Visual Pleasure in Playing for Time (1980)

Whilst studying both a module on sexual difference theory and representations of the Holocaust, it is becoming increasingly clearer that theories of sexuality are relational to the portrayals of the ‘Shoah’. In this close analysis, I apply (or perhaps a better way to put it, I think through) Laura Mulvey’s theory of visual pleasure (1975) in relation to a scene in the 1980 television film Playing for Time, directed by Arthur Miller.[1]

It is important to note that, like all cultural artefacts, Holocaust representation and its memory have been facilitated under the structures of sexual difference (phallocentrism, patriarchy, and sexism) which symbolically prevail the masculine over the feminine. This has affected the ways by which viewers watch and receive depictions of the ‘female holocaust experience.’ Such is the case within Playing for Time. Despite the atrocities the film depicts, I believe Fania Fenelon – the film’s protagonist – is depicted in a way that enables both the characters within the film as well as the spectator to project their scopophilic fantasy onto Fenelon in particular scenes. This is important as, in doing so, the viewer can gaze at Fenelon as the desirable, beautiful, and vulnerable heroine and thus become attached to her character, helping them deal with the emotional turmoil the narrative of the film enacts. The enactment of visual pleasure is then, a filmic device, employed by Miller to make the viewer of Playing for Time think and feel a certain way – this is, as I will try to make clear, an unconscious act. Of course, this relates to wider issues of sexual difference, as well as the portrayal of women in film generally, and the problems of holocaust representation, but I cannot go into those factors here. Instead, this close analysis asks how far Mulvey’s now-famous theory of visual pleasure and narrative cinema can be thought through a film about a woman’s experience in Auschwitz Birkenau. It will ask how a scene perhaps moulds her theory into something different and will pose whether or not it works in the same way as it does for thinking about 1950s Hollywood cinema.

Figure 1 - Still from Playing for Time (57:22 mins).

To start then here is a major difference: Playing for Time is not a Hollywood film — it tells the story of Fania Fenelon as she lives through Auschwitz as a desired and beloved member of the all-female Orchestra. The scene I am interested in (57:24-59:60 mins) opens with the camera directed towards the ‘in-film spectators’ (Figure 1). I call them this because they are not the “protagonists” in the traditional Mulverian sense. They do not lead the narrative. They are the opposite, the antagonist; the characters in the narrative that we are not supposed to identify with. Yet like the male protagonist in 1950s Hollywood films, these in-film male spectators project a ‘fantasy’ onto Fenelon with which the real spectator can identify his desire. As the out-film spectator watching this scene, we assume the gaze of both the SS guardsmen/women and the other female prisoners and watch Fenelon sing through their eyes (see Figure 1).[2] Through her idyll and melancholy performance, she holds their gaze with her beauty.

What is she singing? She performs a number from the opera Madame Butterfly (1904). After transcribing the lyrics, she appears to be singing to a male lover. Is there some kind of dual identification going on? Do the SS guards and Dr Mengele go through a similar identification process as the out-film spectator does? Could it be argued that they identify their desire with the male lover Fenelon is singing to? Perhaps so. I suggest this as Fenelon performs as the passive imperilled women figure and sings the lyrics, ‘until he’s reached the summit’, waiting ‘for a long time’. She entices ‘him’ with her angelic beauty and calls ‘abet to tease him’. Perhaps for Mengele and his fellow guardsmen, Fenelon’s singing (as the character from Madame Butterfly) allows for the unconscious identification of desire which resembles the same identification the spectator watching the film goes through. So, when watching the film, is one identifying with both Mengele and the male figure in Fenelon’s song, creating an identification upon an identification which facilitates the scopophilic desire? As the scene develops, the camera focuses on the gaze of Dr Mengele alone; we begin to watch Fenelon through his eyes only (Figure 5). Mengele is entranced by her looks and her singing voice — she, like Monroe in the opening scene of The River of No Return, becomes a spectacle.[3]

Figure 2 - Still from Playing for Time (58:32).

Figure 3 - Still from Playing for Time (59:27).

The camera frame continues to oscillate between Fenelon and Mengele. The framing of the scene with Fenelon alone is important (Figure 2&4). Similarly to the Monroe scene in The River of No Return, it is this part where the “diegesis” is broken or forgotten — the part where Fenelon becomes a desired object and an object of visual pleasure. For a moment, we forget about the bleak narrative. Fenelon’s beauty, that which is looked at and desired through the eyes of Mengele and the SS (and subsequently us as the viewers of the film), begins to disrupt ‘the flow of the action’.[4] We watch Mengele project his fantasy onto her, whilst she simply performs. This is elevated by particular aesthetic qualities which are too part of the frame. Looking back at this part of the scene, where the camera frames Fenelon’s head and shoulders, we can see a ball of light above her head (see Figure 1). Accentuating her angelic quality, she is desirable, idyllic, and beautiful; she is the object of the gaze and is performing for them, and us, taking us out of the ‘narrative space.’

In Mulvey’s analysis, women display “to-be-looked-at-ness” through passivity.[5] The male viewer is the active onlooker, and as we have already underpinned transforms the woman figure into his desirable object through his operative look. This binary is important to Mulvey’s analysis; the active/passive distinction synergistically works with the other distinction Mulvey repeatedly makes, that being identification (active; male) / desire (passive; female). In Mulvey’s case, both are dialectical processes, they need one another to operate. One cannot enact a scopophilic desiring gaze without identifying with the active in-film male onlooker and vis-a-versa. Yet, what’s different in Playing for Time is that Fenelon is the protagonist. The film is based on her Holocaust memoir; throughout most of the film, she directs us through the ‘narrative space’. She is then, an active agent in the making of the story. Despite understanding this, is she ‘active’ in this particular scene? I would argue not. Isolating the scene from the overall narrative, Fenelon is mostly passive, or at least controlled by the active look like a passive object for visual and erotic consumption; and, as I have underpinned, this is the part of the film where the “renaissance space” is broken. Unlike in the rest of the film, where Fenelon leads the narrative as the active protagonist, here she is docile and set up to be controlled by the look. Throughout the film then, she is both active and passive simultaneously, unlike Monroe’s character in The River of No Return who ‘in herself has not the slightest importance.’[6]

Figure 4 - Still from Playing for Time (59:02).

Figure 5 - Still from Playing for Time (58:44)

Moving on, for Mulvey the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, is enacted through a particular visual appearance. She notes this on page 19 stating, ‘In their traditional exhibitionist role [in Hollywood cinema] women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.’[7] This ‘appearance code’ refers to a ‘Monroeness’: the look of the feminine, blonde, 1950s bombshell. In the case of Playing for Time and this particular scene, Fenelon doesn’t possess such a look. She is a victim of trauma and is without those qualities that make the female figure in Mulvey’s view, an ‘erotic spectacle’. But does this matter? Does it prevent her from becoming the passive and desired spectacle? It does not – she is still desired through the gaze of the male SS and possesses that sense of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness.’ She too is performing her beauty, just as Monroe does in her introductory scene of The River of No Return. It is just that her beauty appears less iconically feminine. Perhaps one could argue, although this contradicts my previous view, that her outward traumatic look – her baldness and thinness – takes away some of that “to-be-looked-at-ness”. Yet, although not at all like Monroe, she is still visibly beautiful and as such can become an erotic spectacle through a scopophilic gaze.

In parts of the scene (59:32 mins), we also assume the gaze of the other female prisoners, who also watch Fenelon sing. At one point, we watch a female Kapo project her gaze onto Fenelon (see Figure 3, see above). Thus, Fenelon is watched from all angles in the room at once. Does the action of the gaze change when Fenelon is looked at by the other women? In this case, for the women watching, unlike for the in-film (and out-film) male spectator, Fenelon does not pose the threat of castration. In the Freudian view, all the women have been “castrated”. For the men looking, perhaps Mengele in particular, Fenelon both installs fear and desire within them, and it is this which causes one to project their scopophilic fantasy onto her. For the women watching Fenelon, their gaze is perhaps not sexual but still somewhat scopophilic. Her voice and beauty are their saving grace; they know that if Fenelon can please the SS (and she does in this case), their lives will be saved. Their gaze then does not act in the same way as that of the SS but still has some pleasurable projection.

I could go on thinking, but what is clear is that Mulvey’s theory of visual pleasure is at large in Playing for Time. The slight variations in thinking about this theory through a film about the Holocaust both nuance and reshape its framework but do not refute its relevance. What is evident is that binary and hierarchical ‘sexual difference’ is under the skin of all anthropological matters, even in depictions of atrocities.

Endnotes

[1] Playing for Time (57:22), online video recording, YouTube.com, (unknown date of publication) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SOuGr835SI> [Accessed: 12 March 2024], (57:24-59:60 mins).

[2] One could ponder for a while on how the gaze nuances through the eyes of the female SS guards (Figure 1, both seen on the right of the still). I understand that this complicates Mulvey’s theory and perhaps opens some further insight, but for the purpose of the exercise I choose to ignore it mostly.

[3] McINTYRE1987, River of no return (1954) Part 1, online video recording, DAILYMOTION, (March 13, 2012) <https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xpyr8b> [Accessed: 12 March 2024], (5:26 mins).

[4] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen (1975), (reprinted in, Visual and Other Pleasures, Macmillan, 1998) pp.15-26, (p.19).

[5] Mulvey, p.19.

[6] Budd Boetticher (1958), in Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen (1975), (reprinted in, Visual and Other Pleasures, Macmillan, 1998) pp.15-26, (p.19).

[7] Mulvey, p.19.