9 creates a subject position for the spectator to enter into that
reproduces the original moment when shame arises: the moment when
the social network of the subject has disappeared. But as shame is based
on the subject's bodily capacity for and possession of experience
through cultural structures of intersubjective existence, in shame the
subject nevertheless remains embedded in the social network. In shame
the subject is at the same time 'transparent' and (re)orienting his or her
body towards the world; in the case of If 6 Was 9 towards 'new' female
sexuality beyond the negations of masculinity: an active, energetic, and
self-determining sexuality that is not being carried out through the Other
(male, nation). According to Sartre, this kind of reflective consciousness
can be properly called a moral consciousness, since it cannot arise
without at the same time revealing social values: "It is obvious that I
remain free in my reflective consciousness to direct my attention on
these values or to neglect them."58
Shame is a possibility for reflective reorientation to the social world
precisely because of its ambiguous relationship to the societal values: on
the one hand shame interrupts the subject's bond with the community; in
shame the subject experiences alienation from the community. On the
other hand, it is through shame that the communal norms and values
make their return, offering the subject a chance to re-articulate them. As
a result, the unbearable transparency in shame paradoxically becomes a
way of recognising one's indebtedness to other subjects in the world and
re-negotiating one's position in the social network.

Sartre, 1956, p. 146.

138
 Conclusion

In this book, I have examined contemporary cinema against the sell?

Other relationship that manifests itself both in the way in which films
epitomise this relationship and in the way in which the spectator relates
to the film intellectually and emotionally. The initial starting point was
the question of where we could turn in the field of film studies to dis-
cuss spectatorship in the context of understandings and misunderstand-
ings, fascinations and rejections, involvements and indifferences that
exist throughout the locus of seeing and being seen. The most important
theories on film spectatorship, be they psychoanalytical or cognitive,
often do not take the social dimension of spectatorship adequately into
account. Instead, they often assume an ideal spectator, and cultural and
historical questions of spectators' (emotional) responses are thus ne-
glected. On the other hand, within the Cultural Studies approach 'cul-
ture' is offered as a kind of explanatory category into which all individ-
ual meanings can be fitted.1
In order to explain the ever-changing 'oddities' in contemporary cin-
ema, then, the most relevant approach seems to be to focus on the
relationship between the self and the Other through the Sartrean concept
of intersubjectivity, a concept that deals with both the individual and the
sociohistorical dimensions of subjectivity. Intersubjectivity means that
there is a continuous exchange between the subject and the social world
through which the 'outside' of the collective experience becomes the
'inside' of the subject's psychic life. The subject exists in the social
world in an embodied, active, dynamic manner, anticipating how his or
her actions will be seen by others. The subject's presence in the social
world requires that the subject be both aware of the world and aware of
his or her presence in the world; the subject always depends on others in
order to know him- or herself. We see, hear, feel, and express ourselves
through actions that in part always remain beyond ourselves, always
beyond the reach of my self-awareness, in the Other. We must look to
others to see ourselves and to know ourselves. We can see by ourselves,
but only in the presence of others can we become aware of our look, be

On this problem, see, for instance, Massumi, 2002, p. 253: "Cultural Studies [...]
takes the collectivity as already constituted, as a determinate set of actually existing
persons. [...] [I]t restricts its movement to the manifestation of a content considered
to be generally applicable to a collection of particular persons, to an established cate-
gory or class of human. [...] It generally-particularly misses change."

139
Shame and Desire

it a returned look (Sin, Man Bites Dog, World of Glory, Hidden) or an

imagined look by the Third Other (The Idiots, Drifting Clouds). Our
self-consciousness emerges and is sustained by taking an external
viewpoint on ourselves. This is why, according to Jack Katz, "the
identities of others, as anticipated or encountered, are from the start
intrinsic to the shaping of one's own frames of action and of the self that
is inscribed in them."2 These frames of action are socially and culturally
constructed, but they reside 'in the flesh' - in the affective operations of
the body and the senses.3
In order to understand spectatorship, then, one has to understand sub-
jectivity; and in order to understand subjectivity, one has to take the
subject's reciprocal relationship with the Other into account, since this
relationship is not simply an external one, but contributes to the founda-
tion of subjectivity itself. By focusing on the issues of intersubjectivity,
it is possible to abandon the models of spectatorship based on the oppos-
ing positions of subject and object, internal and external, active and
passive, seer and seen. This also means that the role of cultural specific-
ity as a component of visual analysis lies in the way in which contempo-
rary films, documentaries, photographs, and video installations repro-
duce the intersubjective modes of social engagement, modes that could
be discovered in the emotional experience.
Focusing on emotions in the cinematic experience, this book has of-
fered an insight into the ways of looking and being looked at within the
terms of the social and the intersubjective. The primary argument was
that, in contemporary cinema, the traditional juxtapositions of self and
Other, subject and object, seer and seen, active and passive, observer
and participant, knower and known are no longer sufficient grounds for
theorising spectatorship in terms of the intersubjective. In order to
conceptualise this new way of looking, it is necessary to create a 'third
position' that is able both to break up the traditional juxtapositions of
subject and object of the look and to maintain the tension that underlies
them. Because shame can be seen as a realm of intersubjectivity, I have
drawn particular attention to shame and the way in which it is founded
on the relationship between the self and the Other. This is subjectivity
invested in the existence of others, the social (rather than ontological)
dimension of intersubjectivity, simultaneously within and beyond one's
own socially conditioned field of (embodied) vision, in the context of

2
Katz, 1999, pp. 314-6.
3
See, for instance, Mazis, 1993, p. 319: "To be embodied, to be located in time and
space, to be with other people, to have the world matter, and to be able to direct one's
focus towards what is important to one only come to be as felt, as a result of finding
the how of letting the world move one e-motionally."

140
 Conclusion

the transnational {Against the Wall If 6 Was 9, Head-On). To make my

case, I have brought in the issues of the relationship between the self
and the Other, communal identification, affect, and the bodily nature of
intersubjectivity in order to show how cinema both engages us in new
kinds of relationships with and distances us from its world in order to
understand its conditions of existence.
Emotions, such as shame, are not 'only' emotions; they are also con-
cepts. To understand a concept is to place it in a theoretical framework
of interlinked concepts. For me, making sense of the relationship be-
tween the film and the spectator through emotions is to make sense of
hitherto non-explored aspects of cinematic subjectivity that shed light on
the intersubjective nature of cinematic experience. It is the contention of
the book that the concepts here highlighted, and the recourse to Sartre's
theories could actually redirect and invigorate the study of cinema and
the new forms of spectatorship much more generally, as emotions are
found within the intersubjective, linked across differences through
shared ways of being-in-the-world.
Jacques Derrida once wrote that the heart is the organ of thinking
and not only the organ of feeling, love and desire.4 So although the
"transnational F who speaks in this book has specific reasons of the
heart, it hopes to have made a contribution to understanding why and
how we are 'interpellated' and fascinated by, but also so much involved
with contemporary cinema. It will hopefully also have explained why
traditional theories of disembodied, asocial or agendered theories of
spectatorship are insufficient for understanding the changes taking place
in our visual culture, but also how this culture is shaping our intimate
relationships. Contemporary thinkers will most certainly have to take
into account this refiguring of public and private, self and other, subject
and object, individual and community, local and global.

4
Derrida, 2005, p. 289.

141
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150
 Index

2001 - The Space Odyssey, 116, Birnbaum, Daniel, 126

118 Blanchot, Maurice, 122
Ahmed, Sara, 67, 103 Bluest Eye, The, 69, 85
Ahtila, Eija-Liisa, 25, 121, 122, Bonzel, Andr6,24,46
123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 137 Breaking the Waves, 22
Akin, Fatih, 25, 102 Breathless (A bout de souffle), 34
Ali - Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Bride Retires, The, 34
essen Seele auf), 71 Bruno, Giuliana, 27, 136
Allen, Richard, 33 Buftuel, Luis, 34
Allen, Woody, 35 Burgoyne, Robert, 59
Almodovar, Pedro, 77 Butler, Judith, 91, 94,95, 111
Althusser, Louis, 11, 12 Canaan, Joyce, 135
Anderson, Benedict, 74 Cannon, Betty, 16,62, 64
Anderson, Joseph, 117 Carroll, Noel, 13,15
Andersson, Roy, 24, 52, 53, 54 Cartwright, Lisa, 90
Andrew, Dudley, 11 Casebier, Allan, 112
Anne, AkiandGod, 126 Celebration (Dogme #7 -
Annie Hall, 35 Festen), 73
Apo, Satu, 68,69, 79 Chanter, Tina, 95
Arbus, Diane, 90 Chaplin, Charlie, 93
Arendt, Hannah, 12 Chion, Michel, 48,93
Aronson, Roland, 65 City Lights, 93
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 97 Connor, Steven, 131
Barnes, Hazel, 55, 70 Conrad, Tony, 117
Barthes, Roland, 106 Consolation Service
Bartky, Sandra Lee, 19 (Lohdutusseremonia), 124,
Baudry, Jean-Louis, 11, 12 125, 126
Beauvoir, Simone de, 20,21, 133 Cowie, Elizabeth, 73
Belvaux, Remy, 24,46 Crying Game, The, 95
Benedict, Ruth, 67 Cubitt, Sean, 32
Benin, David, 90 Danto, Arthur C, 54, 55
Benjamin, Jessica, 91 Dayan, Daniel, 11
Bergman, Ingmar, 34, 35 Denzin, Norman K., 67
Bergoffen, Debra, 21 Derrida, Jacques, 21, 141
Shame and Desire
Descartes, Ren£, 112
Doane, Mary Ann, 111
Dogville, 19,20,21,22
Donlon, Helen, 116
Drifting Clouds (Kauas pilvet
karkaavat), 24, 76, 78, 79, 82,
83, 140
Dunne, J.W., 117
Easy Rider, 90
Eisenstein, Sergei, 114
Elfving, Taru, 123, 124,137
Elsaesser, Thomas, 27, 70, 71,
72,77
Every Man for Himself (Sauve
quipeut (la vie)), 48
Farocki, Hanon, 92
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 70,
71,72
Feagin, Susan, 15
Fell, J.P., 119
Ferris Bueller 's Day Off, 35
Fight Club, 35
Fincher, David, 35
Flicker, The, Ml
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, 59
Fox, Nik Farrell, 60, 65
Frank, Adam, 39,41,42
Freud, Sigmund, 79, 110, 111,
133
Fuller, Samuel, 35
Funny Games, 47, 57, 78
Genet, Jean, 71
Gibson, James J., 115
Godard, Jean-Luc, 12, 34, 35,48
Gray, 122
Grodal, Torben, 13
Gunning, Tom, 34
Hallie, Philip, 53
Haneke, Michael, 24,47, 56, 57,
58, 59, 77, 78
Hansen,Mark, 109, 118
Harsin, Jayson, 23
Harvey, Robert, 18
Hate (La haine), 9, 10, 32
Head-On (Gegen die Wand), 25,
102, 141
Heath, Stephen, 11
Heidegger, Martin, 12
Helke, Susanna, 24, 36, 52, 66
Hidden (Cache), 24, 56, 58, 59,
140
Hitchcock, Alfred, 136
Howells, Christina, 61
Hughes, John, 35
Husserl, Edmund, 16
Idiots, The (Dogme #2 -
Idioterne), 24, 73, 75, 76, 140
Idle Ones, The (Joutilaat), 66
If 6 Was 9 (Jos 6 olis 9), 25, 127,
129, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138
Irreversible (Irreversible), 25,
114,117,118
Jameson, Fredric, 60,68, 70, 82
Jordan, Neil, 95
Kassovitz, Matthieu, 9
Katz, Jack, 31, 130, 140
Kaurismaki, Aki, 24, 76, 78
Killer's Kiss, 34, 35
Klein, Melanie, 11
Kristeva, Julia, 91, 93,94,95,
102,104
Kubrick, Stanley, 34, 116
Kuhn, Annette, 26
Kundera, Milan, 77
Lacan, Jacques, 11, 12, 31, 32,
38,61,62,63,64,73,93,98,
110,111
Lafond, Frank, 48
Lauretis, Teresa de, 111
Levinas, Emmanuel, 21
LSvi-Strauss, Claude, 60,61
Lewis, Michael, 19,20, 31, 64,
67,81,82,130
Love is a Treasure (Rakkaus on
aarre), 126
Lupton, Deborah, 15
MacCabe, Colin, 11
Man Bites Dog (C'est arrive pres
de chez vous), 24,46,47,48,
49, 140
Manderlqy, 22,23
Marcuse, Herbert, 60
Marker, Chris, 92
Marks, Laura, 112
Marlowe, Christopher, 76
Masked Woman in a Wheelchair,
90
Massumi, Brian, 115, 121, 139
Mazis, Glen A., 109, 140
Me/We, 122, 123, 124
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 112,
119
Metz, Christian, 11,33,49, 50,
72,73
Michelson, Annette, 118
Modleski, Tania, 136
Morrison, Toni, 69, 85
Mulvey, Laura, 11, 12, 33,49, 50
My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie), 48
Naked Kiss, The, 35
NSre, Sari, 135
Nathanson, Donald L., 81
Natural Born Killers, 47
Nichols, Bill, 36
No£, Gaspar, 25, 114, 116
Noll Brinkmann, Christine, 111
Okay, 122, 123, 124
Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 11, 12
Pettman, Jan Jindy, 135
Piaget, Jean, 118
Plantinga, Carl, 13, 15
Poelvoorde, Benoit, 24,46
Probyn, Elspeth, 103, 104,107
Raisanen, Arja-Liisa, 135
Rascaroli, Laura, 114
Rebecca, 136
Rodowick, David, 50
Rutherford, Anne, 111
Saarikoski, Helena, 135
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9,10,16,17,
18,26,27,29,30,31,32,33,
36,37,38,40,41,50,51,52,
54,55,56,60,61,62,63,64,
65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 82, 83, 85,
93,100,109,110,111,112,
119,120,121,126,129,130,
131, 134, 138, 141
Scheperlein, Peter, 21,22
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 39,41,
42, 69, 90
Serres, Michel, 117
Shaviro, Steven, 111, 112
Sherman, Cindy, 92
Shohat, Ella, 135
Siltala, Juha, 68, 79, 86, 129
Silverman, Kaja, 12, 30, 63, 73,
92,111
Sin - A Documentary on Daily
Offences (Synti - Dokumentti
jokapaivaisista rikoksista), 24,
36, 37, 38, 39,42,45,49, 52,
140
Small, Edward S., 117
Smith, Greg M., 13, 15
Smith, Murray, 13, 32
Sobchack, Vivian, 26, 112, 113
Solomon, Robert, 104
Something Happened (Nagonting
har hant), 24, 52, 53, 54
Sorfa, David, 57
Stadler, Jane, 112
Stam, Robert, 59, 135
Stocker, Michael, 14
Shame and Desire
Stoller, Robert, 133
Stone, Oliver, 47
Studlar, Gaylyn, 36
Summer with Monika (Sommaren
med Monika), 34
Suutari, Virpi, 24, 36, 52, 66
Tan, Ed S., 13,14
Taylor, Gabrielle, 31, 130
Today (Tanddn), 123, 124, 127
Tomkins, Silvan, 15, 88, 89,90,
103, 120, 129
Trier, Lars von, 19,22,23,24,
73, 75, 77
Turunen, Pekka, 25, 85, 86,90,
92,95,97,98,101,102,103
Vinterberg, Thomas, 73
154
Vogler, Carolyn, 67
Wasington, 22
Wider, Kathleen, 131
Willemen, Paul, 97
Williams, Bernard, 19, 31
Williams, Linda, 50, 111, 133
Wollheim, Richard, 119
Woodward, Kathleen, 20, 69,85,
133, 134
World of Glory (Hdrligt dr
jorden)9 24, 52, 53, 54, 140
Wright, Elizabeth, 73
Wurmser, Leon, 68, 129
Yli-Annala, Kari, 122, 123, 126
Ylflstalo, Pekka, 79
Zizek, Slavoj,41,93,94
 Rethinking Cinema

The main purpose of the "Rethinking Cinema" series is to provide film

scholars as well as professionals from the audiovisual field with innovative
research material in the field of film aesthetics, theory and history. Many
areas of last century's main attraction are still there to be rediscovered or
have seldom been approached in the past. Consequently, priority is given to
film concepts, genres, oeuvres or authors which have not been frequently
dealt with. Conference proceedings, collections of essays, revised doctoral
theses or monographs are published and have to distinguish themselves by a
considerable degree of originality, audacity and scientific rigour, without
neglecting the transdisciplinary and crosscultural aspects related to different
branches from the Humanities such as Art History, Philosophy or Linguis­
tics. The series welcomes manuscripts written in French and/or in English
as well as translations of noteworthy texts from other foreign languages.

Series Editor: Dominique NASTA,

University Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)

Series' Titles
No.l - Dominique NASTA & Didier HUVELLE (eds.), Le son en perspec-
tive : nouvelles recherches / New Perspectives in Sound Studies, 2004,
ISBN 978-90-5201-208-7
N° 2 - Muriel ANDRIN, Malefiques. Le Melodrame filmique americain et
ses heroines (1940-1953), 2005 (2nd printing 2007), ISBN 978-90-5201-
210-0
No.3 - Tarja LAINE, Shame and Desire. Emotion, Intersubjectivityy Cinema,
2007, ISBN 978-90-5201-062-5