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Georgina’s Reasons Schlöndorff’s next film, Georgina’s Reasons (Georginas Gründe, 1974) would appear to be a rather routine television assignment. It is on the surface a conventional, rather straightforward adaptation of a story by Henry James made as part of a series of five James adaptations coproduced for French and German television, with the other episodes directed by Claude Chabrol, Paul Seban, and Tony Scott (Appel). Schlöndorff worked from a script by Peter Adler, but on close inspection one sees that Georgina’s Reasons picks up two major motifs that run through Schlöndorff’s other work: the impossibility of love in a society that offers too many constraints and the problem of being a free-minded woman in that same repressive society. In adapting this Henry James story to television, Schlöndorff has deliberately turned a detached, thirdperson narrative into a subjective, first-person drama. He has, either by instinct or design, created a work in which the patterns of his mise-en-scène duplicate for the television viewer the patterns of looking and desire that operate within his own fictional narrative. In portraying a man’s desire to possess an unresponsive woman, Schlöndorff employs mechanisms of voyeurism, of a male gaze directed at an idealized woman, to create a visual analogue to the character ’s internal state. In giving a story of female resistance an uncomprehending male point of view, he strengthens the woman’s mystery and power. At the same time, this treatment may become problematic from a feminist viewpoint, in its adoption of strategies similar to those of patriarchal traditional cinema. Georgina’s Reasons is the story of a young woman from a good New York family who marries a young naval officer, Raymond Benyon (Joachim Bissmeyer), against the will of her parents. Georgina Gressie (Edith Clever) keeps the marriage a secret and makes her husband swear not to reveal the marriage until she permits. She has a child, which she goes to Italy to deliver, still keeping the marriage from her family. After virtually abandoning her baby, she marries again but still refuses to free her first husband to remarry legally. 11 121 Inversion of Victorian Conventions Set in the nineteenth century, the movie relates to Schlöndorff’s earlier work in raising issues about the emancipation of women, but for both James and Schlöndorff the title Georgina’s Reasons is clearly ironic. We never learn Georgina’s reasons directly, and the movie’s fiction is perhaps best seen as a deliberate reversal of the conventional Victorian narrative (seen in one of its most famous variants in D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East) whereby the man exploits a woman, impregnates her, then walks out on her and the child. Here it is the woman who uses the man, becomes pregnant, then walks out on both father and baby. Georgina reverses the traditional double standard; the film becomes a kind of antigenre film. Schlöndorff uses this antigenre structure to suggest that Georgina, like so many other Schlöndorff heroines, is a woman whose odd behaviors arise out of the conditions of the society in which she lives. Her unarticulated reasons are ultimately political and feminist. Despite its deceptive simplicity, Georgina’s Reasons is not simply an impersonal , academic literary adaptation. Rather, it reveals Schlöndorff’s understanding of those qualities in the original story that make it highly suitable to visualization. Georgina’s Reasons explores the ability of the filmic medium both to reveal and conceal the interior thoughts and feelings of characters. The movie opens to us Benyon’s thoughts and feelings while we at the same time share his ability to read Georgina’s internal motives for her externally eccentric behavior. As Schlöndorff constructs the film, the actress who plays Georgina, Edith Clever, becomes an object of our fascination and admiration. Much as Benyon has done, we scrutinize her beauty and try to decipher her motivations. Georgina’s Reasons is a film about sexual frustration, about Benyon’s desire for Georgina and his inability to fulfill it, and about his inability to remarry and so fulfill any sexual desire. Benyon’s frustration becomes analogous to the way in which the audience is both tantalized by Edith Clever’s beauty and similarly can neither act on it nor even fully understand the reasons for the fascination. (See illustration 16.) Schlöndorff is faithful to the events of James’s narrative. Shifts of point of...

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