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Mad'ln") has been sustained on the sound track to become thefragrantly romantic accompaniment to this ascent. The calm and quietof the sequence from ballroom and carriage to staircase stand in placeof any moment of invitation or persuasion. We know that the return withStefan is a matter of unspoken agreement, of desires mutuallyacknowledged from the outset.So the assertion of similarity is put in tension with the sense oftransformation.We know that Lisa longs to give herself to Stefan. We do not know howfully she recognises the role of appetite and the body in this sacrament,or whether she recognises anything that unites her with Stefan's, andthe film's, other women. "I wanted," she will later write, "to be onewoman... who asked you for nothing."The purposes of her ascent would, then, from her own viewpoint beutterly unlike those involved in Stefan's routines of pleasure. Here itbecomes relevant to consider the culminations of the staircase shotsand their sharp differences.When Stefan and his woman disappeared from view for the secondtime they did so behind a flat, blank expanse of whitewashed wall atscreen right that censored their activity. The shot was held while soundfilled the blankness with suggestions of the flighty and illicit. Lisa wasfixed near the centre of the frame but we could not see what, apart fromher exclusion, the sounds meant to her. At the start we could see thatshe was watching; at the end we could not tell if she was listening.In the reprise the pattern of appearance and disappearance isrepeated, but the shot changes as soon as Stefan and Lisa go out ofsight for the second time.We cut to the inside of Stefan's apartment forthe couple's entrance and Lisa's immediate surrender to Stefan'sembrace. There is a direct sense in which this action fills in the earlierblankness, so it is doubly striking that it yields straightaway toblankness reasserted. The conventional kiss fade-out is followed at thefade-in by an image of remarkable emptiness, reinforced by thedisappearance of music. It turns out that we are looking at closeddraperies sealing off an area of the dress-shop, but indecipherablesilence is what we first encounter.In the pattern of repetition and variation the emptiness here replacesthe extended diminuendo in which the disillusioned Lisa had made herlonely way back down the stairs, the camera holding its position untilshe had exited at the bottom of the frame: "And so there was nothingleft for me. I went to Linz." That was the point at which music came in,as an expression of anguished disappointment. When this shot isrepeated it comes again in strikingly abbreviated form. It cuts off at thepoint where, earlier, it had developed as a sorrowing reflection onStefan's infidelity. We may see frustration replaced by fulfilment. But itis an equal part of the pattern that an extended assessment of events isreplaced by silence.Staircase One [*9] was embedded in one of the letter's most extended,almost garrulous passages of commentary in which the words spokenby Lisa became something close to an interior monologueaccompanying her exploration of the now empty rooms of the homeshe had had to leave. It was part of a lengthy passage in which the onlysignificant, dramatically salient, words were those of the commentarythat culminated in the first return to the present and Stefan's readingimage on "You who have always lived so freely... " The shot's vitalcontext, then, included its context in Lisa's reflections.Such a context is entirely absent from Staircase Two. In the sequencesdepicting the love affair the commentary tails off at the moment whenStefan is at last about to notice Lisa waiting in the snow outside theapartment building. It yields to the music of the street singers here[*10], and it does not return until Stefan's departure for Milan and the