Abstract
In a late sequence from François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (1968), Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) sends a letter by ‘pneumatic post’. It is a farewell letter: ‘our feelings will die of the same impossibility of Félix de Vandenesse’s love for Madame de Mortsauf’. We see him writing the letter, discarding an early draft, writing it again and posting the letter at night in a Montmartre street while, in voice-over, we hear its contents read aloud by its author. The camera then follows the letter, in its delivery capsule, through an intricate network of underground tubes, until it is delivered on the other side of town where, at dawn, it is opened by a female hand. We then return to the street where the letter originated. Fabienne Tabard (Delphine Seyrig) has crossed Paris to deliver her reply personally to Doinel, proposing a contract with him, whereby she offers herself to him for a few hours: ‘Look at me. You wrote me yesterday and the answer is … me.’
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
L. Mulvey, Death 24 × a second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 18: ‘To see the star on the screen in the retrospectives that follow his or her death is also to see the cinema’s uncertain relation to life and death. Just as the cinema animates its still frames, so it brings back to life, in perfect fossil form, anyone it has ever recorded.’
F. Kafka, Letters to Milena (New York: Schocken Books, 1990), p. 223.
G. Deleuze, Cinema 1. L’Image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit), p. 142.
M. Vernet, suggests a doubling in the fact that the letter’s circuit (written in the absence of the recipients and received in the absence of the writer) imitates the functioning of the cinematic device. Figures de l’absence (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1988), p. 114.
S. Cavell, Contesting Tears. The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 108.
T. Gunning, ‘Fritz Lang Calling: The Telephone and the Circuits of Modernity’, in J. Fullerton and J. Olsson (eds.) Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital (Rome: John Libbey, 2004), pp. 19–37, (24).
M. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 3 (London: Everyman, 2001), pp. 419–21.
J. Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), p. 186.
M. Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 32; and Film: A Sound Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 466. Chion has described the acousmatic voice as a voice whose source is impossible to identify. Its power, he argues, is usually undone through the materialization of the source as a discrete body.
M.A. Doane, ‘The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space’, Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 33–50 (35). For a recent detailed analysis of female voice-over in the frame of feminist theory, see B. Sjogren, Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
S. Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
R. Wood, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 203.
A. Fleishman, Narrated Films: Storytelling Situations in Cinema History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 150.
P. Mérigeau, Mankiewicz (Paris: Denoël, 1993), p. 99.
Plato, Phaedrus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 70.
S. Zweig, ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’, reprinted in Selected Stories (London: Pushkin Press, 2009), pp. 119–120.
M-C. Ropars, ‘L’Oubli du Texte’, Cinémas 4 (1), (Fall 1993), 11–22 (14).
V.F. Perkins, ‘Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman’, CineAction 52 (2000), 40–8 (46).
J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread. Story Lines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 18.
As Branka Arsic suggests: ‘The unaddressed do not have a name, however they may be called.’ ‘Afterword: On Leaving no Address’, in P. Kamuf, Book of Addresses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 286.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Judith Buchanan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rowland, C. (2013). Deliveries of absence: epistolary structures in classical cinema. In: Buchanan, J. (eds) The Writer on Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317230_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317230_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33934-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31723-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)