Filmic Form and the Gaze Revisited in Virginia García del Pino’s El Jurado

This is the text of a paper I delivered here at UIC in Chicago last Friday as part of our ongoing encounters on “Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Archive in Spanish Cinema”.

Virginia García del Pino has long been interested in symmetry and asymmetry, in diverted correspondence and the distortions of reflective surfaces and reflected images. Whether it be subtly expressed via maids and their mistresses in Mexico (Sí Señora, 2012); by two sisters in Mi hermana y yo (2009); through the defining relation of jobs to the workers who perform them (Lo que tú dices que soy, 2007); or explicitly in her 2010 film titled Espacio simétrico. Writing on Lo que dices que soy, Javier Garmar describes the film — in terms of its diegetic subjects — as being like “a deforming mirror.” In this sense, El Jurado/The Jury (2015) is no different. Indeed, in interview García del Pino also describes her piece as a mirror, but, unlike Lo que dices que soy, it is one that reflects back on us, the spectators. In this disconcerting imbalance — that generates a certain disquiet, a vulnerability, or an anxiety on the part of the viewer — lies a complex relation between spectator, the filming, the object of the filming by the camera, the theme and subject of the film, and what we might term the “gaze”. The gaze here is ineludible, at the center of the frame (in every sense of the word frame), at every moment of the film. El Jurado is a film defined by the “gaze.’ What is in doubt, however, is what exactly is meant when we talk about the “gaze.”

Joan Copjek observes that “…the gaze is always the point from which identification is conceived by film theory to take place” (22). Meanwhile Todd McGowan makes the provocative claim that “Film theory today is almost nonexistent” (ix). Tracing a thumbnail genealogy of film theory, the latter points out that the turn to cultural studies in the 1980s (and this persists to the present day) meant abandoning theoretical approaches to film in favor of discussion of production, industry, and reception. Simultaneously, he takes to task (and does so by following the work of Copjek) the theorists of the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly those around the influential British film journal Screen, who sought to politicize film studies through psychoanalysis, with recourse to a Lacan read through the work on ideology as conceived of by Louis Althusser. McGowan however makes the incisive point that these theorists, whose work revolutionized the discipline (Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Stephen Heath, and others) based their thought on misreadings of Lacan and gaze theory. McGowan notes, quite rightly, that these thinkers focused on the ideological effects — via Althusser’s refiguring of the Imaginary — of the filmic apparatus as constitutive of the spectator as subject with the on-screen action as object of the gaze, positioned by the gaze. “Gaze” in Lacan, McGowan maintains, however, is not so much about visually situating the object of the male spectator as it is about realizing its own subjectivation. Gaze is contained within the structure of the film itself, rather than an exterior element that focuses on a screen that in turn acts as mirror, within which the spectator identifies himself (or misrecognizes himself, hence ideology).

In what is unquestionably one of the most celebrated essays in the history of film theory — and emblematic of that which McGowan criticizes — Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ builds on Baudry’s apparatus theory and Metz’s work on the Lacanian Imaginary to speculate (in devastating fashion) on the ideological processes of the Hollywood narrative, within which the (hypothetical) male spectator, interpellated as subject, whose controlling and determining (sadistic/voyeuristic) scopophilic gaze leads to identification with the principle male on-screen actor. The leading male actor is thereby subjectified, while the female protagonist is objectified by the male fantasy as passive (as exhibitionist masochism), she is rendered object by both active male protagonist and the projecting male spectator. McGowan argues though that the emphasis on the Imaginary, within which Mulvey (and later Heath on suture) locate the gaze, is founded on a misreading. McGowan insists that contrary to these thinkers, screen spectatorship takes place in the realm of the Lacanian Real. “The gaze,” McGowan insists, “compels our look because it appears to offer access to the unseen, to the reverse side of the visible” (6). Rather than the spectator’s exterior and panoptic vision, the gaze forms part of the internal structure of the filmic experience; it is desire motivated by the intangible, the sense of incompletion; the unrealizable desire to see that which is beyond the visible, it is the objet petit a. Which is to say, while the gaze is content as object rather than subject (the active gaze of the male spectator), the question of the gaze is a negative one and a formal one that shapes the structure of the film itself. And, I would add, in the case of the film I will discuss today El Jurado, the spectator becomes thus enmeshed in the formal practices of the film, rather than in any narrative content. The form of the film and our place as spectators within and without the film points to an underlying inaccessible structure to film akin to what I have sought to describe in McGowan’s understanding of the Real.

Form draws attention to itself by displacing convention. While El Jurado is a film that makes use of the traditional cinematic genre — that is, the form — of the courtroom drama it does so in order to disturb the premises of that genre and it does so precisely by its focus on the gaze. Unlike conventional commercial film El Jurado shifts our attention to the gaze as theme rather than seeking to direct our gaze itself. It is a film of people on screen looking out into offscreen space. Critic Gonzalo de Pedro alludes to the problematic of the film when he describes it as — in terms that recall the idea of the filmic experience as structure — “un triángulo especular” (“a specular triangle”): involving, the jurors who look on, the courtroom action, and us, the spectators. Importantly, and relevant in terms of dialogue with Mulvey’s pioneering work, El Jurado is also a film that has gender at its center. Its director is a woman. The hour-long film consists of a series of shots of mainly (though not exclusively, three out of four) female jurors as they hear testimony in a murder trial of a man accused of killing his girlfriend, whose body it seems was abandoned in the street on a bench. A crime of domestic violence. The entire trial takes place off screen beyond the visual reach of the spectator whose desire is in this way negated, repressed, shut away in some kind of off-screen unconscious. It is, in this sense, an internal dialectic (or at least a dialogue) between distinct structural elements marked by the positive and negative form of the film: on-screen and off, sound and vision. And most of the film consists of comments on video evidence together with background detail gleaned from another screen, that of the victim’s cellphone. The spectator is privy to nothing other than the faces of the jurors. Nonetheless we hear the questioning of the defense lawyers and the prosecutor, the interventions of the judge, and the testimony of the expert witnesses as well as the man accused of the murder. The entire film is also punctuated by the shuffling of papers and inaudible murmuring. There is also no denoument. We never learn the outcome of the trial, it is denied us. Nor are we present during the deliberations of the jury. What we share with the jury is not the tension of the judicial encounter but, as I will discuss later, the tedium of the experience.

Largely overlooked by Cultural Studies approaches (owing to the interest of Cultural Studies in factors external to the filmic text), filmic form concerns, among other things, genre, mise-en-scène, the specificity of the technology employed (analog or digital), camera positioning, lighting, sound, etc. Form is what goes largely unnoticed, if the spectator is successfully sutured within the text. And yet El Jurado is a film that foregounds its own form, that makes the positioning of the spectator part of the filmic process itself. It is the enunciation of a structural division of labor but also of a psychic division between that which is visible and that which is not.

El Jurado is a film of portraits, fragmented portraits. Two things can be said about the portrait. The first is that the portrait concerns appearance, surface — quite literally the sur/face. The second is, of course, that there is an entire cinematic genre called “the portrait film.” Again, de Pedro has noted a connection with Ten Minutes Older (Herz Frank) and Miren el rostro (Pavel Kogan) but this critic also observes that, unlike these antecedents, García del Pino never shoots the faces full on. The gaze for most of the film is not diegetic in that the women jurors gaze into off screen space. Irrespective of our gender as spectators our gaze can never coincide with theirs precisely because we are denied access to that space. The gaze (as conceived of in non-Lacanian terms) is always profilmic, it is that of the camera, of the camera operator, or the director (they are the same person in this case), who is a woman. Here though the jurors are filmed from above and at an angle. Shot with a digital camera from the distance of the press benches where García del Pino was seated, these faces are consequently pixelated, the camerawork depicts flickering patchy headshots that dominate the screen. These slightly out-of – focus, distorted, blurry images, medium shots of the jurors focus on their tics, the boredom of the proceedings. There is no contact with the spectator, no identification or recognition of one’s mirror image. There is though a shared alienation in the ordeal of the filmic process itself. It is as if the notion of duty, of the onorous civic duty of jury service, of its labor were being experienced by the spectator. Just as the aspect of the thriller, or the melodrama of the courtroom is beyond the frame, the imprecision produced of the digital technology effects a humanizing blurring that departs from the cosmetic emulsion of cinema. Indeed the angle of the camera, filming from above, violates the traditional conceptualization of Renaissance perspective (that has dominated visual culture ever since), that point at which the gaze comes into focus. Here the camera remains unfocused throughout the film. Further, the jurors are, at first, seemingly oblivious to the fact they are being filmed. On our part the alienation we experience provides the negative charge of the film; we are denied the filmic satisfaction to which we are accustomed. In any case, the traditional conception of the gaze does not pertain here. The shared alienation between spectator and juror is not the same as identification. We feel as we do because of the structure of the film itself, the tedium built into it (by the formal setting and the filming, by that is, the form of the film) and not because we identify with any character on screen. Very much not part of the proceedings, visually denied to us, the film puts us to the test, as the trial does with the jurors themselves, the experience in both instances is a question of endurance; compulsion, obligation, laborious duration. This is not so much a matter of squandering what Karl Schoonover calles the “prized narrative economy” of commercial cinema as a wholesale violation of the notion of continuity. Fragmentation is everywhere, from the interrupted trial proceedings to the pixelated images, the incompetence of the officials, the truncated and malfunctioning technology of the courtroom from which we are marginalized (“Lamentablemente la ciencia no es tan rápida como la justicia,” (“Lamentably, science is not as swift as justice”) someone anonymous off-screen says without a hint of irony in a country where the legal process is notoriously slow. This is a cinema of mind-numbing boredom, of time distorted, elongated, of negation. If the conventional courtroom drama of commercial film depends on rarefied, exceptional circumstances in a race against time, here urgency has also been banished off-screen, to the sidelines of invisibility: “The gaze,” writes McGowan, “is the point at which the subject loses its subjective privilege and becomes wholly embodied in the object” (7). And this embodiment is absorbed within the film’s dilatory, its molasses-like lethargy.

In an interview with García del Pino, Miquel Martí Freixas describes the play of “judging” in El Jurado as similar to that of a game of Russian dolls, multiple dolls contained within another, each smaller than the previous one. However, while that is certainly the case, what is equally interesting about El Jurado is not so much this kind of replacements (configurations of criteria — courtroom evidence, witnessness, experts, video proof; the jurors themselves and their facial and other bodily reactions, the judgement of the camera as it focuses on them, our judgement of them and of the film, as spectators and critics), as it is of the displacements. Metonymy outweighs the metaphor. The metonymic field is there in the administration of justice and the evidence presented unseen by us. It is there contiguous to what we see but separate invisible to us. We are partialized and made metonym, made desiring objects. There is in this marginalization, in this negative charge to the film, an off-screen surplus, an excess beyond the frame that lures us as it partializes us, the spectators.

 

The part of the trial upon which we are eavesdropping largely consists of video evidence. The evidence provided by street surveillance cameras. We quite literally watch a video of the jurors watching a video. It is, in a way, a film about surveillance. And at the same time we are privy to the comments and the interrogation of experts who continually return at the behest of the lawyers to the video evidence, to the series of recordings (and we are listening, of course, to a recording). Elena Oroz links the notion of video evidence to the eternal debate in film studies concerning indexical relation of the thing filmed to the film itself (a debate fuelled by the onset of video and then digital video – the pixelation of the images is a constant reminder that we are watching the jurors in digital format). That is to say, the debate over the reliability of digital video as opposed to celluloid here takes on the question of truth in a courtroom. Truth and justice, the reliability of evidence in the pursuit of culpability. What then is on trial here? The man accused of murdering his partner or the format of how it was recorded? The trial here is of the veracity of the visual image, that of a visual image we never actually see and the one we do. The trial proper — to recall the early idea of metonymy — provides the off- screen soundtrack to the film: the negative image, a discharge of unseen excess displaced to the outer margins beyond the screen, an externality, exterior to the frame but acoustically present. What we are left with are the inarticulable portraits of the anonymous jurors caught up in a swirling discourse on truth and justice, charged with determining a guilt that is never actualized. In this, the two “institutions” (to paraphrase de Pedro) that of law and the digital documentary film are subject to a critique forged in a discourse on truth and visibility, on the reliability of visual evidence. This meanwhile returns us to the notion with which I started, that of symmetry. We conceive of symmetry in terms of mirror images, yet these are consistently thwarted in El Jurado. While absent except in auditory form, the off-screen courtroom drama provides snippets of speech that bookend the film itself in a form of filmic self-reflexivity. “Es que es formato de dvd” (“The format is that of dvd”) is the first sentence we hear spoken. The last (or at least the penultimate) is “Estamos interpretando unas imágenes.” (“We are interpreting some images”). We might add that Foucault’s claim of law as productive of desire is at the heart of Copjek’s Lacanian critique of the former, precisely as it concerns film theory.

Simultaneous to the hesitant, paused, and fumbling speech of the lawyers and court officials (an auditory correlation to the defective digital image of which we are spectators, as well as the deficient video screened in the courtroom), the rustling of papers, the murmurs and the whispers, the camera zooms in to the final juror of the film. While the previous jurors were all female, this final sequence is a lengthy single shot of a male juror. This juror is young and attractive, a conventionally handsome man, and as such is “objectified” by García del Pino’s camera. None of the previous female jurors had turned her head upwards toward the camera but this one does. In this final sequence of the film his eyes meet the lens of the camera. In the course of some 10 minutes this exchange of looks from the camera to the male juror and back is repeated again and again. For the first time, and at the very end of the film, we witness a gaze that is diegetic, one marked by reciprocity with the camera but with a look that is deprived of agency; the juror is unable to act upon the camera’s gaze. This is emphatically not a gaze constitutive of subjectivity. In a film in which we hear a significant amount of commentary on surveillance, this man is unable to see his own image (as we are incapable of seeing ours in him). This is not the kind of self-observation or self-surveillance that psychoanalysis associates with conscience.

“The relation between apparatus and gaze creates only the mirage of psychoanalysis,” writes Copjek. And she goes on to say in her critique of 1970s film theory, “There is, in fact, no psychoanalytic subject in sight.” It is an asymmetrical encounter and subjectivation is divided and incomplete. While the camera maintains the juror in the frame, we hear a witness proclaiming the unreliability of the video evidence. Owing to its poor quality of the film, the expert witness in question declines to evaluate it, he says that he cannot offer an opinion based on such evidence. Then we see more of the male juror chewing his nails, looking upwards, trapped in the gaze of the camera. And in the courtroom out of the frame we hear a desembodied comment referring presumably to the surveillance cameras of the video evidence: “At 2 hours 44 minutes and 9 seconds the camera focuses and zooms increasing the size of the image.” The screen fades to black, the unknown and the unfathomable, and thus the film ends.