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Classical studio films, it has been argued, treated sound in analogy to the image and, therefore, underwent little stylistic change after the advent of synchronized sound. In classical Hollywood filmmaking “the recording of speech is modeled upon the way cinematography records visible material and the treatment of music and sound effects is modeled upon the editing and laboratory work applied to the visual track.”20 The jazz sequence in Phantom Lady undercuts this image-sound analogy. Sound, here, as in many of Siodmak’s features, Hollywood or otherwise, does not simply add substance to the image track. Instead, the auditory is granted a certain kind of autonomy that enables sound and image to engage in a mutual process of denaturalization. Rather than incorporate music entirely into the visual field, the jazz sequence demonstrates the extent to which the effects of music and film sound rely on the power of discourse and representation. In this sense Siodmak’s sound direction challenges what Michel Chion calls the scotomization of the microphone in classical cinema.21 Inverting the image-sound analogy, the film contests the naturalist perspective according to which any reference to the process of sound recording must be purged not only from the visual and auditory field but also from the viewer’s mental act of perception and representation. We may not see the mike that records Cliff’s frenzied solo, but when the film invites us to hear what the musicians and Kansas hear, we start to understand how classical film sound usually wants to hear for us and thus render the rendered natural and organic.
Many of Siodmak’s most successful films deliver speech, noise, and music from their subordination to the image track. Siodmak’s sounds are custodians of nonidentity. They warrant the heterogeneity of cinematic representation, the brokenness of modern sense perception. In frequently splitting bodies from voices, sounds from sights, Siodmak’s films allow the viewer’s perception to slip beyond the visual field. They urge the spectator to keep the different modalities of human sense perception in a state of open-ended dissociation and crisis. Siodmak’s film noirs explore the utopian potentials of nonsynchronicity. In doing so they not only convert the proverbial crisis mentality of 1940s America into a formal language, but they also revoke the Wagnerian undertones of Nazi cinema and its euphonies of standardized sameness and existential resolve.
p h a nt o m b o d i e s , p h a nt o m vo i c e s Political existentialism, as conceived by Nazi theoreticians such as Carl Schmitt and Alfred Baeumler, considered the political a space of resolve, a privileged space where authenticity could come into being. Weary about
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the ever-increasing decentering of power and identity in modernity, political existentialists hoped to recast the modern state as a showcase of self-assertion and willpower. Politics, as some Nazi ideologues argued, is self-sustaining; political leaders justify their action not in recourse to normative debates or legal principles but their mastery of extreme situations and creative ordering of social space. Although claiming the radical autonomy of the political, Nazi existentialists, however, did not hesitate to interpret political action according to the principles of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century genius aesthetics. Goebbels summarized this affinity of art and politics in a speech to film practitioners in 1937: “Just as art shapes human beings, so does politics shape peoples and nations.”22 Both art and politics express humanity’s will to form. For both the artist and the politician, form is a direct expression of power. In Goebbels’s view industrial mass culture by no means eliminated this basic identity of artistic genius and political leadership. On the contrary, it offered unprecedented means of transmit-ting the aura of creative power to ordinary people. The task of German film was to transport the expressive authenticity of artistic genius and political leadership to the age of mechanical reproduction.
Siodmak’s Phantom Lady moved Goebbels’s nexus of art and politics to the center of a taut Hollywood thriller. Like Goebbels, Siodmak draws parallels between different arenas of human creativity, the ways in which people channel their talents into social projects and, thus, in a truly existentialist sense, hope to create themselves, as well as communal bonds. Unlike Goebbels, however, Phantom Lady reveals what is terrorist about the celebration of creative genius and authenticity in the era of machines. Staging a climactic conflict between genius aesthetics and liberal-democratic technocracy, Phantom Lady in the end exposes fascist modernism as an ideological practice that buries the arbitrary and sensual under a screen of anaesthetic reality control. Whereas Nazi existentialists envision art as an expression of power and a tool to intensify modern life, Phantom Lady suggests that this existential crusade for total form and identity culminates, at its most consequential, in the desire to administer death. Geniuses may aspire to interrupt the weary routines of modern existence, but they can do so only by silencing the voices of the other.
Produced by Joan Harrison for Universal, Siodmak’s Phantom Lady premiered at Loew’s State Theater in New York City on February 17, 1944.
The film’s plot was based on a 1942 novel by Cornell Woolrich, but it changed both the novel’s original story line and character motivation in significant ways. With the figure of the psychotic artist Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone), a fascist modernist in thin disguise, Siodmak’s Phantom Lady
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added a dimension to Woolrich’s original conception that not only permitted new narrative possibilities but also struck the political nerve of the time. Siodmak’s Marlow is an elitist sculptor who murders the wife of his best friend, Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis), a young, energetic, and socially committed engineer. The police arrest Henderson for the murder because he is unable to provide a solid alibi for the night of the homicide. Having gone out with a young lady without knowing her name or identity, Henderson fails to find any witness who would want to confirm his mysterious night out on the town. Kansas (Ella Raines), Henderson’s attractive secre-tary, believes in the engineer’s innocence even after the court sentences him to death. Turning into a prototypical femme fatale, she traces the anonymous lady by means of only one clue: a hat, the copy of a flamboyant designer model as it turns out, specially manufactured for an eccentric Latin American singer. When Kansas, with the “help” of Marlow, finally finds the phantom lady of the film’s title—Ann Terry (Fay Helm)—it is time for Jack to intervene in Kansas’s unraveling of the case. Back at his apartment he reveals to Kansas the motive for his murder, recalling his love affair with Henderson’s wife and how she refused to run away with him. Now preparing to strangle Kansas too, Marlow discloses his true feelings about his friend Henderson, this “mediocre engineer working in sewers, drain pipes, faucets.” In Marlow’s eyes Henderson represents the aesthetic banality of Fordist modernity and liberal-democratic mass society. “I never,”
Marlow proclaims, “liked cities, noises, confusion, dirt, and the people in them. They hate me because I am different from them. . . . What is any life compared to mine?” When Inspector Burgess, suspicious that Henderson might not be the murderer after all, knocks at the door of Marlow’s apartment, Marlow jumps out the window and commits a spectacular suicide, represented onscreen as sound and metonymical trace, the noise of breaking glass and the following image of a jagged hole in the apartment window. In the film’s final sequence Kansas’s originally neglected amorous investments are finally rewarded when Henderson returns to his office after his release. Yet instead of revealing his own affection face-to-face, Scott leaves a message on Kansas’s voice recorder. He invites her for dinner
“tonight” and “every night”—a marriage proposal repeated to Kansas’s delight forever because of a malfunction of the apparatus.
Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward praise Phantom Lady for Siodmak’s ex-quisite manipulation of mise-en-scène. The film’s atmospheric images of New York streets and jazz clubs, of jails and apartment interiors, of desire and excess, they argue, recall the iconography of Weimar cinema. Assisted by his cinematographer, Woody Bredell, Siodmak, in particular in the jazz
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club sequence, “brilliantly interweaves expressionistic decor with American idiom. If watched without sound, the scene could be from one of the classic German films of the 1920s.”23 Silver and Ward make a convincing case for the visual qualities of Phantom Lady. Whether one considers the film’s use of canted angles, disjointed continuity, expressive close-ups, visual allegory or synecdoche, spotlights, or chiaroscuro effects; whether one brings into focus the film’s iconography of schizophrenia, hysteria, paranoia, or sexual stimulation—all might be understood as part of a performative recollection of Weimar expressionism authored by a nonexpressionist exile stranded in Hollywood. To suggest watching the film without sound in order to appreciate its artistic quality most distinctly, however, grossly misses the point, for it is precisely in the film’s use of sound, in the layering and often deliberately mismatched juxtaposition of sound and image track, that Siodmak’s Phantom Lady achieves its most notable qualities. Phantom Lady advances sound to the primary force that may breach the aesthetic excesses and perversions of Marlow. “Sound effects and silent track without dialogue,” as the reviewer for Variety noted, “are used to maximum effect to heighten the suspense of the picture.”24 It is also in the use of sound, one might add, that the film’s political unconscious affects the surface of the text most forcefully and urges the viewer to recognize the film’s historical index.
In direct continuation of his first sound films for UFA, Siodmak’s sonic experimentations in Phantom Lady primarily aim at severing sounds from their corporeal sources, at disconnecting acoustical events from visual representations. Phantom Lady in fact presents this peculiar disjunction of image and sound as the benchmark of modernity and its machines, institutions, and technologies of representation. Twentieth-century modernity, as film and experiential reality, in Phantom Lady decenters the unity of body and voice. It dissolves the traditional chains of signification people used in order to position themselves in time and social space. Yet whereas Marlow understands the modern unfixing of organic ties between the acoustical and the visual as a step into an apocalyptic state of inauthenticity, Phantom Lady endorses audiovisual disruptions as potential sources of agency and emancipation. The film splits voices from their bodies not only to foreground the constructedness of meaning but also to revoke Marlow’s totalitarian coordination of sense perception, his rhetoric of aesthetic heroism and existential authenticity.
Consider, for example, the highly idiosyncratic and, arguably, farcical representation of Henderson’s court trial, which grants the film’s sound track a curious, albeit temporary, autonomy from the image track. Repeatedly
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throughout the sequence, rather than picturing those whose voice we hear—jurors, judges, or lawyers, even the accused himself—the camera pans over individual faces in the audience. Even more confusing are the various instances the camera zooms in on only the hand of a court stenog-rapher recording the indictment speeches in shorthand. While the voices of jurisdiction achieve through their very invisibility a kind of heightened intensity, the court’s audience is shown as transfixed in mute positions of voyeuristic spectatorship. The juridical system appears as a voice without body, whereas the public in whose name justice is spoken owns a body but no voice. Phantom Lady thus presents secular jurisdiction as both at once: as impartial argumentation and as spectacle. When the (invisible) judge proclaims the sentence, a visitor in the auditorium coughs so loudly that most diegetic and all extradiegetic spectators are kept from comprehending the final verdict. It is only by means of a reaction shot showing Kansas’s consternation that the film finally discloses the outcome of the trial. Reconfigured into the conventional patterns of hierarchical dependency and mutual reinforcement, images and sounds thus come together again, but the spectator’s trust in the unity of representation—the identity of sounds and images—has been irrevocably shattered. Temporarily sundering what conventional practices forge into an imaginary totality, the disjunctive courtroom sequence not only allegorizes the erroneous nature of the verdict—the fact that Henderson’s sentence results from blind emotion rather than reasonable insight—but, more important, it questions epistemologies of jurisdiction that overlook the discursive character of truth. Inasmuch as the sequence plays various levels of representation against each other, it attests to the fact that any image of the past, as well as any evaluation of human action, is necessarily steeped in historically specific struggles over the forms, technologies, and contents of representation.
Many other instances in Phantom Lady could be cited in which temporary breaches between sounds and images drive a wedge between conventional assumptions about the identity of voice and body. In one of the two show numbers the voice of the Hispanic singer, Estela Monteiro (Aurora Miranda), dominates the sonic plane while the camera focuses on how Kansas exchanges erotic glances with the drummer, Cliff. Chased by Kansas, a hysterical bartender (Andrew Toombes Jr.) dies in a noisy car accident in the space offscreen while the camera shows us the response of Kansas and some pedestrians on the sidewalk. On Kansas’s return to her apartment, Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez) seems to speak from a void, poised first in the darkness of her room and then with his head hidden behind a lamp shade. And last, but not least, Henderson’s warped message on the voice
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recorder figures as a decisive vehicle for the film’s happy ending. Romance here does not result in spite of modern technology but rather through its calculated employment—as if Walter Benjamin had it right after all, and mechanical reproduction indeed possesses the power to bring things closer to each other, spatially as much as humanly.25
For Marlow, to be sure, modern technology signifies the root of all evil.
Insisting on the authority of the original, the here and now of the genius work, Marlow considers modern machines of reproduction to be catalysts of aesthetic banality; they enable an ominous dominance of Zivilisation over Kultur. Minus his psychopathology, the figure of Marlow closely follows the formula Nazi entertainment features had developed for the role of male artists. Nazi cinema privileged the representation of male artists involved in physically challenging, heroic genres: sculptors, battle painters, architects, or conductors of explicitly “masculine” music such as Bach and Beethoven.26 Excessive masculinity, driven to the point of murderous paranoia, is also at the core of Marlow’s aesthetic project. Marlow’s New York studio, brightly lit and hygienically cleansed of all traces of modern civilization, is populated by a variety of sculptures that clearly recall the monumental work of Nazi artists such as Arno Breker and Joseph Thorak. Like Breker and Thorak, Marlow’s art aims at what Nazi-philosopher Ernst Krieck theorized as a “realism of the Volk” (völkischer Realism).27 Similar to the artifacts that dominated the aestheticized public sphere of Nazi Germany, Marlow’s massive works hope to ground art in the vitalistic roots of collective life and, in order to do so, not only challenge abstract modernism and bourgeois utilitarianism but also promote the artist to the charismatic
