Consuming Distractions in Prix de beauté

We annihilate beauty when we link the artistic creation with practical interests and transform the spectator into a selfishly interested bystander. The scenic background of the [photo]play is not presented in order that we decide whether we want to spend our next vacation there. The interior decoration of the rooms is not exhibited as a display for a department store. . . . A good photoplay must be isolated and complete in itself like a beautiful melody. It is not an advertisement for the newest fashions.

—Hugo Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study

In a profound sense, Berlin audiences act truthfully when they increasingly shun these art events [that claim the status of high art]. . . preferring instead the surface glamour of the stars, films, revues, and spectacular shows. Here, in pure externality, the audience encounters itself; its own reality is revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions.

—Siegfried Kracauer, "Cult of Distraction"

Prix de beauté (dir. Augusto Genina, France), the 1930 production starring Louise Brooks, proves an interesting case study for a feminist examination of the much contested debate about the pleasures of the "culture industry." As it emerged within the Frankfurt School, this debate hinged on a central opposition between traditional art as "contemplation" and mass culture as "distraction." In both its mise-en-scène and its narrative, Prix de beauté stages this opposition, portraying one woman's complex relationship to the pleasures of mass culture. The film's narrative traces the mobility of Lucienne (played by Brooks), an aspiring New Woman of the 1920s, whose dreams and desires find their realization in the fame and luxury that accompany her appointment as "Miss Europe." Even as the narrative prescribes a rather limited role for women in the age of mechanical reproduction, in the mise-en-scène images of a more ambiguous modernity proliferate, a modernity rife with unrealized potential. The objects represented in the mise-en-scène and their cinematic rendering recall the historical avant-garde's attempt to harness modern technology to their own utopian goals and, indeed, address the spectator as a "selfishly interested bystander."

By contrasting the epigraphs of Münsterberg and Kracauer, I orient my project around the opposing positions that locate cinema's artistic value in either unity or disunity, contemplation or distraction. This opposition resurfaces in feminist film theory's attempt to both theorize cinema's relationship to women in general and attend to the particular details of a given film. Additionally, the epigraphs point to the importance of modern decor, or "surface glamour," in contributing to a disunified, fragmented, distracting notion of cinema. I find certain parallels between Münsterberg's distrust of these visual distractions and later psychoanalytic film theory's censuring of visual "fetishism." My strategic focus on the pleasures of mise-en-scène takes its place within particular debates of feminist film theory, as I oppose many psychoanalytically oriented feminist critiques that either ignore or censure the pleasures of cinematic imagery. Rather, I want to examine the potential benefits and problems of women's pleasure as it coincided with consumer culture in the 1920s.

Because its cinematic style mimics the free-floating imagery of the modern cityscape, and because its narrative specifically addresses issues of women's pleasure in the late 1920s, Prix de beauté provides an excellent anchor for a historical examination that Patrice Petro would describe as simultaneously "formalist and culturalist." ¹ Petro identifies the historical turn taken by many feminists who find apparatus theory inadequate and, "in an effort to reintroduce both historical and sexual specificity into theories of cinematic perception," examine "the ways in which a particular history (the history of consumer capitalism) transformed not just the organization of narrative and visual pleasure, but also the forms of subjectivity associated with a female spectator-subject" (75). In fact, the visual pleasures of consumer capitalism that surface in particular details of Prix de beauté problematize many narrative-based theories of female spectatorship and...