Love in Motion by Reidar Due

Author:Reidar Due
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004010, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Direction & Production
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

Love in the Underworld

The crime films that became known retrospectively as film noir offer a fertile ground for exploring love relations, erotic power and amorous obsessions. The shadowy world of middling criminals, which is the preferred environment of film noir stories, features erotic ambitions that do not have marriage as their inevitable or natural horizon. Here desire is not thereby adulterous, but is presented to the world independently of marital codes and expectations. It was possible for Hollywood cinema after the self-censoring Hays code of 1934 to explore erotic sentiment in a nuanced and sophisticated way in films like Laura, Gilda, Out of the Past and Double Indemnity by framing the moral freedom of sexual desire within strict temporal and legal constraints.

Rebelling against the gentle and pragmatic romanticism of Capra and Hawks, who portrayed love as a whimsical but not ultimately irrational or unmanly deviation from the ethical requirements of camaraderie and work, European noir directors like Charles Vidor, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Jacques Tourneur emphasised the specificity and autonomy of erotic desire in relation to conscious wishes and moral demands. Like many other creative people working in Hollywood at this time, all of the above were European émigrés. Vidor was Hungarian, Wilder and Preminger were Austrian and Tourneur was French. In any case they do not contribute to the educational programme that forms the core of Capra’s and Hawks’s filmmaking. Their films do not teach us to become decent and considerate, to minimise our own pretentions and set limits to our sexual ambitions. These are films in which sexual energy, erotic desire and relations that have no other reason to exist than mutual attraction are celebrated in full awareness of the existential price that may be paid for such a freedom in a culture based on the austere and puritanical moral values of rationality and work. The noir genre allows these European Americans to stylise a clash between two kinds of freedom, the American freedom of work and incessant activity, and the self-destructive erotic freedom of desire pursued for its own sake, as an end in itself, answerable to no one and to nothing. Yet, these filmmakers also pay a price, as they have to punish desire two times over. They have to make sense of desire in the terms of a moral discourse, thus robbing it of its freedom to be merely itself, to be merely desire. Second, they have to show that the uncompromising egotism of sexual desire is incompatible with the ethics of communal values: thus it is not only crime that is punished, but the prospect of erotic claims that are not reducible to peaceful life in society.

Gilda is a story of pride and electrifying erotic tension. It is the story of a sadomasochistic relationship and the difficulty that two lovers have in affirming and publically asserting their love. Gilda is an attractive and sexually adventurous woman devoid of economic means and social privilege. She marries a charismatic and wealthy crook, a ruthless casino owner.

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