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ior space again, scared more by her vision than by the blowing sand, the vision returns, confirming that no protection is to be found, neither outdoor nor indoor. Her feminine enclosure has now definitely been violated. Upon this insight, she faints. Roddy carries her to bed and bars the door behind her, in a vain attempt to close-up the house. This turns out to be a highly ambiguous movement, which is just as threatening as it might be securing. The next shot of the galloping horse has been interpreted as a means of visualising his outrage. In Letty’s imagination, the wind is now seen “as a sexual threat, ‘a demon lover’ intent on violating her body and mind”. 37 In Scarborough’s phrasing: “She saw the wind as a black stallion with mane-a-stream, and hoofs of fire, speeding across the trackless plains, deathless, defiant!” 38 This is followed by a shot of a black screen, creating a pause in the narrative flow. This way of visualizing – or, rather, avoiding to show – the rape described in the novel deserves further comment. The Production Code, which had just begun to take hold in the late 1920s, stated that representations of rape “should never be more than suggested, only when essential for the plot, and even then never shown by explicit method”, as part of a general strategy to strive for the “elision or effacement of sensitive subjects”. 39 This was not only the case within cinema. On the contrary, film culture seemed to rely heavily on other, earlier forms of representation – within literature and drama in particular – in its avoidance of an explicit dealing with the subject; probably a result both of a certain “textual anxiety” (to use a term coined by Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver), which also tends to reproduce itself in contradictory discourses, and of censorship, explicit or implicit. In Higgins and Silver’s intermedial analysis of rape and representation they show that: “What remains is a conspicuous absence: a configuration where sexual violence against women is an origin of social relations and narratives in which the event itself is subsequently elided”; moreover, this is pointed out as a “basic conceptual principle” both within social and aesthetic contexts. 40 Here, as we have seen, this elision coincides with the merging of images of natural forces: the stallion, the wind. The Final Crossover Conquering Nature – The Wind 93 The next shot, to exterior, reveals the landscape in the unexpected calm of the morning, which is followed by an interior: a shot from behind, gradually closing in on Letty’s head and shoulders. This recalls the first shot of Letty in the train, captured from behind by Roddy’s gaze, thus holding her in his grip. Here, the circle closes. But the way out of this grip is also indicated in the next shot, by a close-up of Roddy’s holster on the table beside her. When Roddy
94 Transition and Transformation opens the front door later in the sequence, a sandbank wells in, and he tries in vain to bar the door with a spade. This shows first of all that he has become unable to dominate and enclose her in interior space. Secondly, it prefigures Roddy’s own burial in the sand. Thirdly, it also affirms for the last time the definite merger between indoor and outdoor space. It is as though this shot in the calm of the morning finally confirms what had already been revealed in the dramatic images of the evening before. Fig. 14: The female avenger pulling the trigger (The Wind). As Roddy in the next shot-countershot sequence tries to convince Letty to leave with him, threatening with the fact that Lige would want to kill them both, the wind keeps blowing in their hair. As she struggles to get away from him, the barking dog – which already barked in her support during the preceding sequence – seems to take her party. During the whole sequence that follows, their visual separation is emphasized. (FIG. 14) They are united only as she unexpectedly pulls the trigger, killing him, which immediately separates them once again. This leads to a series of shots of the dog barking, of Roddy lying dead on the floor, of the sand blowing into the house and of her trying in vain to dig his
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FILM CULTURE IN TRANSITION Transiti
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Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introdu
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Acknowledgements This book traces i
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Introduction - From Sjöström to S
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Film Culture in Transition General
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Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener
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