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2. Partition and Desire in the Films of Joseph H. Lewis
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38 2 Hugh S. Manon Partition and Desire in the Films of Joseph H. Lewis If the paths to jouissance have something in them that dies out, that tends to make them impassable, prohibition, if I may say so, becomes its all-terrain vehicle , its half-track truck, that gets it out of the circuitous routes that lead man back in a roundabout way toward the rut of a short and well-trodden satisfaction. Jacques Lacan, seminar 7 Sometimes I’d only use half a face; sometimes it would be out of focus. But this was me. This was what I saw. This was what I wanted to do and it came across. Joseph H. Lewis, as interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich Released in 1945, Joseph H. Lewis’s breakthrough film My Name Is Julia Ross begins with real temerity, forcing the viewer to contemplate, at great length, the back of a woman’s head.1 It is a rainy afternoon in London and a female figure in a trench coat walks unhurriedly across a dim street. As she drifts into the background, the camera cuts closer, tracking her from behind as she proceeds up six steps to the front doors of a rooming house. Soaking wet, the woman pushes open the doors and enters the front hallway, where a floor-scrubbing housekeeper (Joy Harington) accosts her: “Here—wipe your feet, will ya, and oblige me that has to clean up after ya?” The camera continues to stalk the lodger, admitting nothing of her countenance, and after some catty small talk the housekeeper indicates that there is a letter on the hall table addressed to her interlocutor. “Nobody writes to me,” the faceless woman replies. “It must be an ad.” Collecting her letter, the woman turns toward the camera, now positioned at waist level, and a cut-in reveals the handwriting on the envelope—“Miss Julia Ross, 51 Carrington Street, Partition and Desire 39 Bloomsbury, London”—providing the identity of the one who holds it. It is a wedding invitation from Dennis Bruce, another resident of the building. The housekeeper contemptuously asks when the wedding will be. Finally, after one minute and twenty seconds of scrupulous withholding, the camera tilts up to reveal the face we have been unable to view. Julia Ross (Nina Foch) appears dazed, her eyes staring off into space as she responds, “It was yesterday.” Appearing in various configurations throughout the mature films of Joseph H. Lewis, the strategy of nondisclosure that dominates this initial scene might most usefully be termed partitioning. The term functions here in two ways. First, in spatial terms, the face of Julia Ross has been perfectly obscured, neatly dividing the profilmic space into two parts: a fore-zone that sees (that of the housekeeper) and an aft-zone that fails to see (that of the viewer). Second, in temporal terms, this withholding extends beyond the point at which one would conventionally expect the woman’s face to appear . The longer we wait, the more it becomes clear that we are temporarily being kept in the dark so that her identity can be dramatically unveiled at some later point. Our experience of the event is thus divided into two periods: a presumably finite present moment (in which we lack) and an anticipated future moment (in which we will have attained). Crucially, too, the term partitioning signals that the viewer is consciously aware that such divisions are at play. Given the camera’s reluctance to show, along with the sheer duration of its forestalling, the missing-ness of Julia’s face becomes conspicuous in a manner that borders on the self-reflexive. Moreover, when her face is revealed, there is no startling payoff—her face is not scarred, for instance, or bandaged à la Claude Rains. The more we watch, the more we become aware that our desire is being toyed with, that our wishing to see is a direct response to the camera’s deliberate obstruction of our view. In other words, instead of compelling his audience to imagine a solution, Lewis foregrounds the obstaculous foreground itself, as if to say, here, take a look at how your desire works. This impulse to spell out the structure of desire constitutes a major current in Lewis’s oeuvre, becoming simultaneously more acute and more abstract as his career progresses. To suggest, as a number of auteurist critics have, that Lewis is a “stylist without a theme”2 misses the point: the director ’s heavy emphasis...