***

Twenty years have passed since the release of Stanley Kubrick’s last film. A seemingly long span, given the speed at which cinema moves within the landscape of the culture industry, yet a far shorter one when seen from the standpoint of the power of the image. It is indeed the film’s images that still summon our gaze, question it, call it into doubt.
Kubrick does not belong in a museum (even though there is a Kubrick museum, even though exhibitions are devoted to his work); in the sense that it is not a museum-goer’s gaze that the American director demands. There is always something urgent, uncanny and destabilising stirring within his images. One does no great favour to Kubrick by anaesthetising their power through pacifying celebration.
Returning today, twenty years on, to the images of Eyes Wide Shut proves this clearly. That enigmatic expression, of eyes closed and wide open, that gaze laden with desire, with eros and with death. This enigma of seeing continues to unsettle our visions, anything but pacified, just as the text of the novella Dream Story evidently went on, years later, inhabiting the dreams and disquiets of Stanley Kubrick.
This is why every discussion, every reflection, however slight, can be put forward again, if only for the possibility it may open: that of a new (and always contemporary) vision.

***

Stanley Kubrick’s last film is also his terminal film, the work that allows us to rethink, critically and theoretically, all the previous work of the New York director. Eyes Wide Shut is, first and foremost, the synthesis of a cinematic journey, of a poetic world that the director never ceased to build, film after film, image after image. But, in the second place, Eyes Wide Shut is also a theoretical perspective, a hypothesis about the possibility of a thought of cinema that Kubrick – director-philosopher par excellence – never ceased to explore. The film’s complexity lies also in this twofold possibility of reading (one might say: the first concerning a poetics, the second an aesthetics), within which Schnitzler’s text too, on which the film is based, plays, of course, a fundamental role.

It is in this direction, then, that of recognising the autonomy of the Kubrickian text with respect to Schnitzler’s text, that a new comparison may be attempted; if one identifies in Eyes Wide Shut a reinterpretation sub specie cinematographica of Schnitzler’s text, then Kubrick does not transport the Austrian writer’s text from word to screen, but rereads its themes from the standpoint of the image, of the gaze and of movement: in other words, from the standpoint of cinema.

From the title itself, Eyes Wide Shut – an expression hard to translate into Italian, evoking an eye at once wide open and shut [1] – Kubrick, rather than offering a key for decoding the film (its mystery or its enigma), foregrounds a problem, a paradox that, on reflection, is an integral part not only of his cinema, but of cinema tout court. The semantic complexity of the title makes it possible to introduce three possible directions of reading into the film; three lines that do not mutually exclude one another, but integrate with one another.

The eye open and shut at once is first of all the eye of oneiric vision, the mobile eye of the REM phase of sleep; and if the comparison between the cinematic image and the dream image has always been an element present in cinema, it is also the thin line that runs through Schnitzler’s writing, in particular in a text like Dream Story. In the second place, the eye shut and open at once is also the staring eye of death, a pupil fixed with no more spark of life. The dimension of death is, in this sense, one of the elements that characterise Kubrickian cinema, a vampiric cinema that has always presented figures suspended between life and death. Finally, the image of a gaze at once living and dead, at once open and shut, is the image of the gaze in cinema, the image of an eye that is not real, no longer alive, powerless, incapable of acting and condemned to see, to observe, often wide-eyed, a world it does not understand, that it can no longer inhabit [2].

The centrality of the eye and of the gaze in Eyes Wide Shut: an eye, however, that moves away from that positive instrument of vision and knowledge which is grounded in trust in vision and in the possibility of distinguishing the true from the false, reality from illusion. Modern cinema – of which Kubrick is one of the great theorists as well as practitioners – is founded precisely on the rupture of the sensory-motor link between gaze and knowledge, gaze and action. From neorealism to the nouvelle vague, from the new cinemas of the Sixties to the great auteurs of the present – Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andy Warhol, Aleksandr Sokurov, Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Terrence Malick, to name but a few – the cinematic image has shown the real as something ever more elusive and complex, and the visible as that which prolongs its enigma. Beginning with neorealism, in fact, a path opens that will run through all subsequent cinema, in which: “…the certainties of the data of the real give way to elusive elements, incomparable unities. Directors realise that the data of perception do not exhaust the dimensions of the visible. […] Objects and the forms of space, little by little, begin to take on unsettling, enigmatic characteristics” [Brunetta 2004, 188]. It is along this furrow that Kubrick’s cinema has always moved.

It is therefore from this awareness that the analysis can set out, taking account precisely of this complex interweaving of lines with manifold meanings, without necessarily keeping the paths separate; on the contrary, crossing them as much as possible, in order to probe deeply the complex relationship between Kubrick’s film and cinema.

The powerlessness of the gaze / The power of cinema

Between 1945 and 1949, Kubrick worked as a photographer for the American magazine Look. In that famous American weekly the young Kubrick produced genuine photographic reportage, often capturing the gestures and everyday moments of ordinary people: visitors at a zoo, patients waiting in a dentist’s office, boys watching a baseball game. Kubrick’s photographs, despite the variety of situations and subjects, share a common element: what interests the young photographer is not action, but the expression of those who, forced into stillness (spectator, visitor, patient…), seem in a sense to freeze their own life, their own humanity, in their gaze: “The human subjects display an ambiguous, almost animal expressiveness. Instantaneous enigmas […]. The series of gazes at the zoo sees nothing; once again, we do not see the object of those gazes. They look not at the camera but, body snatchers, into the camera and beyond it, beyond the bars of the ‘prison of the eye’ (understood in the Kafkaesque sense), into the heart of darkness in which any vision is formed” [Ghezzi 1999, 8]. The photographs bear witness to a kind of paradoxical movement: the camera immobilises and, above all, drains life from the subjects it frames. Kubrick is careful to make the still image a kind of equivalent of death or, better, of the vampirisation that the apparatus of photographic reproduction of the image (photograph or cinema) sets in motion. As though the true subjects of Kubrick’s photographs were the eyes and the gazes of the human subjects, curdled rather than captured: gazes always oblique, sidelong, never aimed straight at the lens, as if to challenge its omnipotence, its arrogant and presumed invisibility that legitimises the spectator’s voyeurism. A director always attentive to the properties of the gaze, Kubrick grasped from the very outset the ambiguous status of the gaze, its being – when captured through the cinematic camera – a powerless gesture, withdrawn from action. The repertory of Kubrickian characters is indeed made up of figures withdrawn from action, like David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, or the Joker in Full Metal Jacket (id., 1987), “mummy actors […], reproduced in movement thanks to the machine” [De Bernardinis 1999, 241]; figures who, like the Bill Harford of Eyes Wide Shut, are the typical Kubrickian characters who “do not act, but look a great deal” [Chion 2005, 464-465].

What movement, indeed, is more typically Kubrickian than the finale of The Shining (id., 1980), in which the frenetic and sterile race through the maze ends with the double fixity of the cadaverous face of Jack Nicholson/Jack Torrance, frozen to death, and his image portrayed in the celebratory photograph of the party at the Overlook Hotel on 4 July 1921? Throughout his cinema, Kubrick has always explored this immobilisation of the gaze that cinema inevitably brings about as an apparatus. The ambiguous status of the human eye is a Kubrickian obsession insofar as it is an obsession of cinema, the constant unresolved presence of the organic and the inorganic across the screen. From the averted gazes of the photographs for Look magazine, to the gigantic eye that sets off the visions of the final part of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the multiplication of eyes and gazes in Eyes Wide Shut, the theme of cinema suspended between life and death, between the organic and the artificial, between vision and blindness, never ceased to interest Kubrick.

One thus understands one of the reasons why the interest in Schnitzler’s novel has distant roots (Kubrick had long known Schnitzler’s Dream Story and had acquired the rights to it as early as 1971, with the idea of making a film from it): the novella by the Austrian writer and physician is, for the New York director, the ideal instrument for pursuing his inquiry into the powerlessness of the gaze. Traumnovelle, Dream Story, is a text that belongs among that set of “non-realistic” authors and writings which have always formed the ground from which narration departs in Kubrick’s cinema. Writing is, in a sense, not the point of departure to be recovered at the end of the process of making a film (whose task would then be to “restore” it); it is, on the contrary, one of the elements in the construction of an “other” space and time (purely cinematic ones): “K. does not put himself at the service of a story, nor does he abandon himself to the pleasure of telling it, and in this he departs radically from the tradition of American cinema. For him the tale is only a first ‘screen’ onto which to project the real film, and the whole of it; not a means for conveying a message but rather for conveying the entire film (which is the message)” [Ghezzi 1995, 19]. In other words: in Kubrick the text has always been functional to the image and not the reverse; it is only as cinema in potentia that writing can then become film. Cinema (and its obsessions) is superimposed on literature, becoming the lens through which to frame the text, as the director himself confirms: “If I find a good book that is nonetheless not visualisable, I then prefer a simpler work onto which I can transpose my ideas (for example, the maze scene that replaces the one of the burning hotel at the end of The Shining). Once I have found the story, and that is already a real miracle, I need only adapt it, with a co-screenwriter or else with its own author” (my emphasis) [Bouineau 1995].

The story is therefore the “screen” onto which to “transpose the ideas”; to find the story means to find the ground on which cinema can test the possibility of positing itself as an instrument of vision. Kubrick is a total filmmaker in the sense that his aim is the image, the construction of an image of which the “story” (whether it comes from a screenplay or is drawn from a pre-existing text) is one (but only one) of the elements. Sometimes the text is pure pretext, chosen for the possibility of transforming it into something else, as in the case of Stephen King’s The Shining, Dr. Strangelove (from Peter George’s Red Alert) or Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (which inspired Kubrick both in the title – A Clockwork Orange – and in the use of vision as violence [Aragno 1999, 32-33]). At other times, what fascinates Kubrick is the possibility of finding in a book an archetype, a mythic or fabulous element to be recreated in the cinematic image – from the founding myth in 2001: A Space Odyssey, drawn from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, to the fairy tale in Nabokov’s Lolita – or a territory of artificial images in which to set cinema playing once again as an apparatus (as in Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon).

Beyond the differences, what the work on the various novels or stories that form the basis for Kubrick’s films has in common is a setting-at-a-distance that the director performs with respect to the matter of the narrative; the text is dismantled, minutely analysed starting from the cinematic image: in a few words, the text is “abstracted”, rigorously and radically transformed. What Kubrick sets in motion is a kind of reworking – to use the term employed by Noël Carroll [Carroll 1998, 247-248] – a cold reprocessing of cinematic and literary genres and forms, or rather, reprocessings capable of showing the film as a grand setting-into-form of logical structures. Space and time, rhythm and speed, definitions and digressions, assertions and inferences seem indeed to be the real stakes of Kubrickian cinema; it is in this sense that Deleuze can affirm that what Kubrick stages in his films is the brain: “The identity of world and brain, the automaton, does not form a whole, but rather a limit, a membrane that puts an outside and an inside in contact, makes them present to one another, confronts them or sets them face to face. The inside is psychology, the past, involution, a whole psychology of the depths that undermines the brain. The outside is the cosmology of the galaxies, the future, evolution, a whole supernatural that makes the world explode” [Deleuze 1989, 228].

At this point, then, a space opens that allows us to recapitulate a thought, a way of thinking cinema that belongs to Kubrick and that we have seen taking shape along the traces scattered so far: Kubrick’s cinema is a “total cinema”, insofar as it puts cinema into play as “form”, totally “ab-stracted” from the (naive) claim to represent reality; if anything, the Kubrickian image has to do, on the one hand, with the mind and the brain, the logical forms and the deepest psychological dynamics, and, on the other, with the most archaic forms of narration, myth and fairy tale. It is in this twofold direction that the relationship between Kubrick and Schnitzler is enriched with new meanings.

Schnitzler, Kubrick and cinema

According to the testimony of Dalton Trumbo, who worked with Kubrick on Spartacus (id., 1960), the director, brought in to replace Anthony Mann at Kirk Douglas’s wish, at once began to alter the screenplay, structuring the relationship between the two antagonist figures – Spartacus and Crassus – as a mirroring relationship, in which one figure was the double of the other; Kubrick, Trumbo recounts, was prompted to this change by his reading, begun in 1959-60, of the writings of Arthur Schnitzler [3]. As already mentioned above, Schnitzler is a figure long present in Kubrick’s cinema, and it is not inaccurate to say that his presence is not comparable to that of the other authors from whom the New York director drew films, but goes well beyond. For Kubrick, Schnitzler takes on a different and far broader role, that of an instrument through which to reread cinema and its possibilities. In a sense, Schnitzler’s work on psychoanalysis – the transfiguration on an aesthetic plane of what for Freud had necessarily to find a scientific foundation – becomes for Kubrick the possibility of finding in the Viennese physician and writer an extraordinary reservoir of forms which, in more than one sense, prefigure cinema and its images and, at the same time, an exceptional formal challenge. It is precisely the work on the image and on the elision of the event that shows through in Schnitzler’s writing, and particularly in Dream Story, that poses itself as a putting-into-play of the potential of Kubrick’s own cinema and of cinema tout court. As Chion recalls: “Written by a man of sixty-three, the age Kubrick was when he began work on the film, it is a text of extraordinary richness, a challenge for a filmmaker, for the spectacle of the orgy inserted in it, but also because what does not happen is far more important than what does” [Chion 2005, 453].

As in the case of the work on the double used to rethink the structure of Spartacus, Schnitzler’s writing allows Kubrick to rethink cinematic form and to “re-work” (re-working) his own cinema [4]. Schnitzler’s rigour, which goes hand in hand with the challenge and the capacity to work with blurred and indeterminate images, the fruit of that mid-consciousness (Mittelbewußtsein) to which Schnitzler assigns a central role in the configuration of psychic facts and which, above all, the Viennese writer places at the centre of the aesthetic and poetic activity of the human being, are the elements that allow Kubrick to think of Eyes Wide Shut as a laboratory-film, a reworking of cinema. This, then, is the reading proposed for rethinking the Schnitzler-Kubrick relationship: not so much to highlight the differences between one aesthetic form and the other, nor to underline the distances (temporal, narrative, diegetic) that characterise the passage from the written text to the film. What interests Kubrick is not so much the “content” of Dream Story as the Schnitzlerian “form”, a form that allows him to explore the limit of the image and of the gaze which, as has been said above, is in Kubrick always deflected, frozen, fixed toward a beyond-the-frame that, as in Schnitzler’s writing, is more important than what remains within.

Here, then, are laid out the terms of a relationship more complex than the one that takes shape between a director and the author of a text. Kubrick – through Eyes Wide Shut – makes of Schnitzler, as has already been said, the instrument necessary for the fine-tuning of a practice of cinema, of a theory of the cinematic image, of that “total cinema” that runs through all of Kubrick’s works. It is a matter, then, of traversing the film once again in the light of what has been said so far, and of bringing out those knots and those forms through which Eyes Wide Shut posits itself as the putting-into-image of a theory of cinema.

Eyes Wide Shut: gazes, lights, wanderings, elisions

It is from a suspended gaze that Schnitzler’s novella opens. The daughter of Fridolin and Albertine is reading a fairy tale drawn from the Thousand and One Nights, and her words halt precisely on the word “gaze” and on the image immediately preceding it, that of a sky strewn with “stars” [5]. The multiplicity of artificial lights and stars, as well as the continual and obsessive presence of the deflected, suspended gaze, frozen in the image, constitutes, as we shall see, a double constant presence in the film.

While she is getting ready to go to Ziegler’s party, Alice asks Bill to look at her, to know how she appears in her dress and make-up: “How do I look?”; Bill, without even looking, tells her she looks wonderful: “Perfect”, and Alice replies with a grimace: “You’re not even looking at it”. The small exchange already introduces a visual theme, that of the gaze, which Kubrick will never abandon throughout the film. But another detail strikes our attention: while the steadicam’s movements precede the movements of the Harfords along the corridors of the house, a great many electric lights are switched on and scattered through the apartment and, as can be seen in the drawing room, a Christmas tree helps to heighten this epiphany of lights, like a crescendo that reveals a further shift in the following shot, in cross-dissolve (the nocturnal New York street crossed by fixed lights – buildings and blocks – and moving ones – the cars); and, again, it reaches its climax inside Ziegler’s house, when the couple, after crossing a corridor (once more anticipated by the steadicam), are welcomed by the Zieglers, who greet them in the middle of the drawing-room atrium, an enormous space whose walls are entirely decked with cascades of electric lights.

A rising movement thus introduces us into a particular atmosphere, where the lights and the obsessive presence of the steadicam seem to give the image a visionary, artificial dimension, without losing anything in verisimilitude [6]. During the party, Bill and Alice separate, and Kubrick shows their movements within the party. Complex movements and, above all, movements that lead nowhere (Alice lets herself be seduced a little by the elderly Hungarian nobleman; Bill crosses the drawing room, drawn along up to a point by two accommodating young women). When, at Ziegler’s request, Bill revives the prostitute Mandy from her overdose, the young doctor asks the woman – in a state of semi-consciousness and with her eyes closed – to open her eyes and look at him. The contact of gazes thus allows Bill to interrupt Mandy’s state of unconsciousness. Every movement is interrupted during the party, both Bill’s movements (the chat with Nightingale, the walk with the two young women) and Alice’s (the dance with Sandor). The party itself is interrupted by an editing cut. A cut that opens onto the shot of Alice from behind, framed as, naked and in front of the mirror, she removes her earrings; from off-screen Bill emerges, naked as well, who approaches and begins to kiss his wife. The shot (marked by a slow zoom that tightens to a close-up of the two actors clasped to one another) does not frame the two bodies but, to be precise, their images reflected in the mirror. The shot tightens until it reaches the image of the film’s poster. And it is here that Alice’s gaze performs a series of swerves: instead of closing her eyes, Alice looks toward the mirror – she looks at herself and looks beyond the screen – in a double movement (the body embracing Bill and the gaze wandering elsewhere) that introduces a split between two bodies that had until now been essentially united or, at the very least, parallel to one another. If the man’s eye is closed, concentrated in the intimacy of the gesture, the woman’s is open and turned toward the lens (toward the one who looks), in an explicitly declared mise-en-abîme of fiction, a scandalous offering-up of the gaze that breaks the pact of fiction between actor and spectator.

The split, announced by the wandering of the gaze, will take concrete shape in the following sequence. After Alice and Bill have spent the day each carrying out their own tasks (Bill in his medical practice, Alice at home), the couple find themselves in bed talking about the Zieglers’ party, discussing the theme of desire and of the relations between men and women. The two bodies move apart, Alice gets up, and the rest of the scene is shot in shot/reverse-shot, with Bill seated on the bed and Alice continually changing position and moving in front of him. At a certain point Alice sits on the floor and begins to recount the exchange of gazes with the naval officer. The account has no images, but emerges solely from Alice’s words. Bill remains silent, staring straight ahead of him. The telephone call that breaks the silence a moment later forces him to go out to the wake of one of his patients. Bill takes a taxi and imagines (the vision is in slow motion and in black and white, with a slight tinge of blue) a man in a uniform kissing his wife.

Now the two are completely separated, and Kubrick has perfectly described their tasks, the all but opposite roles that distinguish them. Alice looks (it is she who sees beyond the frame, who doubles her gaze through the mirror), but her movements are limited (hers is a disquiet, a tension, that translates into rapid shifts, twirls, pirouettes, movements on the spot); moreover Alice does not produce images, her gaze exceeds the limits of the frame without settling into an off-screen that finally becomes visible. Alice creates or reproduces tales, words, dreams that we are not permitted to see. Bill, by contrast, moves: from this sequence on, he will shift continually from one place to another for the whole duration of the film; but Bill, in reality, looks without seeing, his eyes always believe they see, and yet everything he will experience over the course of the film could be seen otherwise, could be interpreted differently, could even not be. Bill too looks, it is true, and his gaze always fixes on something that the spectator ends up seeing (unlike Alice); the off-screen never remains such, but what Bill sees – or believes he sees – is traversed by the doubt of truth more than by verisimilitude.

This split, this division of roles between the man and the woman, between the power of word-narration and the powerlessness of the gaze (which nonetheless makes it possible to create images), is what structures the movement of the film from this moment on. Here, then, a precise dynamic of character takes shape in the film: not so much the representation of real figures or types as devices capable of creating cinematic forms (tales and images). But, as we have seen, neither the tale nor the image can be judged from the standpoint of the truth of representation, since it is not as representations that they can be judged. Bill and Alice are properly active forms of cinema, devices precisely, which construct, through the Kubrickian rereading of Schnitzler, a staging of a theory and a practice of cinema.

Toward a theory of the mask

In this, Kubrick positions himself as one of the poles of contemporary cinema, that of a cinema capable of pushing to the limit its possibilities as a machine of narration, working on the boundary between reality and representation. In Kubrick – as in other key auteurs such as David Lynch, the image is ambiguous precisely by virtue of its verisimilitude. What is characteristic of cinema is precisely its working on the profound reality of the filmed/reworked image and, at the same time, on its intrinsic fiction and evanescence. It is in this borderland that cinema posits itself as an instrument of thought, a “form that thinks”.

In the film, besides the Harford couple, a third character dominates the staging: the mask, the conceptual character of Eyes Wide Shut. The conceptual character – a figure dear to Deleuze and Guattari – is what dominates and runs through an author’s discourse. Kubrick, a mental director, always elaborated conceptual characters that in a sense constituted the horizon and the very form of the film (the maze, the tunnel, the trench, the geometric shape). In this sense too Kubrick is an author-philosopher, but not because his is a visual elaboration of philosophical concepts, rather because his cinema works by means of conceptual characters, of forms that make it possible to feel, to perceive, the very movement of the concept, its being “at work”.

The mask in Eyes Wide Shut is thus the last of the Kubrickian conceptual characters. The film is full of masks, material or invisible. The prerogative of the conceptual character is that of not being limited to a body or an object (as in the case of an actor or an element of the film). It is not an aesthetic figure, of which works of art are full, from films to objects to paintings. Unlike the latter, which “affectively” amplifies a work of art, which makes a theme expressive, the conceptual character operates intellectually; it precedes, traverses and follows the film. In this manifesting of itself, the conceptual character performs an intellectual operation. It is, properly speaking, a figure of thought that transforms and is transformed in the film, that makes the concept capable of bifurcating along the text, manifesting itself to infinity: such is the mask in Eyes Wide Shut. Like every conceptual character, its distinguishing feature is mobility, the capacity to assume different forms. Material, concrete masks are those worn by the guests at the masked orgy-party, as well as those that Milich sells at Rainbow Fashions. Grotesque masks are the made-up faces of Milich’s daughter (a kind of baroque parody of Lolita) and of her Japanese clients. But invisible masks are also the bourgeois rituals that condition the language of Bill and Alice and of the characters who surround them. The formulas and the words that punctuate the life of the wealthy, comfortable New York couple create a kind of veil, a perennial mask, stretched to conceal every word, every gaze capable of tearing it.

Once more, and above all, the mask is described in the film from the title onward. Taking up the initial considerations regarding the semantic complexity of the film’s title, the eye shut and wide open is also the eye of death, the empty eye of the death mask, the gaze of the corpse of Amanda Curran laid out on the mortuary table; a gaze that Bill confronts in one of the film’s central scenes and that Fridolin describes in Schnitzler’s novella.

When Bill approaches Amanda’s body, the girl’s eyes are open and blind at once – “eyes now extinguished”, Fridolin reminds himself [7]: eyes now extinguished… perhaps another possible meaning of Eyes Wide Shut?

It is at this point in the film that Bill receives Ziegler’s telephone call inviting him to his house to talk about something important. Bill penetrates once again into Ziegler’s house, crossing the long corridors (as he had already done with Alice), and Ziegler receives him in a room with a large billiard table with red cloth at its centre. Here Ziegler begins to tell Bill a version of the events that took place the night before, and as he speaks he moves continually from one side of the billiard table to the other, the table always remaining between the two, marking the “playing” distance between them. “No games”, Ziegler admonishes in the face of Bill’s feigned incredulity, but Kubrick’s direction and the performance of the two actors accentuate in every way the dimension of the game, of construction, of the false. As Ziegler continues his account, Bill, ever more distraught, moves away from the billiard table and sits down in an armchair, holding his head in his hand. His gaze is once again directed elsewhere; he does not look at the man who is speaking to him. At this point Ziegler moves away from the table and, having taken a few steps toward the camera (toward Bill), at a certain moment addresses the young doctor, telling him that everything he witnessed was staged, a kind of charade, a fake. Bill raises his head and repeats questioningly, “Fake?”, and Ziegler: “Yes. Fake”.

Charade, Fake, Staged [8] . Terms that connect deeply with the most controversial element of cinema – the art of the reality-effect par excellence – fiction. But the explanation, of course, does not convince: the staging of a staging, the fiction stretched to construct a further fiction, does nothing but keep on the same plane the ambiguity and ambivalence that throughout the film have characterised the practices of the gaze and of the eye.

If in fact the scene of the conversation with Ziegler – the false demiurge who presents himself as a further reference to the world of cinema, being played by the director Sydney Pollack – ends with a clean cut, the following shot offers us a further key to the film’s closure (a closure, naturally, not of meaning).

It is a shot of anticipation, that is, an image presented in advance with respect to the temporal unfolding of the narration in order to create disquiet or tension in the spectator. From the shot of Ziegler placing his hands on Bill’s shoulders to reassure him, the cut presents us, immediately afterward, with the detail of the mask worn by Bill during the masked orgy-party, laid on a pillow beside the sleeping Alice. Bill enters the house and slowly crosses its corridors and its wide rooms. At last he opens the bedroom door and sees the mask. It is the moment of collapse. Weeping in despair, he abandons himself on the body of Alice, who has meanwhile woken.

Here, then, gathered in a single room, are what we have called the film’s three characters (Bill, Alice and the mask): three characters that refer not so much to concrete figures, real empirical beings, as to three dynamics of the gaze (in this sense they are conceptual characters), as has already been said, until this moment scattered and separated among the film’s images. Three gazes, three potentialities that cinema has explored and that Kubrick has probed throughout his career: the three dimensions of the gaze spoken of at the beginning of this essay. If Alice is the gaze of the dream, the mask is its negation, its emptied, dead gaze, with black sockets; and finally Bill, who observes the unsettling arrangement of Alice and the mask on the bed, is the powerless gaze, terrified and immobilised in the awareness of no longer knowing how to look, of having shattered (forever) the virtuous (and Enlightenment) circle of the relationship between knowing and seeing.

In this pre-finale, then, Kubrick’s complex game comes to an end, a game that has involved the three gazes of cinema, bringing them to a blind spot, to an Eyes Wide Shut that constitutes, following Kubrick, the extreme limit of cinema, of its constitutive ambivalence, of its power and its powerlessness. It is also for this reason that Eyes Wide Shut is a terminal work: not so much because it is the last, as because it is a work that does justice to Kubrick himself, all too universally admired for the supposed “literary” quality of his films, and very little interpreted as a gaze strained over the abyss of the visible.

Notes

[1] The expression plays on the more common phrases “wide eyes” and “eyes wide open”; the phrase “eyes wide shut” thus retains the sense of the vastness of the opening, while reversing it into its opposite, preserving a semantic ambiguity that is hard to translate into Italian except through unsuitable expressions such as “occhi spalancati-chiusi” (eyes wide open-shut). The most straightforward translation of the expression – “occhi ben chiusi” (eyes tightly shut) – is the one proposed by Umberto Curi [Curi 2000, 168]; but that translation, besides being an obvious forcing, loses all the semantic ambiguity that, as one understands on seeing the film, is an integral part of its structure. More faithful to its oxymoronic sense, but equally impossible (perhaps only because it is precisely the impossibility of the translation that is the truth of its translation), is the one offered in Canova [2000, 153], “occhi aperti chiusi” (eyes open shut).

[2] It is here, for Deleuze, that the fracture is located between classical cinema, centred on the priority of the action-image, the movement-image marked by the gesture that modifies the world and that yields an indirect image of time, and modern cinema, in which a new image emerges, characterised by the pure optical and sound situation, in which: “The character has become a kind of spectator. He may move, run, exert himself all he likes, the situation he is in outstrips on every side his motor capacities and makes him see and hear what is no longer justifiable, in principle, by a response or an action. He records rather than reacts, he is handed over to a vision that he pursues or that pursues him, rather than being engaged in an action” [Deleuze 1989, 13].

[3] The interview with Dalton Trumbo, published in Positif, no. 64/65, April-May 1960, is cited in Arecco 2004, 97.

[4] The importance of Schnitzler’s work and of the concept of mid-consciousness in Kubrick’s cinema is underlined, among others, by Simone Ciaruffoli in his essay on the film [Ciaruffoli 2003].

[5] “But the prince, wrapped in his purple cloak, lay alone on the deck, beneath the deep blue of the starry night sky, and his gaze…” [Schnitzler 2002, 5]. Immediately after reading these words, the little girl falls asleep.

[6] The image has, according to Chion, a “phantasmagoric” dimension [cf. Chion 2005, 454].

[7] “Now, however, he would see again only the body, a dead woman’s body, and a face of which he knew nothing but the eyes… eyes now extinguished […]. Fridolin drew still closer to the dead woman, as though, by sharpening his gaze, he might wrest an answer from those rigid features. And at the same time he understood: even if that was truly her face and those eyes the same ones that the evening before had fixed on his, so warm with life, he would never know it, he could not know it – perhaps he did not want to at all” (my emphasis), [Schnitzler 2002, 85, 88].

[8] As often happens in Kubrick’s films, the word and the iconic sign can give rise to linguistic games or cinematic references to which many critics and exegetes of Kubrick’s work have devoted themselves (from the deconstruction of the names present in Kubrick’s films – the Overlook Hotel – to cabalistic games on acronyms and symbols – HAL 9000). The three words cited above, for example, refer to three films much loved by the American director and united by the fact of being profound reflections on the nature and the intrinsically fictional power of cinema: Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963), F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1975) and Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950).

Bibliography

Aragno, R., 1999, Kubrick. Storia di un’amicizia, Schena editrice, Brindisi.

Arecco, S., 2004, Anche il tempo sogna. Quando il cinema racconta la storia, Ed. di Cineforum/ETS, Bergamo/Pisa.

Bouineau, J. M., 1995, Entrevue inédit avec Stanley Kubrick, in Id. Le petit livre de Stanley Kubrick, Sportorange, Garches.

Brunetta, G. P., 2004, Breve storia del cinema italiano, Einaudi, Torino.

Carroll, N., 1998, Interpreting the Moving Image, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Canova, G., 2000, L’alieno e il pipistrello. La crisi della forma nel cinema contemporaneo, Bompiani, Milano.

Chion, M., 2005, Stanley Kubrick: L’humain, ni plus ni moins, Cahiers du cinéma, Parigi

Ciaruffoli, S., 2003, Stanley Kubrick. Eyes Wide Shut, Falsopiano, Alessandria.

Curi, U., 2000, Lo schermo del pensiero. Cinema e filosofia, Raffaello Cortina, Milano.

Daniele Dottorini teaches Film Studies (Istituzioni di Cinema) at the University of Calabria. His publications include: Filmare dall’abisso. Il cinema di James Cameron, (Edizioni ETS, Pisa 2013), Jean Renoir. L’inquietudine del reale, (Ente dello spettacolo, Rome 2007), David Lynch. Il cinema del sentire, (Le Mani Editore, Recco, Genoa, 2004).