New Review of Film and Television Studies

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Imitation of life: new forms of spectatorship

Laura Mulvey

To cite this article: Laura Mulvey (2017) Imitation of life: new forms of spectatorship, New
Review of Film and Television Studies, 15:4, 471-480, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2017.1377936
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2017.1377936

Published online: 12 Oct 2017.

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New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2017
VOL. 15, NO. 4, 471–480
https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2017.1377936

LECTURE

Imitation of life: new forms of spectatorship*

Laura Mulvey
Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck University, London, UK

I would like to start, in order to set the scene for my paper, with a quotation
from my host, Sam Girgus, as he reflects on my concept of delayed cinema:
… the production of previously sub-surface images or in holding exposed images
in prolonged examination for fresh life and meaning. Slowing, reversing, stop-
ping, stalling film in delayed cinema reveal depths of previously invisible moving
images. Altering temporalities for the images of delayed cinema exposes a bounty
of semiotic signs for study as potential events of emerging being and presence.
These temporal and spatial shifts realize what Mulvey describes as ‘stretching
out the cinematic image …
Here, I want to discuss a particular instance of ‘stretching out the cinematic
image’ in an analysis of the first four shots of Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film Imitation
of Life. It seems strange to me that I should have spent so long dwelling on
these shots. A chapter of my book Death 24 x a Second: Stillness in the Moving
Image, published 10 years ago, has a chapter devoted to these shots. And I had
certainly been watching and thinking about the sequence before then. And I
have now returned to these four shots again, although from two rather different
perspectives.
First of all, it was due to Sam’s very interesting and thought provoking
response to my Death 24 book1 that I returned to the particular significance of
‘delaying’ the image in this sequence. Sam’s use of the term ‘presence’ seemed
to illuminate an aspect of the content (the African-American extras), the cine-
matic form of their figuration (fleeting, marginalised), as well as the ‘stretched
image’ out of which their significance and visibility emerges. Sam points out
that my concept of ‘delayed cinema’ suggests that, in the almost imperceptible
shift between stillness and movement, a sense of presence materialises, a ‘mark
of being’ central to existential thought. I am not engaging here with these
existential questions but rather using Sam’s insights to return to this particu-
lar sequence, but in terms of content, as well as the more abstract questions

CONTACT  Laura Mulvey  l.mulvey@bbk.ac.uk

*
From a lecture given at Vanderbilt University on 9 November 2016.
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
472   L. MULVEY

of cinematic form. For me, this sense of presence arises, by and large, from
a consciousness of the cinema’s relation to time, its indexicality (the past’s,
the moment of registration’s, continued being in the present of spectatorship),
combined with a sudden awareness of chance or punctum-like details in the
image. The sense of presence, I think, comes into being when the usual act of
active looking becomes a more meditative reflective ‘watching’, when the look
itself is slowed by the experience of perception itself, when spectator finds
that the sensation of seeing time and grasping meaning has become palpable,
taking shape in front of one’s eyes. We are both, I think, trying to pin down
something that is specific to cinema but is usually lost under the flow of film at
24 frames per second, absorption into the narrative and the automatic habits
of spectatorship.
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES   473

Secondly, recently I extracted the opening sequence, the four shots, of

Imitation of Life, from its place in the body of the film. I then re-edited it,
using montage and delay to turn it into a ‘remix’ or a short ‘audio visual essay’.2
Although the ideas I inscribed into the re-edit are very much the same as those
in the book chapter (which I will return to in a minute), I became interested in
the way the sequence acquired a new independent and autonomous identity;
the fragmented and recombined images created a new object, no longer an
extract, detached from the original film. To my mind, the bits of rearranged
footage belong rather to the genre ‘compilation’ or ‘found footage’ film. And
Sirk’s Imitation of Life also undergoes a changed relationship to the new object;
the feature film is transformed into source material and thus acquires some-
thing of the properties of the archive. The newly edited object moves a stage
further on from the pensive spectator’s delayed cinema; the insights and the
hidden meanings established in the first phase of analysis become the struc-
turing principles of this small essay. I hope in this paper to manage to bring
these two perspectives, the concept of presence and the reconfiguration of the
sequence, into dialogue with each other.
I want to begin, perhaps rather laboriously, by tracing the various stages
I have been through over the course of my engagement with this particular
sequence. This is to illustrate, phase one: the way that digital interactivity trans-
formed textual analysis in the post celluloid era. And secondly, phase two: to
illustrate how digital editing can detach the ideas invested in textual analysis
from the film itself, taking on the new independent existence, that I mentioned
earlier, to become an ‘essay fragment’ in its own right.
The chapter on Imitation of Life in Death 24 was designed to bring the pen-
sive spectatorship of digital interactivity into dialogue with textual analysis
as it had been applied to the aesthetics of Hollywood melodrama, critically
and analytically, for so long. The Hollywood ‘women’s’ genre focused on the
family, the mother and domestic space, films of displaced meanings in which
the ‘unsaid’ and ‘unspeakable’ find cinematic expression in the mise-en-scène.
Looking back, I see my long-standing interest in the aesthetics of Hollywood
melodrama as a starting point for my later elaboration of delayed cinema. For
instance, I never had the opportunity to watch Imitation of Life on a film-editing
table, the only way of carrying out thorough textual analysis in the pre-digital
era. But I remember when I first saw it on a VHS tape, stopping and repeating
images and sequences, gradually realising that, while this form of decipher-
ing spectatorship changed the flow of a film, it could also liberate its hidden
meanings. The film seemed to change before my eyes. I watched the opening
sequence repeatedly, gradually piecing together the structure of the scene, and
the symmetrical pattern that juxtaposed contrasting iconographies of feminin-
ity that gave rise to the first phase of my analysis.
To summarise the opening sequence: Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) is intro-
duced with an elongated and complex crane shot as she hurries along the Coney
474   L. MULVEY

Island boardwalk, pushing through a crowd of passers-by. Leaning over the rail
to look down to the beach, she searches for her lost daughter, Susie. The crane
shot continues to follow her down a flight of steps leading to the beach and a
man (John Gavin as Steve Archer) positioned at the bottom takes her photo-
graph. Without seeing him, she crosses to the left of the screen and questions
another man (‘Pardon me. Have you seen a little girl in a blue sun-suit?’). But he
turns away without speaking. She moves quickly back to the right of the screen,
bumps into the man with the camera and the crane shot cuts abruptly. The next
shot acts as a pivot, as it were, for the sequence as a whole, shifting attention
from Lora to Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore). Steve directs Lora towards the
police, on the steps a few feet above her; the camera turns and moves ahead
to Annie who is reporting that she has found the lost child. The two women’s
paths cross as Annie descends the steps and, with a cut, the camera watches
her move away into the space under the boardwalk. The next closer shot shows
Annie with Susie and her own daughter, Sarah Jane, as she gives them hot dogs,
reminds them to say thank-you and prevents them from rushing off to play
(‘Else how’s your Mama going to find you?’).
Although the scene has a symmetrical structure, there are two static shots
of Annie to rhyme with the grand opening crane movement that introduces
Lora. The central point of the sequence, the shot on the transitional space of
the steps, mediates between the binary opposition constructed around two
contrasting female iconographies. Lora is sexualised and on display, blonde,
made-up and white, Annie is domestic and maternal, neatly but discreetly
dressed, and black. The topography of the sequence, its organisation of space,
translates these oppositions into further, spatial, ones: ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘above’
and ‘beneath’.
I specifically imagined the spectator who had deciphered these patterns and
their significance, then returning, with a new sense of the director’s ideas/inten-
tions, with an enhanced understanding of the film both in terms of its cinema
and its content, to the main flow of the narrative, to the whole movie. I said:
The discovery of a particular sequence or segment that responds to textual anal-
ysis necessarily leads to questions of film form both in terms of material and
language. To halt, to return and to repeat these images is to see cinematic mean-
ing coming literally into being: an ordinary object becomes detached from its
surroundings, taking on added cinematic and semiotic value. But delaying the
image, extracting it from its narrative surroundings, also allows it to return to its
context and to contribute something extra and unexpected, a deferred meaning,
to the story’s narration.
Although the reading of the mise-en-scene, described above, enhances under-
standing of the sequence and the film as a whole, the significance of the con-
trasting iconographies, and the topographies in which they are set, is reasonably
obvious.
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES   475

There was a key moment when my understanding of the sequence changed.

Later, watching the opening sequence again, this time on a good DVD copy, I
saw details that I had previously overlooked. By chance, or rather by scanning
the sequence beyond the main figures on the screen (Lana Turner; Juanita
Moore), I noticed, concealed within the sequence, another kind of invisibility,
another layer beyond that of textual analysis. While meanings, invisible at 24
frames per second, became relatively obvious once the structure of the sequence
had been deciphered, I noticed figures who I had previously overlooked. At first
glance, Annie is the only black figure in the Coney Island scene, surrounded
by white extras; but a closer scrutiny reveals that black extras both foreshadow
and accompany her first appearance. Their presence could only be grasped once
the image was literally stilled. The extras are only on the screen so fleetingly
that it would be difficult (but not impossible) to register their presence at 24
frames a second. In the closing seconds of the first crane shot, a single figure
creates a remarkable pivot point between Annie and Lora, (subtly questioning
the accuracy of the antinomy between them that I discussed above): at the very
end of the first shot, literally seconds before the cut, an elegant young black
woman appears, descending the steps, only just visible on the very far right
edge of the frame. Steve is about to photograph her in an exact repetition of
the scene a few moments earlier. But Lora collides with him, knocking way his
camera. The new frame shows Lora and Steve close together in a two-shot. The
choreographed movements of the crane, the stars and the extras are perfectly
timed and synchronised throughout the whole of an extremely complex crane
shot, demanding considerable thought, pre-planning and careful direction in
the studio. During the next shot, as Steve turns Lora round to face the police,
now standing in the middle of the steps, a black woman extra, with her back
to the camera, ‘leads’ its upward movement to Annie. At the same time, two
black extras move through the top left-hand corner of the frame. These figures
are, once again, not easy to detect at 24 frames per second; but their presence
has the impact of a gesture, not one that is acted out through a character, but
one that seems to materialise out of the texture of the film itself, mysterious
but present and relevant.
The fact they can only be seen with difficulty is in itself meaningful: this
representation of race is given a formal cinematic figuration, precisely in the
fleeting nature of the images. Most obviously: and very likely consciously
intended by the director, the visibility/invisibility of the African-American
extras relates directly prefigures the film’s themes . Annie’s marginal status
within Lora’s household, her daughter Sarah-Jane’s attempts to pass as white;
and most particularly, the black to white contrast is overturned in the film’s
final scenes of Annie’s funeral, when the streets are filled with black people and
her community takes over the social spaces of the city. All the film’s themes,
associated with racial marginality and how social visibility is constituted, are
prefigured in these opening moments.
476   L. MULVEY

Furthermore, with these fleeting, almost imperceptible images, the

sequence uses the human eye’s difficulty in perceiving motion (and it is only
because of this flawed vision that a series of stills can be transformed into
the illusion of a moving image). Early experiments with moving images,
Muybridge and Marey, were filmed precisely in order to still the film strip
into a series of distinct images, in order that is, to enable an analysis of the
nature of movement itself. Thus Marey recorded the flight of birds, to slow and
still the images, exposing the exact nature of the flap of the wing to human
perception for the first time. Similarly, with Muybridge, as the human eye was
unable to grasp the horse’s galloping action, he filmed it, then stilling it into
single frames. Thus the first use of cinema was one of understanding through
stilling the moving image. In my Imitation of Life instance, the coincidence
between the need to still the image of the African-American extras in order
to see them works analogously: the gap between human vision and that of
the cinema comes into play metaphorically, to evoke cinematically the gap
in dominant ideological vision and the presence of African Americans on
screen.
But these African America extras are not literally hidden from view; although
they only appear fleetingly on the screen, the alert spectator could certainly
see them. Invisibility here is enhanced by the arrangement of movement across
the screen. The spectator’s eye naturally follows Lana Turner, her bright pink
scarf, her privileged movement, her star status, as she moves from one side
of the screen to the other, all distracting attention from the young African-
American woman on the steps. But she is there. Similarly, as Annie moves
quickly and firmly down the centre of the staircase, the three black extras can
easily be overlooked. But they are there. Delaying the film not only makes them
clearly visible but the stilled images also give the spectator time to think about
their cinematic figuration. These figures are given social, cultural and political
significance precisely through their filmic representation. Once the image is
delayed, paradoxically their very fleetingness is significant, their marginality
gives them status.
Finally, these figures relate directly to Sam’s argument about cinematic pres-
ence. And I would like, here, to cite his citation of me. In my chapter on the
pensive spectator, I am commenting on Chris Petit’s film about Manny Farber’s
sense of cinema in relation to a scene in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946):
When the commentary draws attention to the young woman walking past in the
background, at that moment her presence suddenly becomes more significant
than the presence of the star. After all, Bogart is known, familiar. The hierarchy
of star and extra shifts. The young woman, a cinematic document as mysterious
as an unidentified photograph, has a presence that would be impossible to per-
ceive at 24 frames per second and can only be discovered in the ‘playful’ process
of repetition and return.
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES   477

And Sam goes on to say:

At first, presence as used by Mulvey for the unidentified girl in the Hawks-
Bogart film merely seems to indicate the girl’s sudden physical appearance and
an unanticipated awareness of her on screen. At the same time, referring to her as
mysterious also hints at certain connotations of presence as suggesting a distinct
bearing, even charisma or uniqueness. On another level, however, presence in
this scene at this moment also literally means and dramatises existential presence
in the sense of bringing to life, coming to being, a birth to presence. As Mulvey
makes clear, without the slowness of the movement of the film, the girl would
remain unseen, unknown, virtually pre-nascent and unborn.
I did indeed feel that Petit and Farber were materialising a poignant detail to
make a poetic point about the workings of cinema. In a sense, this coming into
presence has, in very different conceptual terms, a certain relation to Barthes’s
idea of the photographic punctum (as I said earlier), a salient but not central
detail that catches the spectator’s interest and emotion. However, the impact, the
‘presence’, of the African-American extras is unavoidably over determined, due
to the political and ideological connotations of social marginality and invisibil-
ity that I mentioned above. Relevant here would be Sam’s reference to: ‘Jean-Luc
Nancy’s notion of emerging presence and the existential as a kind of shock of
recognition’. Unlike the young woman in The Big Sleep, invisibility/visibility
acquires ideological meaning in the Imitation of Life sequence, reaching beyond
questions of perception and presence as such, into content. The shock of recog-
nition, the philosophical coming into being, the materialisation of presence, is
at one and the same time, social and historical a recognition that conjures up a
history of economic and cultural oppression. At the distance of almost 60 years,
it is not hard for the pensive spectator, contemplating the stilled image of the
African-American extras to impose extra meanings retrospectively: a fleeting
signifier of events in the social and political context of late 50s United States, a
flashed reminder of the civil rights movement at the time.
But, beyond the traditional practice of textual analysis, and beyond its
enhancement with digital interactivity (possessive and pensive spectatorship),
in Death 24 I argued that the interactivity of new digital technology opened up
the time to think about time, its registration, representation and its passing.
Alongside this aesthetic interest, lay the political hope that new digital visual
media technologies would give the old new life, confusing temporalities and
technologies as hidden meanings were revealed in a film stilled, slowed and
moments repeated. Thus the new technology could, paradoxically, act literally
as a means of holding past and present together rather than separating them
into the celluloid past and the digital future. But then this kind of engagement
with cinematic time led, inevitably, to the whole world of preserved time, a vast
collective memory as it were, recorded and preserved on celluloid.
In this second part of my talk, I want to consider the phase two, that I referred
to above, that is, the aesthetic, and particularly the temporal, implications of my
recent reconfiguration of the four opening shots of Imitation of Life into a brief
478   L. MULVEY

compilation film. To reiterate my earlier points: this work of practical criticism

builds on the process of textual analysis that I have evoked. But rather than
returning the spectator to the text, the film fragment is itself extracted from its
whole and turned into an autonomous object with an independent existence.
Compilation films consist of recycled material, so that, in Jay Leyda’s words:
Film Begets Film3 or it makes use, in Christa Bluminger’s term, of ‘second hand
film’. The form is built around three kinds of gaps. The first gap is temporal:
between the time when the original footage was shot and its later editing and
arrangement. Film images from the past are arranged into new patterns, pro-
ducing new ideas and arguments. In this layering of time is laid, as it were,
onto or over, the found footage’s past, as in a palimpsest. Secondly, there is
very often an ideological gap between the original film and the political stance
of the artist/film-maker editor. The third gap is more complicated, bringing
temporal discontinuities potentially into dialogue with a radical or avant-garde
aesthetic, asserting the forms heterogeneity and its diffusion of voices. While
the editor extracts new meanings from the raw material, those bits of film con-
tinue to assert their materiality and bear witness to celluloid’s precious ability
to capture and preserve whatever happened in front of the camera’s lens. This
remains the case even in the most conventional of compiled documentaries.
But the continued visibility of original material can be drawn out, to disrupt
chronological or linear concepts of time and history. With the fragmentation
of an existing film text and the recombination of its bits into a remix, past and
present are separate but fused: the ‘then’ of the material is rediscovered through
the ‘now’ of reworking and, in the process, its hidden thought can be revealed
for and into its various futures.
To my mind, the reorganisation of time that I discuss in Death 24 and, that
Sam has discussed so perceptively in his essay, is pushed into a further dimen-
sion by the kind of ‘sampling’ or essay/remix with which I was experimenting in
my Imitation of Life compilation. Once the extracted sequence is detached from
its original text, it becomes a quotation, always thus referring back, necessarily
a fragment and incomplete. This exaggerates the break with linear time that
Sam argued was key to the concept of delayed cinema. He says:
Similarly, for delayed cinema, breaking from the prescribed temporal regime for
film of 24 frames a second creates a new temporal order and experience. Such a
break also suggests the possibility in film for expressing a transcendent tempo-
ral dimension of developing ethical subjectivity that counters ordinary, linear,
chronological time involving narrative, character, and meaning. The pertinence
and significance of disjunctive temporal regimes for these ethical and philo-
sophical projects give a sense of ethical and artistic urgency to the innovations
of delayed cinema.
Sam’s discussion of Julia Kristeva’s concept of timelessness, the Freudian zeitlos,
takes this argument further in very interesting directions, (that I have not yet
fully engaged with) particularly in its relation to non-chronological, non-linear
time. I will end with a few points that relate my arguments back the implications
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES   479

of timelessness, through a Freudian framework, the psychoanalytic concept

of Nachträglichkeit, and some brief reflections on the archive through Jacques
Derrida.
Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit relates directly to a psychic exchange
between the past and future. As defined by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste
Pontalis, ‘deferred action’ (as John Strachey translated the term) implies that:
… experiences, impressions and memory traces may be revised at a later date to
fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development.
They may in that event be endowed not only with a new meaning but also with
psychical effectiveness.
Laplanche and Pontalis also point out that, as the time of a traumatic event
and the time of its later revision are intricately woven together, the concept
of deferred action challenges a linear understanding of human psychic devel-
opment. In a metaphorical parallel, the reordering of found footage similarly
offers a revision of past events within the context of an altered consciousness.
But, in both cases, the new narrative does not completely dissolve the impact
of the inassimilable presence of the past.
These parallels between the aesthetic process of revision that takes place
in the compilation film and the psychoanalytic process of ‘afterwardsness’ are
relevant to the displacement of linear time. However, Derrida’s reflection on
the temporality of the archive in Archive Fever, takes the argument back to
the content, to what issues are raised in the process of revision, and ultimately
to the further dimension of the ethical, that is so central to Sam’s argument.
Derrida says:
In an enigmatic sense, which will clarify itself perhaps (perhaps because nothing
should be sure here, for essential reasons), the question of the archive is not, we
repeat, a question of the past. It is not a question of a concept dealing with the
past that might be already at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive.
It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a
response, a promise and of a responsibility towards tomorrow. The archive: if we
want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come.
Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral
messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like
history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise. And we
are never very far from Freud in saying this.4
If Derrida’s points are relevant to archive film as such, they are particularly so
in relation to the fleeting images of the African-American extras. In the first
instance, the address across time is technological: the hidden images, that is,
only later revealed by stilling the moving image at a given moment. ‘In’ this
material is stored a delayed promise that lies in wait for the future.
After decades of invisibility, these actual instances and split seconds can
emerge into emotional significance and political recognition through delayed
cinema and through the work of the compilation film’s montage. In the last
resort, this material, that has waited decades to be analysed and evaluated,
480   L. MULVEY

carries in the celluloid footprint something (perhaps even something of the

‘promise’) that can be returned to the historical consciousness.
Derrida’s combination of the words ‘spectral’ and ‘messianicity’ creates
the image of a ghostly, unburied, past haunting a future, but also a past that
demands deliverance from a later point in time. Once again the combination
of words confuses and fuses temporalities: Derrida’s ‘promise’ and Laplanche’s
‘message from the other’ meet and find mutual relevance. Just as celluloid con-
fuses temporality, so does a promise speak from the past towards an uncertain,
but possibly redemptive future. The relevance to the promise from the future
to the past, in the context of African-American history is obviously in my
mind here. With the fleeting figures of the African-American extras ‘some-
thing deposited within it that demands to be deciphered’: that is, a cinematic
rendering of political, cultural and economic marginalisation, the presence or
coming into being of a history, by and large, abandoned by the its dominant
narrative. Only through an alternative concept of time and sequence can the
story be stitched together, through the cinematic image of montage. Film has
a unique ability to bear witness to the past, to render the ‘message’ visible and
carry forward its ‘demand’. But the reordering and rearticulation of the film
footage stops short of a coherent narrative, and reaches out, by analogy, to a
non-linear concept of history and a psychoanalytically informed history, as
though these two disciplines might enable the political task of decipherment
demanded by the ‘message’.

Notes
1. 
A New Time for Film: Existential Presence and the Ethical Imperative Existential
Presence and the Cinematic Image: Emergence to Being in Film.
2. 
This kind of ‘audio visual essay’ has recently taken off and is now common in
academic and critical film practice.
On the early history of the compilation film, see Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films,
3. 
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964.
Jacques Derrida: Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago. Chicago
4. 
University Press, 1996, page 36.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.