Film Paper

ParvulescuDaisiesDAISIES.pdf

Daisies (dir. Věra Chytilová, Czechoslovakia, 1966)

And what we call Laughter is only this action of the face, together with that inarticulate and explosive cry. — René Descartes

Daisies (Sedmikrásky) was made in 1966 by a trio of the Czechoslo- vak New Wave: Věra Chytilová (director and screenwriter), Jaroslav Kučera (cinematographer), and Ester Krumbachová (screenwriter and set designer). This is a film about laughter, about laughter’s re- lation to manners, and about cinema’s relation to both. A pivotal scene will serve as our point of entry into the film: One of the two characters (both are named Marie) is stretched out on a bar along- side a painting on the adjacent wall. This is a familiar image in painting: a nude, voluptuous young woman is lying on a rock by the sea in an exotic landscape, dreaming, smiling, inviting. Here I am. Come and take me. Marie ( Jitka Cerhová) doubles the woman in the painting. Here I am. Come and take me. She literally reframes the painting on the wall with her own body. We see that there is a continuum between painting and film that becomes most visible at the point at which both present us with the image of a woman

“So We Will Go Bad”:

Cheekiness, Laughter, Film

Anca Parvulescu

Camera Obscura 62, Volume 21, Number 2

Published by Duke University Press

145

lying, waiting. Daisies works to undo this continuum with the help of an inappropriate, ill-mannered woman’s laughter.

The film’s credit sequence shows a series of rotating indus- trial wheels — details in a huge machine that we do not see. The subsequent cuts offer a collage of apocalyptic scenes of war and destruction as seen from a plane. Bombs are falling, planes are crashing — all this is barely visible on the screen as Kučera’s color reminds us of the lighting in nocturnal military raids. The film itself seems in combustion as images disintegrate, much like nitrate in its slow destruction process. This war-machine assem- blage suggested by the aerial images is, first and foremost, a sight machine, which finds its epitome in an enflamed modernity that Daisies will make it its task to attack in its assault on manners.1 It is the war-producing machinery of modernity that the film takes as its background. And its attack on manners has to do with the “civilized” perception that this war machine/seeing machine produces.

The film opens with a strange image of two beautiful young women — a blond (Ivana Karbanová) and a brunette ( Jitka Cerhová) — in vividly colored bathing suits. They sit upright on the ground, eyes closed, legs wide apart, backs against a wooden wall. Later in the film — when the bathing suit scene is repeated and the camera moves slightly — we find out that they are on a beach, one on which everybody hides behind his or her wooden wall. But for now, the camera does not move, and the two women seem to be caught in a box structure similar to that of the camera itself. When they begin to move their arms, they produce a creak- ing sound. The first thing one of the two women does is ostenta- tiously pick her nose. An elliptical dialogue follows:

Nobody understands anything. Nobody understands us. Everything’s bad in this world. What do you mean, everything? Well, everything. In this world . . . You know what? If everything’s bad . . . So . . .

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We’re going . . . Bad . . . As . . . Well. Right. Do you mind? No, I don’t.

As the two women take turns producing this dialogue, they gradu- ally turn toward each other so that they end up kneeling face to face. As they speak, their facial expressions gradually break into laughter. Now they seem to know what they have to do. One woman slaps the other woman. Slapstick begins. The slapped woman stands up, and the next cut shows her in a field of wildly colored flowers. We have left the grayness of the credit sequence, as well as that of the wooden wall with its accompanying creaking sounds, and have entered the world of Kučera’s amazing color. Later, another dialogue gives a hint as to the two women’s prospects: “Let’s go.” “Where?” “Somewhere where something’s going on.”

The two women characters are played by nonactors — a student and a sales assistant. Both characters are called Marie. The double name functions as an allusion to the two Maries of Christianity, the virgin and the whore.2 The film gives the blond Marie the role of the virgin and the brunette Marie that of the whore. In the opening bathing suit scene, one Marie puts a daisy chain on her head — she will wear it, hold it, or otherwise manipu- late it throughout the film. “What are you doing?” “Being a vir- gin. I look like a virgin, don’t I?” “I see.” The other Marie plays with her role as a prostitute: we see her dining with older men in exchange for sexual favors never to be delivered. “Who’s running around?” she answers when Marie accuses her. Her identifying object is a scarf she uses throughout the film to cover her cleavage or simply to play with. Together, the two Maries — the virgin who is not quite a virgin and the whore who is not quite a whore — embody “woman.” If the film stages a revolt, then it is woman her- self who is in revolt. “Let’s do something big,” one Marie tells the other. They have a picnic in bed, frying sausages hanging from the

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ceiling, cutting them with scissors, feet in their plates. The “some- thing big” they envision has to do with “the little things.”3 Yet the little things will yield something big indeed. In their revolt, the two Maries spectacularly fail at playing the mannered game, the game that regulates the modern body. They deliberately become ill bred — bad girls.

Theirs is an ontologically risky move; one’s very existence is at stake. The “going bad” motif is repeated throughout the film and, in one of its variations, one Marie asks the other: “We’ve gone mad, haven’t we?” Bad and mad seem to be interchangeable since “going bad” puts one in the position of the mad. When, earlier in the film, one of the two Maries looks out of the window, a pointed marching sound comes through. The “bad” world — captured in tones of brown and gray — advances in its modern march, and it is bad (and gray) precisely because it is marching. We are reminded of the credit sequence: the march is the rhythm of war and, more generally, the rhythm of discipline and order. But in a sense, in order to exist — or rather to be recognized as existing — one needs to be part of the march. Later in the film, when the two Maries go to the countryside, they are in danger of losing the sense that they exist as they become invisible to the workers they meet. In their attempt to become visible, the two Maries start marching in the streets, chanting, “We exist, we exist, we exist.” Marching, the film suggests, solves existential problems. But ultimately the film will resolve the problem otherwise. “How do you know you exist?” “Because of you.” The Marie duo is needed for this reason: one Marie needs to confirm the other’s existence in a world in which one exists only as long as one marches alongside everybody else. It is only as two that they can revolt. “There you are. We do exist.”

Ultimately, table manners become the central focus of this mad uncivil revolt.4 The film offers a series of eating episodes in different settings — the restaurant, the picnic in bed, the banquet. In one of the restaurant scenes — during which one Marie is being “seduced” by a lewd, middle-aged, middle-class man and the other Marie “accidentally” finds “her sister” with this older man — table manners come undone. To the astonishment of the hopeful spon-

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sor, the uninvited Marie takes a seat at the table, orders everything on the menu, and begins gulping down her meal. She starts with the pie, every now and then splattering the petrified man with it. Occasionally she stops eating only to declare with her mouth full: “I love eating,” “I love food,” or to noisily lick her fingers. Through- out this scene, the other Marie offers the prim spectacle of eating like a well-behaved little girl, all the while displaying a mischievous smile. We have here two strategies employed against manners: one Marie breaks the rules; the other explicitly overdoes them. A third strategy completes the menu: “We’re still maturing,” one Marie declares, ironically redeploying the “women are only children of a greater growth” theory.5

The banquet scene at the end of the film epitomizes the revolt against manners. More so than the two Maries’ room and the restaurant, the banquet offers a truly formal setting. The design of the table could have been inspired by Emily Post’s eti- quette manuals.6 This is a table with all the required pomp. If in the picnic-in-bed scene, in order to get a taste of true “class,” one Marie eats a picture of a steak from a magazine, the banquet offers “the real thing.” The two reach the empty banquet room by squeezing themselves into a dumbwaiter. The image suggests that they, too, are in danger of becoming food. Likewise, the pic- nic scene presents the same implication, as the two Maries playing with their forks as if they might eat each other suggests. Once in the banquet room, the two Maries first admire the setting. They are impressed. Then they start tasting the dishes, careful at first not to spoil their intricate design and not to leave any traces. Grad- ually, the thought of destruction makes its way to the fore. They sample every dish on the table — and now they do want to leave traces. They sit in every seat; they drink from every glass. They enjoy a game of thrown pies. They transform the table into a fash- ion runway and walk over the Emily Post image in their stiletto shoes. They hang from the chandelier. They have a good laugh.

Why this banquet? Why is this the symbolic site of a revolt against manners? Daisies is a film made in 1966 Czechoslovakia. Banquets like this are — as always — the privilege of an elite. This

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time, it is an elite formed by party officials. It is socialist manners that come under attack in this film, but socialist manners seem to follow closely Lord Chesterfield’s “principles of politeness.” The Czechoslovak establishment reacted against Daisies, condemning the film, particularly its banquet scene, for its outrageous “food waste” at a time when the socialist agriculture found itself in a crisis. The other film condemned in the same breath with Daisies was Jan Němec’s A Report on the Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech), which also came out of the Barrandov Studios in 1966. We should not underestimate the intensity of this condemnation: it was directed not so much at the two Maries wasting precious food, but at the two Maries wasting the precious food of a banquet that, at the time, could only have been intended for party entertain- ment. The problem is that during a time of agricultural crisis, the party indulges in luxurious banquets. We are left to imagine the seriousness of such banquets and their style of polite conversation from the passion with which the two Maries destroy the banquet’s culinary delights. The two Maries’ sin is that of unmasking the socialist leaders and the opulence in which they indulge. A Report on the Party and the Guests, written by Němec in collaboration with Daisies’s Ester Krumbachová, does the same work on manners. In it, we see what the two Maries want to destroy. We see the actual banquet: a formal setting outdoors within which polite conversa- tion seemingly unnoticeably slips into a disciplining mechanism that hunts down its dissidents. “Don’t laugh, don’t be crazy” is the advice that helps one survive the banquet in Němec’s film.

Daisies is in dialogue with other Eastern European films of its time that problematize the workings of the body under social- ism. Besides Němec’s A Report on the Party and the Guests, Miloš For- man’s The Firemen’s Ball (Hoř í, má panenko, Czechoslovakia/Italy, 1967) or Loves of a Blond (Lásky jedné plavovlásky, Czechoslovakia, 1965) and Dušan Makavejev’s W. R.: Mysteries of the Organism (W. R.: Misterije organizma, Yugoslavia/West Germany, 1971), Man Is Not a Bird (Čovek nije tica, Yugoslavia, 1965), or Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice P.T.T., Yugoslavia, 1967) take issue with the mannered body.

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Socialism has not produced a revolution of the body — this is a leitmotif in Eastern European film. And the failure to revolution- ize the body may best be seen in these films’ attacks on the “man- nering” of sexual life: socialism preserves those rituals of mating that preoccupy Miss Manners. Alexandra Kollontai’s warning that the revolution needed to also be a revolution of the body had been bypassed,7 and the countries of Eastern Europe had maintained a body governed by the principles of politeness. One of the main reasons for this failure might be the fetishization of the school as the institution par excellence that dramatizes the principles of politeness.8 Daisies — alongside the films by Němec, Forman, and Makavejev — responds to the failure to revolutionize the body. Like these other films, it also insistently refuses to fit within a Cold War dynamic. The unmasking of a major crack in the socialist project is not synonymous, as the Czech apparatchiks who con- demned Daisies and sometimes the Western critics who praised the film believed, with a celebration of Western structures. On the contrary, Daisies attempts to imagine another outside — outside the Cold War paradigm that often still dominates the reading of Eastern European films of this time.

As an attack on manners, Daisies also attacks romance and film’s long recourse to romance-inflected narrative. At its most basic level, the film follows two beautiful young women through a series of encounters with men. Not only is there no romance proper developing, but in fact, throughout the film, romance is parodied as a mannered ritual. The good-bye railway-station scenes that follow the two Maries’ meals with the potential lovers they trick epitomize this attack. In the last one of these scenes, we see the two Maries crying and waving as the train leaves. Gradu- ally, their facial expressions change and laughter irrupts. Later, when one Marie finds herself in an incipient love affair with a butterfly collector, we witness his standardized declamations of love when Marie suddenly interrupts him: “Do you have any food?” “At least some jam.” Finally, during the two Maries’ picnic in bed, the butterfly collector calls and his repeated declamations of love constitute the background against which the two Maries

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go about their culinary debauchery. It is not only table manners (as a metonymy of manners more generally) that Daisies frames as disciplinary techniques in this scene; manners and romance, and narrative and romance, go hand in hand and are consequently attacked in the same breath. “Why do they call it love?” one Marie asks. “Why not egg?”

Daisies borrows from slapstick. James Agee tells us that “plain slapstick” often involves “a profusion of hearty young women in disconcerting bathing suits, frisking around with a gaggle of insanely incompetent policemen and of equally certi- fiable male civilians sporting museum-piece mustaches.”9 One could hardly find a better image of “plain slapstick” than the two Maries in “disconcerting bathing suits” and the middle-aged men “sporting museum-piece mustaches” in the restaurant scenes. But, of course, slapstick is not slapstick without a taste of pie. The two Maries ostentatiously eat pie in the first restaurant scene, horrify- ing the respectable gentleman. In the banquet scene, they enjoy a classic pie-throwing game. They carefully follow the rules of the game: “The first pies are thrown thoughtfully, almost philosophi- cally,” writes Agee (845). The two Maries know about philosophy.

In its use of slapstick conventions, Daisies strives toward a form of nonnarrativity. Donald Crafton argues that the opera- tion of slapstick, the gag, is an “emphatic, violent, embarrassing gesture” that constitutes an alternative to narrative cinema of the chase model.10 Slapstick therefore consists of a series of episodes as, to use a term that Crafton borrows from Sergei Eisenstein and that describes beautifully the logic of Daisies, a series of “attrac- tions.” In Daisies, dialogue is added to these attractions. But dia- logue in Daisies functions much like intertitles did in the silents. In an interview quoted by Peter Hames in his Czechoslovak New Wave, Chytilová talks about the producers’ intentions with regard to the dialogue: “We would free ourselves of all the implications of the story and keep only the dialogues, very precise and very evocative, which would remain absolutely fixed. These dialogues assured us a base, they guaranteed that we would not abandon the meaning of the film, they were in a sense the guardians of that meaning.”11

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Although Chytilová herself cannot be sure about what meaning the dialogues are guarding, Daisies is a series of loosely related attractions punctuated by dialogue.

Slapstick also helps Daisies develop its own theory of spec- tatorship. Much has been said about the difficulties of reading a film that has been condemned by Czechoslovak apparatchiks as antirevolutionary, defended by Chytilová as profoundly socialist in its — supposed — condemnation of its two protagonists, and read by Western critics as a feminist allegory.12 Let us, however, look closely at the episode in which the two Maries go to a jazz club. The scene opens with an image of a spotlight on a red curtain. The two Maries timidly enter to clichéd drumming background music. When they realize that they are in the spotlight, they want to leave but change their minds and decide to assume the role, smiling. They are pulled aside by a waiter, and a pair of dancers begins its number. But as soon as the two Maries are seated in “their place,” they, too, start their number. They start jumping in their seats, they giggle and laugh out loud, blow bubbles, drink from glasses on neighboring tables at which proper, middle-aged, middle-class husbands and wives sit. Repeatedly the fox-trot danc- ers stop to look at the two Maries. Members of the band peek too. Gradually both audience and performers shift their attention from the show to the two Maries’ impromptu performance. They, the supposed spectators, are now the stars. They are the show. All eyes are on them — if only to be horrified by their inappropriate behavior.

The two Maries sitting at their table are framed as specta- tors; the table at which they sit is in a booth that allows for their image to reach us as if the two are on a screen — a second screen within the screen. We are reminded that we, too, are spectators; what, the film asks, is our role as viewers of Daisies? Or rather, what role does Daisies construct for us as spectators? The scene in the club suggests that Daisies trusts its audience to take over the show. We are invited to behave inappropriately, to disrupt the perfor- mance, stand up and laugh, put on our own outrageous show, and steal from our more legitimate neighbors — at the risk of being

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thrown out of the club. We are invited, in other words, to read. As an attack on manners, this film is also an attack on rituals of well- mannered spectatorship.

Daisies is a film about manners and about laughter, both as the laughter that punctuates all episodes in the film and as an umbrella term for “going bad.” Laughter resonates through- out Daisies. Laughter also occupies a special position within the discourse on manners — it is that which most needs to be regu- lated and yet eludes regulation. It is not an accident that Norbert Elias thought laughter worthy of a separate (never to be finished) project after he completed The Civilizing Process. What Elias called “the civilizing of laughter” is the point at which the larger “civiliz- ing process” is anchored.13 Daisies knows this: it is through laugh- ter — both actual and in the air — that manners are unmasked for the work they do on the body. Laughter is the signature gesture of the practice of cheekiness that the two Maries deploy in their attempt to undo the work of manners.14 Daisies shows us that the spectacular, cheeky revolt against manners cuts the body, as in the scene in which the two Maries play scissors and literally cut the cinematic image into an undistinguishable mosaic.15 The body, of course, coalesces back together, but we know that the pieces in the mosaic never amalgamate in exactly the same way.

Chytilová engages with laughter’s relation to manners in order to produce, in her words, a “philosophical document in the form of a farce.”16 Daisies indeed is a “document” (as Němec’s A Report on the Party and the Guests is a “report”) — it makes a state- ment and, as such, it enters history. And it is a farce — especially if we remember that one of the meanings listed by the Oxford En glish Dictionary (OED) for farce as a verb is “to stuff with force-meat, herbs, etc.,” “to stuff or force (something) into something else,” and “to cram the stomach with food.”17 “Rehabilitation Center,” says one Marie when she answers the phone. Daisies is a farcical document that works as a rehabilitation center, a lab in which the body is reworked in its minutest details — “the little things.” We might do well to remember here Ervin Goffman’s discussion of to- tal institutions of the rehabilitation kind, which he appropriately calls “finishing schools.”18 Rehabilitation centers work on those

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in one way or another mad, and they work on their manners so that their bodies are deculturated and reculturated to suit society. The film speaks to the fact that the socialist states of Eastern Eu- rope started off as a rehabilitation project of one kind that slowly slipped into a rehabilitation center of another kind, a “finishing school,” as The Report of the Party and the Guests also suggests. Dai sies, in being a rehabilitation center, also works on the body, only its deculturation serves other ends and its reculturation is open ended.

Daisies presents two alternative endings. In one ending, we see the two Maries drowning and asking for help. A new voice enters the film at this point. It is an invisible typewriter in a double metonymical relation with the court of law and with the law itself. The following words appear on the screen as we hear the type- writer mechanically produce each letter: “There was only one way they could finish up.” We are left to imagine the two Maries going under. But the typewriter changes its mind and offers us a second ending: “Is there any way to mend what’s been destroyed?” Again we see the two Maries in the water asking for help and adding, “We don’t want to be bad.” The alternative follows: “Even if they had a chance, it would probably look like this.” We are back in the banquet room and the two Maries are completely transformed. This is an instant and ironic rehabilitation. (The OED gives one definition of rehabilitation as “the action of re-establishing [a per- son] in a former standing with respect to rank and legal rights [or church privileges].”)19 They are wearing outfits made of newspa- per collages wrapped tightly around their bodies. They also wear slight, prim smiles. They walk like mannequins, reminding us of the squeaking sounds in the first bathing-suit scene. “Let’s clear all this up, quickly. When we’re hardworking and good, we’ll be happy.” They go around the room and arrange broken plates and glasses back together on the table, gather the thrown pie from the floor and put it back on plates, fix the curtains. It is not the food itself that they attempt to restore, but the Emily Post image that they first saw when they entered the room. The two Maries, the second ending suggests, have decided to assume their bodies, inscribed with the principles of politeness through a very palpable

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collage of texts. They put on appropriate outfits (throughout the film, the two Maries are wearing very fashionable 1960s cloth- ing). We are reminded at this point of Erasmus, an early expert in manners, and his conception of clothing: “Clothing is in a way the body’s body.”20 In this second ending, the two Maries put on a second body, a textual outfit to cover the cracks in the (for one moment) madly ill-mannered body. The body, however, cannot be put back together. The two Maries can return to playing the mannered game, but the cracks in the body are more than visible. So the second ending also has to punish the two Maries. They lie on the table, they surreally become the food, and a gigantic chandelier falls on them. The end. Returning to the destruction images of the credit sequence, the film ends with a dedication: “To those who become embittered at the sight of a smashed-up salad — alone.” It is to Miss Manners that this film is ironically dedicated — to the patron saint of manners in the Western world, but also, maybe to her own surprise, in socialist Eastern Europe.

Two other films can help us discern Daisies’s work in relation to woman’s laughter. These are Western films, and their juxtaposi- tion to Daisies speaks to the fact that it might be more productive to consider the Eastern European films of this period, especially when they engage the so-called woman question, in relation to Western feminist films, rather than isolate them within studies of Eastern European cinema, which means remaining within a Cold War framework. One film (Sally Potter’s Thriller [UK, 1979]) works on the beginning; the other (Marleen Gorris’s A Question of Silence [De stilte Rond Christine M, Netherlands, 1982]), on the end.

Thriller begins with laughter. We see a black woman (Colette Laffont) sitting on a chair in an empty room, a book on her lap. She closes the book, lifts her head, and starts laugh- ing. One peal of laughter, then another, then another. She can- not stop. Why is she laughing? The film has just started, and there is no diegetic explanation for her laughter, nor will there be one. The film — the rewriting of Mimi’s story in Puccini’s La Bohème — is, however, possible only from the standpoint of such

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laughter. For laughter has to do with the beginning; it marks the beginning and is itself a beginning. Only once we have this laughter can Thriller do its work — like Daisies, but taking a dif- ferent route — on narrative-romance-death. One can still hear it resonating over the setting of Puccini’s La Bohème in the film’s next cut. Like all women in opera, Mimi, of course, dies.21 “Did I die? Was I murdered? If so, who killed me? Why? What does it mean?” — laughter opens a space for questions, it makes questions possible even on the terrain of untouchable music. When later in the film laughter irrupts again, the introduction to another book, Théorie de l’ensemble, is read.22 There is no theory that can explain Mimi’s death — laughter marks this revelation and draws atten- tion to itself, to its burst, as a possible beginning, as a stand-in for theory.23 In the end, there might be more laughter, but we will let A Question of Silence take us there. For now, let us remember that there is another kind of laughter in Puccini’s La Bohème, one that makes its way into Thriller by way of Laffont’s initial laughter. The first thing one hears when Musetta — the other female character in La Bohème, the “easy woman” — appears on stage is her laugh- ter: inappropriate, embarrassing, powerful. “Parla piano,” her companion warns her. Always keep quiet in the opera, even while singing. It is Musetta’s laughter that Laffont is after, and if Thriller ends with Mimi and Musetta hugging, it is because the “secret” of this detective story finds its only possible clue in this laugh. For Musetta might be the only woman in opera who not only does not die but also laughs until the end.24

A Question of Silence problematizes the apparently inexpli- cable murder of a boutique owner by three women customers. The three women are looting, and their looting functions as a rev- olutionary gesture. They simply and methodically take the things in the store that they want. Others, too, in their world — and the shopkeeper stands for all of them — are simply and methodically taking the product of others’ work, but within legal standards. In what apparently is a paradoxical finale to the flow of events, the last scene of the film, the courtroom scene, gives us an irruption of laughter. Christine (Edda Barends), the character easily iden-

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tifiable as “the housewife,” who has remained more or less mute throughout the film, starts. Timidly at first, as if trying it out. The waitress Ann (Nelly Frijda) follows suit. One of the women who witnessed the crime and, through her silence, participated in it joins in. Finally, so does the defendants’ female psychiatrist (Cox Habbema). Soon all protagonists are roaring with laughter. Stupor, embarrassment, confusion, disorder in the courtroom. At this point laughter dislocates itself from its initial object, the gender-blind court of law and, by extension, the law itself. It is a laughter that has its own raison d’être, apart from any specific laughable object. And laughter reproduces itself; laughter asks for more laughter. It not only interrupts but it repeats itself over and over, and it spreads. What we have here is a moment of commu- nity formation, one that goes beyond the Marie couple in Daisies. For the first time the women in A Question of Silence “communi- cate” out loud, and they do so through laughter. Such laughter could provide a third ending for Daisies — a third response to the interpellation of the law. In Thriller, laughter is a solitary gesture, although the two women, Mimi and Musetta, come together and hug at the end (“We were separated, to play our roles”). For the two Maries in Daisies, we have seen, it is only possible to invent their own roles as long as the two laugh together, one confirming the other’s existence. A Question of Silence moves from the two to the multiple. What will come of the women laughing at the end of A Question of Silence we do not know. We only know that they have laughed and that laughter seems to offer the promise of a com- munity to come.

If we are to think about laughter, women, and film, we need to begin again, this time much further back. For laughter has his- torically been a challenge for visual representation. How, the his- tory of painting has asked, can one paint the laughing body? How can one represent it? What does laughter look like? The Renaissance medical figure Laurent Joubert has perhaps given the best expres- sion to this difficulty. He writes in his 1579 Treatise on Laughter :

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Everybody sees clearly that in laughter the face is moving, the mouth widens, the eyes sparkle and tear, the cheeks redden, the breast heaves, the voice becomes interrupted; and when it goes on for a long time the veins in the throat become enlarged, the arms shake, and the legs dance about, the belly pulls in and feels considerable pain; we cough, perspire, piss, and besmirch ourselves by dint of laughing, and sometimes we even faint away because of it. This need not be proven.25

Laughter, you will have noticed, is of the face (laughter has its “throne” in the face, as Joubert puts it [10]). Laughter involves a specific constellation of functions of the face: the mouth, the eyes, the cheeks, the voice. But, in excess, laughter also involves the rest of the body — arms, legs, belly, breast, veins in the throat. The whole body seems to be doing the laughing. Extreme, convulsive physiological changes might occur, for one can feel pain, cough, perspire, piss, besmirch oneself, faint. One can even die of laugh- ter, the Treatise warns later.

Joubert further complicates this picture:

Some men, when they laugh, sound like geese hissing, others like grumbling goslings; some recall the sigh of woodland pigeons, or doves in their widowhood; others the hoot-owl; one an Indian rooster, another a peacock; others give out a peep-peep, like chicks; for others it is like a horse neighing, or an ass heehawing, or a dog that yaps or is choking, some people call to mind the sound of dry-axled carts, others, gravel in a pail, others yet a boiling pot of cabbage; and some have still another resonance, aside from the look on their face and the grimacing, so variedly diverse that nothing parallels it. (87)

Not only is there facial distortion and bodily movement in laugh- ter but there is also a variety of diverse, hard-to-define sounds. How can one capture movement and sound at the same time? Painting generally avoids laughter and, when dealing with the face, it concentrates on the smile. There are many smiling char- acters in the history of painting, but very few laughing characters. The history of painting, especially as the history of portraiture, is largely a history of smiles. Significant in this respect is the fact that The Laughing Cavalier, a 1624 painting by the Dutch painter

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Franz Hals, shows a man who is obviously not laughing. Rather, the laughing cavalier is smiling the smile that we now identify as “the smile of reason.”26 Painting seems to have so marginalized laughter that it has become a variation on the smile.

The smile convention in painting is related to the fact that, beginning with the early seventeenth century, laughter is banned both by philosophy and by books on manners. A paragraph in Marquis de Halifax’s 1688 “Advice to a Daughter,” one of the texts that best gives expression to the ban on laughter in its particular form as a ban on woman’s laughter, reads:

It is not intended that you [the daughter] should forswear laughing; but remember that, fools being always painted in that posture, it might fright those who are wise from doing it too frequently, and going too near a copy which is so little inviting; and much more from doing it loud, which is an unnatural sound and looketh so much like another sex that few things are more offensive. That boisterous kind of jollity is as contrary to wit and good manners as it is to modesty and virtue. Besides, it is a coarse kind of quality, that throweth a woman into a lower form, and degrades her from the rank of those who are more refined.27

Painting serves here as a model for proper behavior. In 1668, Charles Le Brun, the first court painter to Louis XIV and the chancellor of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, deliv- ered his Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière (Conference on Expression, General and Particular), which was to be published in 1698 with accompanying drawings.28 Under the heading “LAUGHTER,” Le Brun sketches the head of a woman looking downward, smiling timidly. The image will be reproduced infi- nitely in the following century and, if Halifax’s daughter is sup- posed to take her models from painting, it is likely that she would have arrived at this image. Thus Angus Trumble can conclude, “Most teeth and open mouths in art belonged to dirty old men, misers, drunks, whores, gypsies, people undergoing experiences of religious ecstasy, dwarves, lunatics, monsters, ghosts, the pos- sessed, the damned, and — all together now — tax collectors.”29 These are the “fools” painted laughing — and they are laughing

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because they are fools. Halifax’s daughter should not laugh if she is not to approach a threshold where woman comes dangerously close to the fools, who, it turns out, are simply those “of a lower form.” The daughter’s ideal should be a smiling stillness — a wait- ing to be taken that Daisies takes to task in the bar scene with its painting on the wall. Laughter, in its convulsive effects, is an affront to this ideal. But, it is important to emphasize, it is through recourse to painting that the ban on woman’s laughter is expressed under Halifax’s pen. When, closer to home, Daisies stages its revolt against manners, it is not surprising that this attack is a laughing attack and that it has something to say about painting.

The advent of film promises much for the representation of laughter. If laughter is movement, film is moving picture. If laughter is sound, film resonates with sound from the very begin- ning.30 If laughter is of the face, film has a special relationship with the face.31 As if coming to meet this promise, early film has a lot to say about laughter. The early days of film are laughing days. Edwin S. Porter’s 1907 Laughing Gas (US) tells the story of a black woman, Mandy Brown (Bertha Regustus), who has a toothache. She goes to the dentist and receives nitrous oxide, “laughing gas,” to have her tooth extracted. She starts laughing with her whole body, falling and rolling on the floor, throwing her limbs around. The dentist and his assistant join in. For the rest of the film, Mandy goes through a series of locations, all clear landmarks of seriousness, infecting everyone she meets with her unstoppable laugher. In a streetcar divided along class, race, and gender lines, her laughter upsets all boundaries. When she is brought to court because of a street disturbance, the judge and the policemen are themselves overwhelmed with laughter and Mandy dances away. When Mandy, who is a domestic servant, needs to serve dinner to her employers, her contagious laughter makes them turn the exquisite dinner table upside down, and they, too, join in. When, in a moonlight scene, Mandy runs into a black man and he pre- pares for what appears to be a possible romantic encounter, her laughter ruins any such possibility. When in church, Mandy’s laughter transforms religious songs into generalized laughter, with the black community laughing together as in a choir. The

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minister almost dies laughing. The film ends with a close-up of Mandy’s face laughing, inviting the viewer to join in the laughing- gas party.32

Early film will be “comedy’s greatest era.” For Agee, this means that there are a lot of good laughs to be had in watching the silents, as opposed to watching films of his (and our) own days, in which laughs are “pitifully few, far between, shallow, quiet and short.”33 The laughs triggered by the silents, Agee tells us, reminding us that we are not so far from Halifax, are condemned by “nice people” as vulgar and naive. After all, Porter needed the figure of the black woman to show laughter doing its work on the body. The silents offer, however, Agee believes, all the more good laughs for being “laughter of unrespectable people having a hell of a fine time, laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall” (486). “Unrespectable people,” like Mandy Brown, shower “nice people” with a deafening torrent of laughter.

Let us read again Agee’s famous description of laughter at the movies:

In the language of screen comedians four of the main grades of laugh are the titter, the yowl, the belly laugh and the boffo. The titter is just a titter. The yowl is a runaway titter. Anyone who has had the pleasure knows all about a belly laugh. The boffo is the laugh that kills. An ideally good gag, perfectly constructed and played, would bring the victim up this ladder of laughs by cruelly controlled degrees to the top rung, and would then proceed to wobble, shake, wave and brandish the ladder until he groaned for mercy. Then, after the shortest possible time out for recuperation, he would feel the first wicked tickling of the comedian’s whip once more and start up a new ladder. (482)

The silents themselves are structured on this pattern — they start with a titter, move into a yowl, suddenly become a belly laugh, to gradually raise to a boffo — and then repeat the sequence. The repetitive structure of the silents makes film itself in its early days itself resemble a laugh. The silents develop in peals of laughter. This is why spontaneity needs to be the name of the game in their production. Daisies finds a lost promise in the silents and

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particularly in slapstick — and that promise has to do with laugh- ter. Peter Hames writes about Daisies, “It is clear that Chytilová, Krumbachová, and Kučera did not know precisely what would emerge from their collective work. As Chytilová has said, she is the first to be surprised.”34 Daisies came like a burst of laughter, and Chytilová was not the only one to be taken by surprise. The point of surprise is the spectator’s burst of laughter, her own “going bad” (“Contemporary Western screenings of the film,” writes Hames, “are often accompanied by exclusive feminine laughter” [222]). In that laughter, the audience opens onto the community of the laughing women at the end of A Question of Silence and, with that, once again points to the revolutionary potential of film.

Notes

I am grateful to Paula Rabinowitz, John Mowitt, Karen Steigman, Julia Musha, and Danielle Bouchard for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. I am also grateful for a Harold Leonard Memorial Fellowship in Film Study, which helped me work on this project. Jana Kleňhová and Jitka Kohoutová helped me find images in the Prague Film Archive.

1. On the relation vision-aviation-war-cinema, see Paul Virillio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989).

2. I owe this observation to Thomas Pepper.

3. The phrase is from the 1774 Letters of Lord Chesterfield to His Son, one of the foundational texts for the modern discourse on manners. See Lord Chesterfield, Letters of Lord Chesterfield to His Son (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1929). The book was also published under the title Principles of Politeness, and of Knowing the World (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1778).

4. Both Norbert Elias and Claude Lévi-Strauss argue the centrality of table rituals among rituals of manners. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1 of The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).

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5. This is also Lord Chesterfield’s theory.

6. Contemporary etiquette writers often offer etiquette advice to film producers. Letitia Baldridge’s autobiography, suggestively titled A Lady First, tells about her experience as an etiquette adviser for Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (US, 1993). See Letitia Baldridge, A Lady First: My Life in the Kennedy White House and the American Embassies of Paris and Rome (New York: Viking, 2001). At the other end, the banquet table becomes a motif in feminist art, as in Maya Deren’s 1944 film At Land (US) or Judy Chicago’s 1979 The Dinner Party (US).

7. Alexandra Kollontai, The Love of Worker Bees, trans. Cathy Porter (New York: Academy Press, 1978).

8. Significant in this respect is the special grade in many educational institutions in communist Eastern Europe (and elsewhere) for “good behavior.”

9. James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 848.

10. Donald Crafton, “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle, and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy,” in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1995), 108.

11. Jacques Rivette and Michel Delahaye, “Entretien avec Věra Chytilová” (“A Conversation with Věra Chytilová”), Cahiers du cinéma, no. 198 (1968): 46 – 73. Quoted in Peter Hames, The Czechoslovak New Wave (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 212.

12. See Bliss Cua Lim, “Dolls in Fragments: Daisies as Feminist Allegory,” Camera Obscura, no. 47 (2001): 36 – 77.

13. Michael Schröter, “Wer lacht, kann nicht beissen: Ein unveröffentlichter ‘Essay on Laughter’ by Norbert Elias” (“Who Laughs Cannot Bite: An Unpublished ‘Essay on Laughter’ by Norbert Elias”), Merkur 56 (2002): 860 – 73.

14. On cheekiness, see Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

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15. The two Maries cut their heads so that on the screen we have the image of two laughing decapitated heads moving around the room. See my “ ‘She’s Beautiful and She’s Laughing’: Reading with Hélène Cixous,” in Fabulous Feminisms and Feminist Fabulation: Redefining Women’s Speculative Fiction, ed. Michelle M. Sauer ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, forthcoming).

16. Věra Chytilová, quoted in Hames, The Czechoslovak New Wave, 211.

17. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Farce.”

18. Ervin Goffman, Asylums (Chicago: Aldine, 1961), 41.

19. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Rehabilitation.”

20. Erasmus, “On Good Manners in Boys,” in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 25, trans. Brian McGregor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 278.

21. See Catherine Clément, Opera; or, the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

22. Théorie de l’ensemble (Paris: Le Seuil, 1968). This is a collection of essays signed by Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and others under the aegis of Tel Quel.

23. For an attempt to discern laughter’s stakes in relation to woman and film, see Jane Weinstock, “She Who Laughs First Laughs Last,” Camera Obscura, no. 5 (1980): 100 – 109.

24. Clément, Opera, 86.

25. Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, trans. Gregory David de Rocher (1579; Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 28.

26. Angus Trumble, A Brief History of the Smile (New York: Basic Books, 2003), xliii.

27. George Saville Halifax, “Advice to a Daughter,” in Halifax: Complete Works (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1969), 298.

28. See Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s “Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

29. Trumble, A Brief History, xxiii.

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30. See Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

31. See, for example, Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” differences 14 (2003): 89 – 111.

32. Porter’s Laughing Gas will itself be infectious. Charlie Chaplin, too, makes his own Laughing Gas film (US, 1914). Later, Hollywood and the film industry are described in these terms in P. G. Wodehouse’s 1936 novel, Laughing Gas.

33. Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” 483. Agee did not have an opportunity to consider laugh tracks. It seems that laughter is so “shallow, quiet and short” today that, research shows, laugh tracks are necessary: without them, audiences would not recognize the genre.

34. Hames, The Czechoslovak New Wave, 222.

Anca Parvulescu is an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches in the Department of English and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities. She is currently working on a book project on laughter. Her work has appeared in New Literary History, Discourse, and the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association.

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A Question of Silence (dir. Marleen Goriss, Netherlands, 1982)