Where might we recognize the work of spectacle/attraction in this film? Does spectacle rupture narrative (as we discussed in relation to Steamboat Bill), and if so, when/how and with what impact? Is spectacle gendered in this film, and if so, how and to what effect?
How, in this film, is Louise Brooks as Lucienne simultaneously the woman who looks (and thus perhaps a stand in for the spectator/audience member) as well as the woman we look at?
[This prompt will make more sense after you’ve read the Hastie] How does Louise Brooks’ star text (and/or the Lulu persona) intersect with her performance as Lucienne? How might her persona have impacted viewers watching this movie?
The balance between spectacle and narrative that has been discussed in class is definitely one worth discussing when it comes to “Prix de Beauté.” There is without a doubt both a strong narrative in the film, as well as a large amount of spectacle and attraction. What differs this film however from other films like perhaps “Steamboat Bill Jr.” is how connected the spectacle and narrative are on a tangable level. One could argue that films like those of Keaton or Chaplin, were loose narratives meant to chain together the attraction of comedic bits. In this case, the narrative of the film is literally about spectacle and so we have a stronger storyline that is filled with spectacle and seems to have more of an organic feel. Unlike a film where you have a bit of narrative, then spectacle, then narrative, etc, this film merges the two together almost invisibly which is what makes the film so effective.
In terms of what makes this spectacle so entertaining, the theme of gender comes in to play and it is also worthwhile to take Hastle’s reading into consideration. A simple, and probably accurate, description of the film could be “boys, c’mon down and see this attractive star strut her stuff!” The film depicts rich and powerful men looking at beautiful women in expensive dresses. In this sense the spectacle is very gendered in that it is putting the women on display. It could definitely be argued that the storyline and the emotional struggles/decisions of the protagonist also send out messages to both men and women alike about gender roles in society. In either case the issue of gender is being addressed. The other way in which the spectacle of the film is defined is by the star Louise Brooks herself. As read in Hastle’s piece, Brooks was a celebrity known for her looks, her possibly active sex life, and her ambiguous sexuality. There is no doubt that when you put this type of a celebrity in a film where she models bathing suits and party dresses and has intimate moments with multiple male characters that this adds to the appeal of the film. Not only is the attraction present in the diegesis of the film, but there is also a definite attraction in seeing a talked about celebrity further clarify (or possibly make more ambiguous) the image of who she is.
“Prix De Beaute,” is a title that eludes to both the prize and the price of beauty: an insightful and thought provoking name for a visually and naratively dichotomous filmic study of the contradictory duality of femininity. In short, what is so poignant about this film is the way that form, subject matter, and narrative all parallel one another in purpose.
Form wise, the film is filled with voyeurism and visual fragmentation; a clear result of the influence Rene Clair’s avant-garde world of surrealism, dada and the like – it uses artistically inclined montage and fast forwarding to create a sense of visual spectacle and viewer subject separation – we are perpetually reminded that we are watching a film by the insistence of the form. Specific sequences that highlight this sense of visual voyeurism are when Lucienne is exercising on the beach and the footage of the Miss Europe finals; both illustrate the act of the female being watched and objectified by a third party of observers, with whom we can’t help but relate.
This fragmentation is further delineated in the larger scale of narrative structure, which essentially divides Lucienne’s life into two spheres: the domestic maternal figure and the social object. Lucienne struggles with balancing a sense of personal fulfillment and desire, with societal constraints of womanhood, battling between her perceptions of obligation and her perceptions of womanly value. However, this is not to say that Lucienne ever stops being an object, or ever manages to control her own sense of purpose; as Laura Mulvey makes clear in her writings on the male gaze, the filmic woman is almost always the passive receptacle for male sexualization and expectation, and Lucienne is the perfectly pathetic spokeswoman for female passivity.
The only way for our protagonist to be happy is to be told en masse that she is beautiful, for her to have admirers, diamond bracelets, fancy dinner parties and fame. She is unmoved by the seemingly devoted, if jealous and suffocating, love of her fiancé, she has no real friends of her own and her job provides her with no real source of individual fulfillment. She is stuck between playing the lonely housewife and the starlet, unable to find lasting happiness in either realm, she implodes with her own lack of self awareness and dies.
Louise Brooks made a name for herself as Lulu in her first film with G.W. Pabst, Pandora’s Box. It is therefore fitting that this is also the pet name given to her by Andre, her fiancé in the film Prix de Beaute. While Lucienne does not have the same overt, aggressive sexuality of the first incarnation of Lulu, this subtextual connection between the films incriminates the character of Lucienne in a way to which the narrative rejects. She is no longer just a tragic victim, but through her actions also an accessory to her own murder.
While the incrimination of Lucienne/ Lulu is buried in the subtext, it is also made available through the film’s alternating portrayal of her. The film begins with a her in a bathing suit at the beach, and it is made clear that she is an object for the male gaze. Soon after, however, we begin to see the filmic environment through her eyes. We share her anxiety as she is pushed and jostled in the crowd. When she is getting her picture taken at the carnival, there is a sense of voyeurism. When she gets on the train, we share her sense of excitement and wonder. Once she arrives in Spain, this portrayal eventually reverts back to her portrayal as a sexual object, something to be looked at. The voyeurism is replaced by exhibitionism, especially evident during the pageant. The cold, detached, almost documentary-like shots of the catwalk and crowd aid in this transformation.
This final scene cements the audience’s relationship with Lucienne as someone to be looked at. She is no longer the woman who looks, as this figure has died, both literally and figuratively. As Lucienne expires in the cinema, her celluloid doppleganger sings on, a continuation the spectacle and a reminder of her status as object. It is clear that after her death, beyond the timeframe of the film, this screen test will be a the only evidence of what she could have been. She will be remembered not as a person, but as an object to be looked at.
As Lucienne attracts the public gaze, she notices her own appearance more readily and, as a result, her gaze is drawn away from André. While, yes, the public gaze objectifies her, it is also liberating. It allows her to break free from Andre’s narrow viewpoints, his jealousies and his cage-like philosophy of what is a proper role for a woman. At the same time, while André loses her gaze, he gains the public’s negative gaze, which looks onto him recognizing that he is an overprotective boyfriend. The gaze and the foreshadowing of its future progression are introduced to us in the beginning of the film when Lucienne is dancing by the pool. A crowd of men looks onto her and admires her physique. Upon noticing this development, André reprimands Lucienne and thus attracts the men’s gaze unto him. They note he is “jealous.” The gaze’s negative transference onto André allows Lucienne to retrospectively look back upon what she was doing and how she must have appeared from the men’s perspective, making her want to take on their point of view. Later, Lucienne and André go to a fair, and André performs a weight-throwing game in front of a crow while Lucienne looks on indifferently. André prefers this relationship: to be looked upon by his girlfriend in front of the whole world, but to not have anyone notice her attractiveness. A similar scene takes place in the end of the film in their dining room. André and Lucienne eat and face each other. André decides to relent and give Lucienne her fan mail and, upon doing so, the fan mail steals Lucienne’s look away from him and directs it downwards at the photos she is signing. This is troubling for André because Luciene is looking at photos of herself and is gaining too great a degree of self-recognition. She is beautiful and is able to see she is beautiful. It reminds André of the self-recognition she gained as Miss Europe. On the way to the beauty contest and upon arriving, she was the figure who was not only surrounded by the crowd and looked at, but was the one looking back onto the crowd, glorifying their gazes with smiles and turns. So what are the ramifications of Lucienne’s gaze back onto herself? For one, as mentioned, it liberates her, helping her recognize her beauty. But secondly, it exemplifies and embodies the America’s public’s desire to be movie star. The American public, and especially women, wanted to be watching themselves on screen as Lucienne does in the end of the film. A third point which is more difficult to prove without the help Hastie’s article, is that Louise Brooks was not only aware of her star persona, but manipulated it to her own desire and pleasure. In the film, Lucienne’s character has a more demure relationship with her screen image; she does not play around with her sexuality to the same degree, but she still analyzes her own image so she can modify it and adjust it within the public’s gaze.
When Louise Brooks declared in 1977 that she would never write her memoirs, she gave the reason that no person can effectively be understood without a knowledge of their “sexual loves and hates and conflicts.” She wrote this in such a way as to imply that she would never do such thing, and thus forever keep her story off the shelf.
And yet her sexual loves and hates and conflicts are the very fabric of her films. Whether playing Lulu or Lucienne, Louise was represented to the public as an entity out of which these representative characters grew. Amelie Hastie points out that Louise was one of the early examples of a star that supported the images of her characters, creating dimensions of their collected personality off the screen.
So when Brooks is seen in Prix de Bauté, it is not merely Lucienne we relate to and explore, but the connected persona of her actress. Rumors of lesbianism taint the courting male lovers, known distaste for Hollywood fame contradicts the search for Miss Europe limelight, and indeed the portrayal of Lucienne’s narcissism becomes a commentary in itself. With Brooks’ stated disinterest for fame already conflicting with her clear willing participation in its manipulation, Lucienne’s death gains new facets in the eyes of the audience: How does one starlet behave in the face of another? With the amount of tabloid buzz on Brooks, audiences knew enough to speculate an answer.
So when her memoirs came out in 1983, it was perhaps less of a contradiction, but more a realization of character that pushed her beyond her sexual obstacle. There was no more reason to avoid writing an autobiography because audiences effectively knew her necessary sexual loves and hates and conflicts from the sexual nature of her characters. Whether it was accurate or not, they had long pieced together the deepest secrets of their beloved Lulu, assuming both character and actress to feed into one another. And in apparent acknowledgement of that fact, Brooks titled her 1983 memoirs Lulu in Hollywood, with no mention of Louise. Fame had hijacked her identity, and whether she liked it or not, she was living in a world where her image was both public and unknown, misrepresented and honest with the difference impossible to parse out.
Prix de Beauté is thus one of many intersecting storylines in a completely fictionalized plot that created an amalgamation of people collectively referred to as Louise Brooks. She is a spectacle for us in the film not just because of her beauty, but because her “character” is so developed in so many ways that it is a fascination simply to catch a glimpse. And yet that developed character is an image like Lucienne’s, fleeting and invented, that doesn’t end with a distinct and stated memoir, but rather a collection of suitable rumors. Poignant for both Louise and Lucienne, then, that “prix” in French means both “price” and “prize,” for this is very much the story of Lucienne’s rise and of Brooks’ stardom: immensely rewarding for the attention, yet ultimately costly in its consequence.
When people think of spectacle, their mind normally wanders to heroic feats and daring stunts. The first thing that comes to mind is not necessarily the spectacle of a woman’s beauty. Beauty queen competitions are spectacles and we become a part of the audience of these competitions when we are watching. A spectacle is something that people create to be seen, and I can think of few more visually based events than beauty pageants. The reading emphasized her sexuality, so the spectacle of gender roles being so blatantly presented on the screen in front of us is putting these roles on the forefront for the audience to see, and could even be said to be putting them before story.
Another interesting example of spectacle in the film is the acknowledgement of the audience. Though this film is an example of early cinema, the characters on the screen, and most importantly Lucienne, look directly at the camera. This takes us out of the story and promotes seeing instead of watching. Acknowledging the audience, like in Voyage à la Lune, is something prevalent in all forms of spectacle. A performance becomes more theatrical, and it breaks the fourth wall between the film and the viewer.
Finally, the last aspect of spectacle that I found in the film is the sexuality of Lucienne, Louise Brooks’ character. Despite the fact that she is not depicted as sexually as people are today in rated R movies or in rated X scenes, the men in those days may have gone to see the film in part because they were looking forward to seeing her physique on the screen. She does not deny this as she talked about her life, and she often spoke of sexuality. Men gawking at women who show some skin is nothing new, and Louise Brooks presents a good example of that.
* I’m so sorry, I thought I had posted this last night but it seems it didn’t go through because the internet in my dorm always fails me miserably.
I believe the spectacle in this film lies with the presentation of Louise Brooks herself. Her position as the main character of the film’s narrative supports this. We see her through a male gaze which puts her sexuality as a woman in the forefront. The fact that the film’s narrative centers on an international beauty pageant facilitates this spectacle. In the narrative, Lucienne’s husband becomes insanely jealous at the prospect of having to share his lover’s beauty with the rest of the world. Her female beauty and the desire she inspires in men is at the center of attention in this narrative. Amelia Hastie indicates that many movie fans were fascinated with the way Louise Brooks presented her sexuality on the screen. In this way, the spectacle is definitely gendered. I do not think the spectacle ruptures the narrative. Rather, I think the spectacle and the narrative work in tandem, they support each other.
Hastie cites the attention film historians have given to Brooks’s own writing about being an actress in Hollywood as evidence of the acknowledgement of Brooks as a witness of the Hollywood scene rather than just a movie star to be looked at. She is not simply a “pure image.” Toward the end of the film, Lucienne watches herself on the big screen, singing and performing. She watches herself gleefully while her screen shadow sings a song about overactive jealousy ignited by her coquettish nature. It seems as if, as an “object” of the screen to be viewed by millions, Lucienne must apologize for not belonging to any single viewer, but at the same time reaffirms her loyalty to her fans. In watching herself, she reflects on her own experiences as a star, adored by so many.
The spectacle is in the gaze. In seeing what a man sees. The smooth, porcelain legs, the small fit body, and of course, the rear. The audience, regardless of gender, is situated aside the male character with a simple of screen glance. Then we spend a few seconds entranced in the subsequent point of view shot. A woman’s body, if depicted tastefully on screen, has this entrancing quality. As perverse as it seems, films more often than not utilize women for their “to-be-looked-at-ness.” Women situated as recipients of the gaze, are the spectacle, the show, the attraction. In early cinema this was seen with the lifting of the dress to reveal an ankle. Need less to say today films have pushed this gaze beyond the brink.
In Prix de Beaute the gaze is turned on its head. In the opening swimming pool sequence, there is a shot of a woman’s legs and then a man’s gawking point of view shot as she changes in a car. What comes next is novel. The woman, Lousie Brooks’ Lucienne, smiles at the man playfully before covering the window. In the following shots, she “works out” in front of a group of men as they watch her. Again, she give the same, almost welcoming, smile. Throughout the film, she actively invites men and us, since our gazes are aligned with the male characters through point of view shots, to look at her. This is not voyeurism, as other gazes usually are, instead, Brooks is an exhibitionist.
Louise Brooks herself has made it so that the audience gazes at her with her. In extratexual sources, Brooks contradicts herself just as the gaze in Prix is a contradiction. Because she does not clearly accept or reject the rumors surrounding her sexuality, her ambiguity causes fans to look into her films for the answer. Audiences are therefore encouraged by Brooks to find the answer since she neither rejects the idea of being with a woman nor loving men (Hastie: 10). This encouragement is picturized in the final scenes of Prix where a filmic representation of Lucienne hovers over her dead body, as though gazing upon her.
There are many parallels than can be drawn between Louise Brooks’ “star text” and Lucienne, her character in Prix de Beauté, with a few key differences as well. First of all, we can assume that Brooks was conflicted, like Lucienne, about the nature of stardom and recognition; however, based on Hastie’s article, it’s clear that Brooks was much savvier in dealing with this conflict than Lucienne is. While Lucienne comes off as almost hopelessly naïve—constantly reminded of the pitfalls of stardom yet effortlessly wooed by its charms—the real-life Brooks (or at least her portrayal by Hastie) was a whip-smart woman with a natural intelligence about cinema and a knack for manipulating public image. This is the key difference between the real woman and the fictional one, and it creates an interesting tension in the reading of Lucienne’s character.
The most important parallel between the two figures—one which is echoed in the conflict between stardom and anonymity—is the status of both as a “looker” and one who is “looked upon”. It is well documented, and spelled out in Hastie’s article, that though the real-life Brooks was a star, she also positioned herself as something of an enigmatic Hollywood outsider with an especially keen eye for cinematic analysis when she decided to put on the role of spectator instead of spectacle. This knowledge can help to inform our reading of Lucienne; she becomes very much “looked upon”, but she is new to the world of fashion and beauty, so we identify with her as a newcomer/outsider who is viewing this environment for the first time.
This self-reflexivity only heightens as the film goes on and, as I mentioned in my response to the reading, it is this sort of layering of image and reality that made Brooks such an interesting star, not to mention somewhat ahead of her time in this respect. By the end, we watch Lucienne watch herself on a movie screen; it seems obvious to point out, but she has come full circle as both the spectator and the spectacle. Finally, in a classic comment on the “embalming” (as Bazin would put it) nature of cinema, she is killed as the “immortalized” version of her goes on performing on the screen. Compounding this is the strangeness of watching two versions of Brooks on the screen, one “dead” (or recorded pretending to be dead) and one “alive” (or doubly recorded and projected within the film itself), knowing that the actress herself has long since passed away.
To further add, the character Lucienne relates to in our analysis of Louise Brooks by allowing us into her life prior to her fame. At the same time, we see the steady progression of her becoming a new figure that must turn the celebrity on and the individual off, and vice-versa. It was very unfortunate to have our main protagonist murdered at the end of the film, but could this shed some commentary on the career of a torn individual? Do we ever know Lucienne? Honestly, I really don’t know how to answer these questions, but the presence of her character as it ascended from the common people to the elite does carry some weight to what one person would be able to handle in her hostile situation.
First, the presentation of, Prix de Beauté, was a surprisingly interesting form of filming in comparison to the previous films we’ve screened. Recently, we’ve watched films shot within a fictional frame, but this film appeared to resemble Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which at first glance could be mistaken as a documentary, catching life as it happens. On several occasions the individuals within the movie looked at the camera as if they themselves did not know there was a movie being filmed. Though this was a little distracting at times I felt a little more engaged in the film from the perspective that the narrative reflected some realistic tone. Does this mean spectatorship was portrayed in a way that incorporated such works as the Lumière brothers, while capturing a—as David Bordwell calls it—fabula, or story?
Though I do not know the full extent of the films reception/inclusion into film history’s canon, I do know there is some level of significance regarding the style of the film’s framing, as well as the way sound was represented. Sound here, appeared to play a secondary role to the narrative and the visual components although it was apparent it was still being experimented with as an attempt to simulate a realistic perspective; especially, with the successful use of sound effects included in popular radio shows. Here, though the visuals strike interest, I would not be surprised to hear further comments to this film in relation to the Rick Altman reading.
Watching and Listening to Louise Brooks Perform.
In Prix de Beaute we are able to watch both the spectacle of a talking film (as if we were among the first audience watching a film with sound) and Louise Brooks’ performance, which exemplifies the connection between her on and off screen personas. The main spectacle, film with sound, is displayed when Lucienne sings, which they wasted no time in showing during the first scene. The beginning of the movie was fast paced until a record player is turned on, then motion slows down and the camera focuses on Lucienne singing to her present boyfriend. This struck me as spectacle, I was completely aware that that it was more performance for the audience then narrative progress. However, it did contribute to the narrative flow as the song bookends the beginning and end of the movie with a theme of love. The song is about loving one guy, which in Hastie’s article we know that this was not the case for Ms. Brooks and will not be the case for Ms. Garnier as well. The audience and Louise knew about her sexually promiscuous background and this movie helps with supporting her real life image. At the end of the movie her ex-boyfriend kills her in a movie theater.
This is a really powerful scene. Lucienne is watching a movie with her new boyfriend; this shows that there is not only one love, disproving the song that she sang with her ex-boyfriend. As Hastie explains, “Her reputation for sexual ambiguity and gender transgression was nurtured both by rumor and by the carious roles she played” (p.9). We can watch her the interaction between her on and off screen image. Secondly, she is shot while her image still sings, showing that she will never die. She completely embodied, “the real hero behaves just like the reel hero” (p.4). As we can see from Louises’ life, she kept both images very close to each other which makes us see that even when Lucienne (Louise) dies her image on screen life will survive, thus Louise will always live on.
It was amazing to see the director acknowledging the audience and our experience of watching a talking film by him showing Lucienne watch herself in amazement singing on the screen. It was like we, the audience, were sharing the spectacle of watching a talking film, with Louise, together. In conclusion the act of watching a talking film is displayed as spectacle when we watch Louise Brooks sing. The second spectacle is of her performing her typical role as a sexually promiscuous woman, which connects with us from our outside knowledge of her “sexual exploits” (p.9).
The entire film Prix de Beauté is a spectacle, about a spectacle. The fact that the film is centered around a young woman who is enraptured with the idea of being a beauty queen shows various levels of “spectacles.” The first spectacle is our experience in watching the film–the many photographs of beautiful girls, the pageant, the close-up shots of Louise Brooks as the “beautiful” Lucienne. The second spectacle is the world that Lucienne experiences–her fascination with the beauty pageant upon first hearing about it, her viewing the beautiful new dresses she is given, her star-struckness at being applauded by so many people and pursued by wealthy and handsome men, and fascination with herself. Lucienne often looks at herself in the mirror and in her photographs. It’s rather amusing to see the spectacle looking at herself as a spectacle—there is something self-referencing about it.
In the scenes where Lucienne is in front of an audience (most notably at the Miss Europe runway competition for the most applause), we have a lot in common with the audience at the competition. They are the spectators and we, too, are the spectators in watching Lucienne model. There is something that feels different about this film from later Hollywood films. I think this relates to the fact that Lucienne makes a lot of her own decisions—she sends in pictures of herself to the paper against her boyfriend’s wishes, she leaves him without letting him know herself after winning, and she eventually walks out on him when she decides to pursue a life as Miss Europe. She is not merely a spectacle or a foil to a man (as a lot of the women in Hollywood classical films are), but she is also the one whose point of view we have. She incites a lot of the action herself. She is definitely a spectacle, but she is not only that.