“I can't keep my eyes off of you":
The Ontology of Image in An American In Paris :
It is hard to say what exactly ‘it is’ that we are encountering when we first encounter Lise in An American in Paris. That is, her first appearance – appearance being the operative word here – seems legible along two different ontological dimensions: the non-real and the real. The first of these – Lise as unreal – is perhaps the most readily apparent, since it operates within the mise en scene of the film. As the film’s narrative articulates it, in other words, this first apparition of Lise is just that: an apparition, a visual fantasy produced by the male imaginations of Henri Baurel and Adam Cook. This is rendered for us cinematically both in the famous mirror shot wherein Lise’s appearance seems to arise – at least within the film’s cinematic logic – out of the reflections of Henry and Adam in the mirror, and with the ‘gilded’ mirror frame which delineates the strange abstract landscape in which she appears. Together, these shots seem to establish this ‘Lise’ as not really Lise, but rather a representation of her – the first shot accomplishing this psycho-imagistically, the second, as critic Andre Bavin puts it (albeit in painterly terms), by “establish[ing] something that cannot be geometrically established – namely the discontinuity between the painting and the wall,” or rather, the mise en scene of the frame and the mise en scene of the screen (Bazin 166). Simply put: the world of the colored-backdrops is not the world of the film, and so logically neither is ‘its’ image of Lise.
Just as soon as this proscenium frame introduces ‘Lise’ in her fantastical landscape, however, it vanishes back into the screen – enter Lise-as-real. With the nesting-doll effect which once ‘insulated’ Lise from the reality of the rest of the film now gone, her appearance becomes legible (at least to the audience) as ‘real,’ as the same Lise who will emerge later in the mise en scene of the film. As Bazin writes of such a circumstance:
Whence it follows that if we reverse the pictorial process and place the screen within the picture frame, that is if we show a section of a painting on a screen, the space of the painting loses its orientation and its limits and is presented to the imagination as without any boundaries (Bazin 166).
As such, we are left with an image of Lise which, while still born out in relatively abstract terms – the colorful backdrops, the theatrical stage-scenery, etc. – nevertheless exists in the same ontological classification as the images of her which appear later in the film. That is to say, the objective, ‘reality-value’ which attaches itself to photographic or cinematographic images by virtue of the “very process of its becoming” is the same here as elsewhere in the film (Bazin 14). Despite the change in set decor, in other words, we as viewers are unable to psychologically differentiate this image as any less ‘real’ than the others; we cannot the ignore the fact that, as Bevin argues, “cinema is objectivity in time,” that this dance sequence really did happen, and happened just a ‘real-ly’ as the rest of the film (Bazin 14). To this extent, the transition from the centripetal representation (the picture frame) to centrifugal (the screen) is not truly necessary for this second ontological ‘reading’ of Lise; it merely exaggerates what is already true.
The conditions which surround Lise’s first appearance in An American in Paris thus pose a serious problem for her ontological status in the film. That is, while Henri and Adam’s ‘representation’ of Lise is not presented diegetically as real – in fact, quite the opposite – the image itself, by the very nature of its extra-diegetic realism, is. Despite our best intentions, we cannot help but register this moment as our first encounter with the character that is Lise, an introduction to who and what she is. As such, what Lise ‘really is’ in the film effectively becomes the ‘image’ of her as fantasized by Henry and Adam: a visual spectacle. Unlike her male counterparts whose narratorial powers not only grant them critical distance from their on-screen representations, but also allows them to introduce themselves as ‘themselves,’ Lise has no external recourse for the expression of her identity; she can only be what men see her as.
In this capacity, An American in Paris begins to look like a play-by-play account of Mulvey’s famous formulation of the male gaze. Not only does Lise’s dance sequence present her in explicitly objectifying, exhibitionist terms, but the sequence itself literally enacts, to borrow from Mulvey, a “projection” of the “male gaze’s” “phantasy onto the female figure” (Mulvey 816). In fact, the sequence arguably goes so far as to produce a sort of meta-pun along these lines, with Lise’s apparition in the mirror being the literal and metaphorical reflection of Henri and Adam’s fantasies. Implicit here as well is another one of Mulvey’s stipulations, the tripart alignment of the male gaze of the audience, camera, and the film’s male characters. While we as audience members are complicitized by virtue of the mirror – what does a straight-on shot of a mirror imply if not the audience? – the camera is complicitized by virtue of its conspicuous absence of its reflection: the 180 degree shot should turn the camera back on itself, but it does not. Here, then, the film’ no would seem to not only fulfills another central formulation of Mulvey’s conditions – “the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are nearly combined” – but explicitly enact it (Mulvey 815).
Seemingly built into the very structure of the film’s mise en scene, then, is Mulvey’s notion that “the man controls the film phantasy” (Mulvey 815). Not only does whatever Henri and Adam narrate actually happen to fantasy Lise – “oh no, she’s sweet and shy” (cue ‘sweet and shy’ dance) – but they appear to be in extra-diegetic communication with the camera itself (An American in Paris). This is true not just of Henri and Adam, but Jerry as well, as is evident in the first few shots of the film where we find Jerry, despite supposedly being asleep in his apartment, narrating the camera’s movements as it navigates towards him. Only a few moments later, the same basic effect is born out with both Henri and Adam, each of whom direct the camera as though they were the ones behind it (in the case of Henri, it appears as though he might literally be behind it). As such, what is for Mulvey a relatively abstract argument concerning relation between the camera and male desire takes on a rather literal meaning here.
Ironically, then, the film’s iconic ‘man-behind-camera phenomena’ might not actually be best understood in the same terms laid out in Mulvey’s essay. While the film certainly fulfills the phenomenological conditions of Mulvey’s definition for the male gaze, it does so too almost ‘consciously’ to truly work within her framework. Instead of producing an ‘unconscious’ alignment of the male gaze and the camera, in other words, An American in Paris produces this alignment explicitly within the mise en scene of the film, as though the camera itself were itself a diegetic object, visible to the men but not to Lise. While this by no means absolves the film of criticism along gendered lines – after all, it is still only the men who have access to the camera – it does open up an alternative, diegetic means by which to understand the function of the man-behind-the-camera phenomenon. In particular, this problem of unequal access has some obvious utility within the overarching narrative structure of the film, one whose central drama revolves around the prolonged ambiguity of the question: Who will Lise choose? In this context, her ‘distant’ relationship to the camera arguably functions to maintain the ambiguity of her affections, casting a cloud over her decision-making process, and preserving the narrative suspense of the film. Were we privy to a Lise-centric camera gaze, in other words, the force of Jerry’s various attempts at courting Lise – one of, if not the, central narrative dramas of the film – would be lost: there would be no question as to his success or failure, and there would be, in effect, no plot. It is essential that Lise not ‘have’ a camera, in other words, in order for her to remain, as Jerry calls her, “the girl of mystery” (Minelli, An American in Paris).
This diegetically-incorporated function of the camera’s gaze produces an obvious problem for the already-compromised autonomy of Lise. That is, at the same time that Lise’s restricted ‘access’ to the camera allows for her romantic processing to remain mysterious, it also effectively erases the legibility of such processing in the first place. While there may be the implication of an interior life for Lise, in other words, her distance from the camera means there is no real representation of such interiority within the film; the camera is always brought to her by men, and as such, the only romantic processing on the part of Lise which is made legible to us is circumscribed by the invocations of her suitors. It is no coincidence, in other words, that Lise almost never appears alone – or even first – in a ‘shot:’ we are not meant to understand the terms of Lise’s decision-making, or even her presence, as occurring independently of men.
The camera’s gendered ‘terms of use,’ in this sense, begin to look like a formal realization of a particular, misogynistic vision of male courting, one which sees female desire as necessarily subordinate to male action. More specifically, by barring Lise access to the camera, the film is able to frame the terms of her desire in terms of the men’s ability to ‘bring’ the camera to her, or rather, to conjure her likeness within its ‘frame. In a film where Lise's ontological status is that of ‘image,’ winning her affection becomes a matter of dominating the production and distribution of said image; the typical ‘conquestial’ program of male courting as such is thus translated into pseudo-artistic terms. This logic is born out in more or less literal terms with the transfer of Lise’s affection from Henri to Jerry. It is no surprise, in other words, that the change of Lise’s desire – or rather, the change in her ownership – directly maps onto the respective abilities of Henri and Jerry to produce her real-but-not-real likeness at the beginning and end of the film. That is, if the mirror-sequence signals Henri’s initial ‘dominance’ over Lise’s image, then Jerry’s production of Lise within his film-ending dance sequence signals his ‘representational’ usurpation of Lise’s image from Henri. That Lise’s spontaneous ‘change of heart’ cannot be sufficiently explained in narrative terms – what exactly does Henri do to lose her, and what does Jerry do to win her? – reinforces this; her volte-face seems entirely predicated upon (and immediately responsive to) Jerry’s newfound ability to conjure her likeness within his own abstract world. The true force of the male-dominated ‘diegetic’ camera, in this capacity, is to produce a means of justifying Lise’s romantic development on purely formal terms. From this perspective, there would seem to be a sort of formal inevitability to Jerry’s ‘victory’ over Henri: if the ‘winning’ of Lise can be understood in terms of image production and distribution, then Jerry’s painterly abilities would seem to put him at an obvious advantage.
Of course, it should be noted that this love-logic does not work out so well for everyone in the film. In particular, though Milo Roberts follows a very similar approach to winning over Jerry – managing the production and distribution of his ‘images’ so as to win his affection – her endeavor ends in not just failure, but mockery and embarrassment. As Adam’s rather misogynist comment to Jerry illustrates – “Tell me, when you get married, will you keep your maiden name” – the bluntness or “nerve” of Milos’ interest in Jerry is seen as problematically disrupting the typical power dynamics of male-female courting (An American In Paris). In other words, Milo’s seeking out of Jerry is rendered manipulative, even predatory, while Jerry’s similar tactics are normalized as standard romantic practice. The filmic failure of Milo’s sponsor-ship, in this sense, reveals the double-standard on the part of the film: what is acceptable, even celebratory, for a male is rendered as untoward for a woman.
Arguably, this inequity is legible in more than just misogynistic terms. On the studio’s part, it also reveals a rather surprising form of favoritism, one which appears to reject the very model of production with which the ‘Hollywood’ studio might immediately bear the most resemblance – that of artistic sponsorship. More specifically, you might say that the studio’s preferential treatment of Jerry’s brand of ‘image-control’ functions like a position statement, an attempt of the studio to reimagine its own ‘image-control’ in more painterly terms. This operates in two different dimensions. First, it signals the studio’s interest in envisioning itself as a producer of art, not merely an economic force. The operative difference between Jerry and Milo, in this respect, is their relationship to the ‘images’ they are producing: while Milo merely provides the resources for Jerry’s production of images, Jerry’s role in the production and distribution of Lise’ image is born out in explicitly artistic terms, with him literally painting the backdrop in front of which she emerges as his ‘piece of art.’ As such, the relative success and failure of Jerry and Milo’s schemes arguably serves to align – or at least, imply the possibility of alignment – the film’s own production process with that of painting.
Undoubtedly, this is the force behind Jerry’s ability at the end of the film to literally generate the world of the film ‘set’ out of his drawing. Jerry’s skill as a painter, in other words, is made to look as though it might function just as well, or even better, in the creation of a film set; as such, it is clear that we are meant to understand what Jerry does as a painter in terms of the work that the Hollywood studio does, and vice versa. In this context, it is not particularly surprising that Jerry’s artistic career is so immediately and blatantly abandoned after his production of the “American in Paris''-themed fantasy world; the arc of his artistic journey was never meant to be realized within the normal narrative structure of the film, but rather fulfilled extra-diegetically in the production of the film itself. The final dance sequence, in this sense, can be understood as the art exhibition that Jerry was never able to have within the film’s mise en scene. As such, the point of Jerry’s painting was never really about the actual painting, but rather the way in which the production of a film might be understood in terms of it.
Arguably, this makes sense of the film’s broader interest in representing different mediums of art – Jerry’s painting, Henri’s song and dance, Adam’s music – within its own. In particular, the film seems interested in what happens to these non-photographic mediums when they go under the lens of a camera, and how the camera might be used, similar to a paintbrush, to do more than just trace their ‘reality.’ This would seem to be the force behind the mistaken-identity sequences at the start of the film, sequences which, by means of cinematographic trickery, are able to introduce each of the male characters as ‘images’ other than themselves. This takes on its most explicit formulation with the introduction of Jerry, who is at first incorrectly identified with another character on set: he narrates his own entrance, only to find the camera looking into the wrong room – “No, no, no, not there” (An American in Paris). The true interest of this sequence, however, emerges after this first confusion has been resolve and we find ourselves suddenly staring at two Jerrys: Jerry, and Jerry’s self-portrait. Juxtaposed in this manner, it is clear that the film wants us to understand these two moments in terms of each other. Specifically, the film wants us to relate its own use of cinematographic juxtaposition to produce an ‘unreal’ representation of Jerry – i.e., by mismatching the camerawork and the narration – to Jerry’s use of painting to produce an unreal ‘representation’ of himself. Both, we are led to believe, essentially accomplish the same thing: a depiction of reality which, contrary to Bazin’s theorization of photographic art, does not “share” the “being of the model of which it is the reproduction” (Bazin, 14). Just as you could not say that Jerry’s self-portrait contains a copy of Jerry, then, neither could you say it for the man mistaken for Jerry. Just as the camera finally pans over to ‘real’ Jerry to correct its mistake, real Jerry ‘pans’ over to correct his own, blurring out his self-portrait with his hand. The real reason for the mistaken identity sequences, in other words, is to try to ‘reinsert’ the “shadow” of the “human hand” back “over the image,” to give it back its ‘painterly’ subjectivity (Bazin).
In this manner, it would seem as though the film is not only interested in aligning its own representational project with that of painting, but also generating something like a general theory as to how the one might be made to look like the other. In particular, An American in Paris seems interested in the way in which film can produce juxtapositions of different, self-contained realities – a voice-over and a camera shot, for instance – which, when combined into one single ‘image,’ can be understood as constituting a new independent art object, a reality in and of itself. In this manner, it begins to look possible for film to assume that essential quality of painting: its “inescapable subjectivity,” its unique ontological status of being both real (in and of itself) and unreal (in relation to its models) (Bazin 14 ).
Presumably, this is the interest behind the tri-part ‘performance’ sequence at the heart of the film: each performance, by virtue of its cinemagraphic construction and presentation, becomes something more than the sum of its parts, more than a mere collection of its ‘real’ images and moments. As was the case for the mistaken-identity sequences, this effect is perhaps most obvious with Jerry’s iconic painting montage which, by virtue of its cinematographic construction, assumes a somewhat more interesting ontological status than it might otherwise. Here we find Jerry literally ‘painting’ what we can only assume are the already-painted backdrops of the set, thereby transforming what would otherwise be basic representational works of art into pseudo-modernist, meta-compositions. In other words, we are presented here with a sort of ontologically-ambiguous, representational mise en abyme: i.e., a filmic representation of a painter representing the film’s painted representation of Paris, with each ‘level’ of representation equally legible as either real or unreal. Next, we have Adam’s imaginary concert performance, which even on this diegetic-‘imaginary’ level, already exists in a rather complicated relationship to reality. Layer on the various ‘photorealistic’ duplications of Adam, and suddenly we are confronted with another ontologically-ambiguous meta-composition: though all these ‘Adams’ might be real in their own right, together they produce a composite which, if real at all, is only truly real in relation to itself.
The same is largely true of Henri’s performance, where we find ourselves confronted with another meta-event – a song-and-dance routine performed within a Hollywood musical. Same as the others, it is hard to tell what ‘plane’ of reality this performance exists on: while the sequence is certainly real in the sense that it happened and was recorded, it remains uncertain whether or not we should consider this performance along the same ontological lines as other song-and-dance routines in the show, or on its own terms altogether. It is a representation of reality, but the cinematographic terms of its presentation render it ontologically distinct.
In this context, the films’ interest in painting as a model for its own production process begins to assume a sort of logic. In particular, it arguably offers a framework for understanding and navigating the ontological problem which confronts Hollywood musicals as a genre: that being, the ontological status of its song-and-dance routines. More specifically: should they operate within the mise en scene of the film, or should they operate outside of it? Are they ‘operatively’ real, or do they function on the level of fantasy or psychology? Though ‘painting’ obviously cannot not answer these questions, it does seem to offer a model by which one might navigate the rendering of these different ontological ‘spaces’ along a sliding scale of reality. That is to say, the interest of painting to An American in Paris would seem to be the framework it provides for differentiating what is real, what is unreal, and what is somewhere in between. It is no coincidence, in other words, that the film pulls off such a savvy and ontologically nuanced approach to diegetic activity. That which is most real (the standard, narrative-centric mise en scene) is rendered in the least painterly terms – uncomplicated cinematography, minimal montage and juxtaposition – whereas that which is least ‘real’ is rendered in the most painterly terms. In this capacity this sliding scale of ‘plasticity’ offers something which more binary approaches to diegetic activity cannot accomplish: ontological bleed – i.e., characters existing along several planes of reality at once. In a film like this, in other words, it is not inconceivable that Lise might know Jerry is dreaming of her.
Works Cited:
Minelli, Vincente, director. An American in Paris. Amazon Prime, MGM, 1951, https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00D5VDLMU/ref=atv_dl_rdr?autoplay=1.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 1975.
Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema, Vol.1. 1967