In this lecture series we examine how the female gaze works in cinema, and why it so often chooses the most uncomfortable subjects. We will focus on one of the central sub-themes – woman as temptation and desire within the male narrative – and on what happens when a woman herself takes up the telling of that story.

Film 1 (The Night Porter): the woman-boy, the woman-child – a childless, cold beauty.
Film 2 (Passion in the Desert): the woman-animal – the leopardess, a non-human eros.
Film 3 (The Piano): the woman-silence – absence as presence, matching the muteness of the man himself.

The Night Porter

The Night Porter is so multifaceted that it allows for the most varied, at times opposite, interpretations. This is precisely one of the reasons for its enduring power.

Cavani came to the film as a documentary filmmaker. While researching the theme of women in the Resistance, she came across the real story of a woman who returned every year to Dachau to lay a rose for her executed Nazi lover. Cavani asked: what if he had survived and they met again?

OBJECTS OF MASCULINITY. We have built the following construction: the classic male narrative prescribes for the man (the subject) a set of roles – father, warrior/protector, servant (well-drilled, like Max the porter), hunter, a man of career and intellect. Each role has an official, “proper” object assigned to it: for the Nazi soldier it is the German Frau; for the Napoleonic officer it is the mademoiselle he will marry; for the hunter it is the squaw waiting with the children in the cabin. But Cavani shows that the true, “repressed object” of each role’s desire may be something entirely different. For the father it is the daughter (“my little girl,” as Max says of Lucia), for the warrior it is the beautiful boy, for the hunter it is the beast itself rather than the trophy-prey.

The genius of Rampling’s character is that she enacts all these repressed objects at once and by turns. And this approach shifts the traditional roles, throwing male desire into a different light. Cavani makes Woman the observer of Man, and Man not a whole but a split subject, whose true passion is inaccessible to him. The result is a couple in which the roles are distributed evenly, in which Woman and Man, Executioner and Victim exchange places both within a single person and within the couple.

THE “GRAY ZONE” AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT. While researching the theme of women in the Resistance, Cavani encountered what Primo Levi (author of autobiographical books about surviving Auschwitz) called the “gray zone.” This is a system of incentives created by the Nazis. Within this hierarchy the Nazis deliberately handed part of their power over the prisoners to the prisoners themselves, encouraging them to kill and torment one another. Two documentary impressions became the impetus for Cavani: women who returned from the camps often could not return to their families – their experience “did not fit” into any framework (just as Lucia’s experience does not fit into her American life as a conductor’s wife); and the story of the woman with the rose on the grave of her executed Nazi lover.

For Cavani there was the danger of sliding into exploitation cinema: a “hot” plot about the love between a Nazi and his victim delivers a forbidden pleasure. She needed precisely these actors so that the plot would not become merely sadomasochistic but would instead “grow through” the charisma and performances of Bogarde and Rampling.

OPERA AS FORM. The entire structure of the film is shaped as an opera: the first scene of the meeting and seduction after separation is staged operatically, and the action is accompanied by Mozart (The Magic Flute – not a bright contrast to the dark drama but a key: Tamino and Pamina, too, pass through trials toward an apotheosis, and there is as much darkness in the flute itself as there is light). Lucia is the wife of a conductor, an interpreter of operas, but it is she and Max who end up inside an opera, becoming the last operatic couple, “people who have lived through the whole history of Europe within themselves.” Stylized movement, stylized sex scenes (“suggestion, as in opera, but not porn”). Cavani makes it clearly understood: what we actually take pleasure in within opera is exactly what this film shows us directly. Dual, split relations within subjectivity. Close to perversion. Much like Nazism itself.

After four feature films, Cavani turned to directing opera and became famous precisely there, drawing out of the classical operas the same theme of the psychology of power and submission.

REDEMPTION. For Cavani, Nazism is the secret, perverse drives (the sadism present in everyone) brought outward and made a social norm during the war – and hidden afterward, merely in order to survive. Hence the reversal in the finale: the “real” Nazis of the film are cowardly – they hide, they go through their homemade “psychoanalysis” in order to rid themselves of guilt and destroy the witnesses. Max and Lucia do the opposite: he puts on the SS uniform once Nazism has been defeated and everyone is hiding it, she, a grown woman, puts on the child’s dress, and they step out openly onto the bridge, toward certain death. This has been read as redemption: they are the only ones who do not conceal the secret, who acknowledge it, and for that reason they perish together. They refuse to forget the past, to forget their guilt, because they do not want to give each other up. For them, to remember means to love. And to love, in the end, means to die together.