Imagining Her Death: Cinematic Othering of the Absent Muse

by: Kaitlin Lake , March 25, 2026

One of the earliest still-surviving pictures from the silent era—The Execution of Mary Stuart (Alfred Clark, 1895), produced by Edison—is noted not only for being one of the first narrative films, but also for featuring the first filmed assembly of professional actors. For employing the first known use of special effects, it is often considered the first motion picture that depicts death. The Execution recreates the beheading of its titular queen through the deployment of a substitution splice: the actor playing Stuart is surreptitiously exchanged with a mannequin before the executioner’s axe is lowered to separate head from body. Cinema’s proclivity for depictions of female death, then, can be traced to the earliest moments of the medium’s technological and creative development. That female death is also central to what has been dubbed ‘cinema’s most famous scene’ (Skerry 2009), namely, the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)—in which Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is violently murdered only forty-five minutes into the film—further demonstrates the indivisibility of female death from the medium.

These examples attest to the continued existence of a cinematic heritage that revels in doing violence to the female subject (or rather, object) and exploiting the spectacle of her death. For Elisabeth Bronfen, western artistic depictions of dead female bodies are symptomatic, in the psychoanalytic sense, because they attest to the culture’s drive to simultaneously repress and acknowledge death’s ineluctability. The paradox that conditions this symptom is explicitly enabled because the female is culturally constructed as other: her body affirms death’s facticity, but her alterity assures death’s distanciation from the subjectivity of the spectator, who is positioned as male (Bronfen 1992: x-xi).

If, following Skerry and others (Clover 2015; Rothman 1982; Spoto 1983), the most famous and studied scene in perhaps all of cinema’s history hinges on the spectacle of witnessing Marion Crane’s death, how should we treat another film released in the same year: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura? As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith writes, Antonioni’s 1960 film is one ‘in which various things happen, but more importantly, one in which a particular thing does not happen…’ (1997: 13). Around twenty-five minutes into the film a woman named Anna (played by Lea Massari), disappears during a daytrip to the island of Lisca Bianca; the circumstances of her sudden disappearance and her whereabouts are never explained. Unlike Psycho, in which female death is both visible and definite, L’avventura rejects the classical cinema’s convention of resolution. However, an earlier version of the film’s screenplay did include a scene announcing that Anna’s body had been found by fishermen at sea (see Vitella 2012: 87); any such revelation was removed from the final film. L’avventura does not resolve the question of the vanished Anna: when the film premiered at Cannes, it was famously maligned by the audience for this indeterminacy. For Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, the audience was incensed because the film failed to offer any solution to what it had seemingly ‘set up as its principal question’ (1997: 13). Although it is never made clear whether Anna has willingly absconded, been taken against her will, fallen and accidentally drowned, committed suicide, been murdered, or met some other end, I suggest that it is primarily the suspicion of death that becomes most impressed in the mind of the spectator because of silence’s amplifying capacity.

For Susan Sontag, silence in art is dialectical; it ‘never ceases to imply its opposite’ and also ‘represents everything that could be said’ (1969: 18). The visual and narrative silence of L’avventura on the question of Anna, then, does not preclude her death; rather, its silence seems to conjure it more effectively. Anna’s death arises in a mode of cinematic aposiopesis. In rhetoric, aposiopesis is broadly defined as an abrupt halt, without continuation or resolution, that nonetheless carries the potential for conjecture about an unknown something. The speaker’s inability to continue may be due to being overcome with emotion or to their desire to call upon the audience’s imagination and infer meaning for themselves. The aposiopesis is a pregnant pause, or ‘a pause that has yet to be fertilised’ (Sell, Borch, and Lindgren 2013: 12), through which the implication of things becomes more profound because they have not been openly expressed (Kim 2013: 45).

I argue that the aposiopetic, unseen death of Anna, relegated from the realm of the visual, figures her as a muse that ultimately shores up a particularly male anxiety about transformed national identity. The dead muse, for Bronfen, is endowed with speech through the invocation of the male poet, and ‘the object of her discourse is a representation of his resurrection after death’ (1992: 368). It is by virtue of the dead muse’s absence that the poet ‘can best picture her’ as ‘his creation, with a reference not so much to any historical reality as to his poetic gift’ (Bronfen 1992: 368). The active/male positionality of the spectator against the passive/female figuring of dead muse, as described by Bronfen, operates similarly to the theories of cinema spectatorship proposed by feminist film theorists such as Laura Mulvey, for whom the subject position of cinema is normatively male and marshalled by misogyny (1975; 1981). If we are to follow suppositions about the cultural command of an objectifying and masculine gaze, and the notion that representations of the dead woman’s body serve as symptoms of man’s death-anxiety that also allow the affirmation of his subjectivity, what happens when the body upon which we are meant to gaze goes missing from the frame? If cultural representations of female death defer the death of the male spectator, as Bronfen contends, how are we to treat representations that are themselves deferred through an aposiopetic structuring? My aim here is to interrogate the tension that arises when a film simultaneously implies female death while denying its visual representation.

Like the disappeared Anna—who I read as indicative of a perceived loss of the motherland following Italy’s transformation from agrarian to industrial economy in the post-war period—the disappearances of Saskia in The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988) and Miranda in Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) similarly speak to anxieties that arose in alongside twentieth-century globalisation, though they articulate these anxieties in specific national contexts.

One may be tempted to interpret these films—all of which renounce representations of the dead female body—as resisting a typical patriarchal positioning because female characters play central roles within their diegeses and also seem to circumvent deaths that are aestheticised at best, or become sexually fetishised ‘corpse-porn’ at worst. However, I contend that in this corporeal absenting, the women of these films take up the mantle of the muse, a figure who, for Simone de Beauvoir, ‘creates nothing on her own; she is a wise sibyl making herself the docile servant of a master’ (2011 [1949]: 236). This offers a way of reading cinema’s female characters as more than mere designs for a scopophilic spectator fantasy rooted in the ‘visual pleasure’ of their ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (Mulvey 1975: 62), an approach that seems incongruent with women whose bodies are relegated to the visual realm. Keeping with Mulvey’s claim about the subject position of the spectator, the curtailing of the visual as a loss for the normatively male gaze, can be read as a strategy that reveals the instability of male self-identifications when they are tied up with fantasies of nationhood, which, as Joane Nagel asserts, they often are. She writes that there is ‘an intimate historical and modern connection between manhood and nationhood’ (1998: 242). Here, I argue that the figure of the dead muse—created through aposiopetic strategies that amplify silence and defer the death image—is deployed in these films to reaffirm masculine identities threatened by crises of nationhood.

Despite the absence of the corpse in these films, and, often, the self-conscious positioning of the film in relation to the woman’s relegation, a patriarchal orientation still prevails in the fact of these women becoming muses, and the necessity of their death to this musing. This formulation also conditions the mental afterimages of these women within the imagination of the films’ spectators. Against the anxiety arising from globalisation’s creation of ‘a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities’ (Appadurai, 1996:4), the invisible dead muse becomes a vacuous site into which the male imaginary can be projected, offering him a sense of eternal fixity. This eternal muse—an eternity contingent upon the absenting of a corporeal dead body—is doubly othered.

L’avventura: Anna’s spectral presence 

The lingering absence of L’avventura’s Anna is not, according to Nowell-Smith, a ‘positive suspense à la Hitchcock, which mounts to a climax and is then resolved. It is a negative, nagging suspense, an absence in the plot which is never filled’ (Nowell-Smith 1997: 12). In her final on-screen appearance, Anna, despondently converses with her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) at the edge of a sea cliff about their troubled relationship. With the discussion proving futile, the dialogue ends, and the scene falls silent. Sandro reclines, stretching his arms out and covering his eyes with his hands. Anna stares at the unseeing Sandro, and slowly the scene dissolves into a wide shot of the same landscape, identically framed, though now devoid of the two figures. This transition is striking because the dissolve proceeds at different speeds on the left and right sides of the frame. The dissolve is not applied to the entire shot in equal measure; it initiates at the rightmost segment of the frame, triggering Anna’s disappearance before Sandro’s. For a fleeting moment, Anna has entirely vanished from the frame, replaced by the ocean, while Sandro remains visible. For Sandro, then, the dissolve is a conventional indication of an upcoming temporal shift in the plot. Still, for Anna, who is never seen again after this shot, the dissolve engenders her spectral transformation (Fig. 1).

 

 

This singular instance of shot composition and editing speaks to the two central features that govern my reading of L’avventura. Also, it offers an approach that I apply to the other films under discussion in this paper. Firstly, concurrent to Anna’s disappearance from the frame is Sandro’s adoption of a reclined posture, and (almost in exaggeration) the covering of his own eyes. This pose suggests sleeping, dreaming, and a disregard for visible, corporeal space. Sandro withdraws to an interior, to the realm of the imagination. The notion of interiority is rendered doubly present through Sandro’s positioning within the island’s solid, unmoving, rocky landscape. Where the framing and editing occasions Anna’s dissolve into the ocean, a space of movement and flow outside of the island’s stasis, Sandro dissolves into and with the island’s interior. This detail buoys the second aspect I identify as a central feature of the film: a masculine fidelity to the land’s fixity and to the preservation of the nation, and the ensuing existential crises that arise out of a modernity that reveals the instability of the nation, and thus, masculine identity.

Italy in 1960 was marked by the post-war transformation of its largely agrarian economy into an industrialised society, a modernisation which Umberto Eco identifies as underscoring Antonioni’s expression of ‘alienation’, an adjective that scholars have almost exhaustively called upon in descriptions of L’avventura (see Eco 1989: 149; Tomasulo 1993; Moore 1995; Orban 2001). In what would be the final screenplay for L’avventura, Antonioni details a scene in which Sandro and Anna’s best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti)—with whom Sandro becomes romantically involved as his genuine desire to locate Anna dwindles—happens upon a deserted town. Antonioni’s action lines express that ‘the sun beats furiously down upon the crumbling houses, upon the church, upon the useless monument in the square, on which a dedication is inscribed: ‘To The Agricultural Worker’’ (Antonioni 1963: 181). Though this ‘useless’ monument and its inscription do not feature in the film, Claudia’s description of the town as ‘not a town’ but ‘a cemetery’ bears a similar sentiment, suggesting, but also mourning, the absence of that which is no longer, while also inscribing the space with an impression of death. The perceived loss of the motherland, and subsequent figurations that shore up attempts to reaffirm masculinity and identity (by both Sandro’s behaviour and the film’s wider language, especially in the contrasting characterisations of Anna and Claudia).

That Anna can be figured as a motherland and her disappearance then a parallel of its perceived loss is hinted at through the film’s recurring turn to the motif of the dead or absent mother, one of the stereotypical roles that the woman is often called on in art to fill (see Bronfen 1992: 373). Anna herself seems to have an absent (implied deceased) mother: only her father is notified of her having gone missing, and he explains that he is ‘used to being alone.’^[1]

In her reading of femininity in The Second Sex, de Beauvoir considers the paradoxes of the mother as a symbol (2011 [1949]: 225–35). The symbol of the nation is often allegorised in the ‘mother country’ as de Beauvoir writes: ‘Woman’s function is not specified, but femininity is, in statues that represent France, Rome and Germany’ (2011 [1949]: 231). While it is against the woman that the masculine subject defines his own subjectivity, it can also be through fixed conceptions of nationhood that masculine identity becomes affirmed (see Nagel 1998; Maxwell 2016). Gaia Giuliani has noted that ‘articulations of national belonging’ in Italy’s early Fascist period looked to the pastoral south for inspiration for ‘proper’ sexual, familial, and social customs in the population as a whole, in keeping with the tenets of conservative Catholicism’ (Giuliani 2019: 68). This is not to suggest the political sympathies of any character, but to highlight that particular imaginings of the nation are often inflected by religiosity. That L’avventura’s wealthy holidaymakers are urban Romans who travel to the rural south of Italy—the ideological model of nationalist identity in the early twentieth century, predicated on conservative visions of traditional masculinity, pronatalism and gender roles that upheld social and cultural customs promoted by the Catholic Church—and encounter absence, loss, and emptiness is telling.

R. Bruce Elder has considered how Antonioni’s films are responses to the ‘tragic situations’ of modernity exacerbated by the disintegration of religion, which can no longer provide ‘a home’ for the spirit or the higher faculties (1991: 18) and notes how Sandro ‘marvels at church architecture in Southern Italy’ (1991: 32, n 22). In an earlier screenplay, for a film titled L’isola, which would eventually transform into L’avventura, Anna’s equivalent character, a woman who goes missing in Rome, was named Anita (see Vitella 2012: 77–78). In the final film, however, the missing woman shares her name with Saint Anne, the mother of Mary, whose supposed barrenness was miraculously overcome with Mary’s birth, anticipating the immaculate conception of Jesus. The island from which Anna disappears in L’avventura, Lisca Bianca, is frequently described as ‘barren’; once the search party commences their fruitless search of Lisca Bianca, the screenplay notes the sudden appearance of a lamb (Antonioni 1963: 127), in a strange parallel of Catholic imagery pointing to Saint Anne. There are further coincidences that manifest this figuration of Anna. Historically, Saint Anne was revered as a maritime patroness; Anna’s companions insist repeatedly that she is ‘an excellent swimmer’ when asked if she might have drowned. Further, one of Saint Anne’s emblems is the door (Nixon 2004: 18; Rusca 2008: 115-7). Many critical readings of L’avventura, as well as Antonioni’s screenplay itself, ascribe significance to doorways in representing Anna’s liminality and the other characters’ navigation of the ensuing indeterminacy (see Antonioni 1963; Mroz 2012: 55-7, 64; Pamerleau 2009: 91-2). The loss of a symbolic Anna (and not ‘Anita’) as ‘motherland,’ then, is doubly significant when we consider the role of Saint Anne in Catholicism, especially given her reverence in southern Italy, where the film is largely set.

What then of the film’s refusal to offer closure on Anna’s assumed death through the depiction of her body? Bronfen, in her reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, notes a propensity for conflation between the dead beloved and the dead mother in art (1992: 134). Victor’s creations signify his reconfiguration of decomposition into recomposition because ‘the worst threat to Victor’s sense of self’ is ‘the loss and disintegration of the mother’s body’ (1992: 135). Bronfen notes how Victor’s desire to overcome death, through the elimination of the maternal body (inscribed as the source of death by virtue of it being the source of mortality), is subverted by a desire for an ‘all-encompassing presence of death’ (1992: 135). In a similar move, the body of Anna (figured as a maternal, religious figure of the nation) is eliminated from L’avventura; at the same time, her presence is ‘all-encompassing’ as she becomes spectral.

Near the end of the film, Anna seems to be inscribed in the living body of another. Claudia searches for Sandro, his absence suggesting to her that Anna has returned. As Claudia happens upon Sandro’s infidelity with Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Poliolo), it is implied that the sexuality of one woman’s body stands in for the other woman’s missing body. Gloria Perkins has been described by critics as ‘startlet’ (Landy 2000: 298), ‘writer/actress’ (Orban 2001: 15), ‘famous visiting prostitute’ (Pamerleau 2009: 92), and ‘pseudo-writer/prostitute’ (Elder 1991: 7). The transposition of the missing Anna onto the body of Gloria Perkins during a transactional sexual encounter becomes more significant when considered alongside a critically overlooked point made by Gloria earlier in L’avventura: ‘I write while in a trance and almost always while in communication with the dead.’ Gloria’s initial self-identification as a writer in her first appearance, a literal maker of meaning, becomes overshadowed by this sexual encounter. Sandro’s toss of banknotes at Gloria before he leaves her in pursuit of the devastated Claudia, and the extended duration of the subsequent shot of her retrieval of that money, confirm her engagement as a sex worker. For de Beauvoir, the assimilation of the woman and the nation is not just located in the symbol of the ‘mother country.’ She locates this assimilation as being ‘affectively practised by many men’ (2011 [1949]: 231) in their engagement with sex workers, writing:

Many a traveler would ask woman for the key to the countries he visits: when he holds an Italian or Spanish woman in his arms, he feels he possesses the fragrant essence of Italy or Spain. ‘When I come to a new city, the first thing I do is to visit a brothel,’ said a journalist. (2011: 231)

Gloria Perkins, then, also becomes symbolic of the nation. And with this, the confirmation of Gloria’s primary function as a sex worker, not a writer, by the film’s end strips her meaning-making potential. She becomes a site of inscription. Because her sex work is concurrent with her character’s symbolic potential of ‘communing with the dead,’ it is the dead Anna who is then inscribed on her, and so the ‘lost motherland’ which Sandro then assimilates with this sexual body.

This visual attention to a body, one which critics have also noted bears a resemblance to Anna, amplifies the absence of Anna’s body. Anna’s spectrality is furthered by Claudia’s conjuring of Anna in her paranoid search for Sandro. It is Anna’s missing body that becomes the heart of the love triangle in the film’s denouement, and the return of Anna in this narrative structuring compels an imagined image of this missing body. For Sarah Cooper, although observing images on a screen is a fundamental aspect of film-watching, the experience of cinematic images is not exclusive to the optical. There are cinematic images, she says, that can be ‘seen in the mind and not—or not only—on the screen’ (2022: 3). This is the imagined image, a kind of imaging that, I suggest, is pertinent to the figuration of the dead muse.

In considering the posthumous transformations of dead inamoratas into muses, Bronfen emphasises the role of the (male, active, creative) mourner’s imagination in this process, exemplifying Ralph Waldo Emerson’s diary entries following the death of his wife Ellen. Across various diary entries, Emerson’s ‘dear Ellen’ continued to ‘make [him] happy yet’ although ‘in [her]disembodied state’ she is found ‘nowhere and yet everywhere’ (Emerson 1909: 385, 531). Only through her disembodied state of being dead, though, could Ellen offer her husband an eternal source of creative inspiration: his poetic writing to Ellen ceased after he opened her coffin thirteen months after her death.^[2] For Bronfen, Emerson’s opening of the coffin put ‘an end to his invocation of the idealised dead woman’ (1992: 367). Here, the presence of the corporeal body ruptured the distance required for the dead woman’s transfiguration into muse, negating the eternal and idealised image of her created by the poetic imagination.

In the cinema, similarly, the absence of the dead woman’s body allows for her idealisation, in a move that doubles her othering. She is dead, and so rendered passive; in her musing, which her absence from the visual realm permits, she also becomes the property of the imagination through her relegation to femininity’s symbolic order. In L’avventura, if Anna is dead, her death is put forward as a way for an anxious culture to defer its own demise; because her corpse is invisible, however, she also becomes a vacant presence that preserves the national imaginary, inscribed with meaning that becomes eternal through her spectrality. A similar formulation of the dead woman is presented in The Vanishing, whose dead muse functions to preserve the epistemic superiority of an individual man, right as the very concept of the individual seems under threat in a milieu of increasing globalisation.

The Vanishing: Saskia, Sacrifice, and Epistemophilia

In The Vanishing (released as Spoorloos in its original Dutch, meaning ‘Traceless’), the obsessed Rex (Gene Bervoets) searches for his missing girlfriend, Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), following her abduction from a rest stop in France during the Dutch couple’s road trip. Rex’s search leads him to a meeting with Saskia’s abductor, Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), who offers Rex the chance to journey with him to France and ‘find out everything.’ Near the film’s end, the camera reveals Rex inside a wooden box, buried beneath the ground, and gradually suffocating. The spectator and Rex are united in the shared inference that Saskia has met the same fate, and that her corpse also lies in a similar box. In refusing to represent Saskia’s death, as the film does Rex’s, her final moments offer recursive and eternal fodder for the imagination. She becomes an epistemic cornucopia without any command of epistemic authority.

For Freud, epistemophilia is an anxious drive that is both produced and satisfied by knowledge.^[3] It has been interpreted for feminism in different ways; for some, it is a destructive drive (Grosz 1990; Townley 2006), but for others, it offers a theory that overcomes mind/body dualism, and offers a way of overcoming other binaries, including not only reason/emotion but male/female (Moi 1989). Freud located the development of a desire for knowledge in children with their quest to satisfy enduring questions about ‘where babies come from,’ either because the arrival of a new baby sibling, or even the idea of one’s potential arrival, threatened the child’s sole claim to maternal affection. Significantly, the epistemic quest in this formulation is not caused by the new baby in and of itself; rather, it is fundamentally tied up with the child’s anxiety about the loss of their mother (see Freud 1991 [1905]: 174-81, 190-1).^[4]

In The Vanishing, epistemophilia is similarly tied up with female loss. Rex’s three-year search for Saskia becomes more an exercise in his own epistemic mastery than an expression of his hope she may be alive. This is evidenced in Rex’s own admission that he would rather Saskia be dead, and he definitely knows that she is dead, than for her to be alive somewhere while he continues living in uncertainty: ‘Either I let her go on living and I never know anything…Or I let her die…and I find out everything. Then I let her die.’ In Sabine Vanacker’s reading of the film, Rex’s desire for knowledge is intimately tied to his need to affirm his masculine identity (1995: 106). I suggest that the film’s visual and narrative patterns disclose that this identity requires affirmation precisely because it is threatened by cultural anxieties specific to the transformation of Western Europe in the 1980s.

In 1985, the Schengen Agreement—of which the Netherlands was one of five original signatories—gradually ended the region’s internal border controls, allowing for freer mobility across common borders (see Riches and Palmowski 2021). Michael Gott’s suggestion in his study of European travel cinema that ‘Europe’s borders, identities, and even the very idea of ‘Europe’ itself are perpetually under renegotiation and contestation’ as land borders become ambiguous and porous (Gott 2018: 181), offers a way of contextualising Saskia’s disappearance, and the relegation of her corpse from visuality, as occurring at a critical juncture of transformation in 1980s western Europe. We might do this by reading the film’s generic invocation of the road movie.

Susan Hayward suggests that the purpose of the road movie is self-knowledge, whereas for David Laderman its ‘driving force’ is ‘the embrace of the journey as a means of cultural critique’ (in Everett 2009: 167). The Vanishing’s opening montage is characterised by wide shots of open spaces, the road, and tracking shots of the couple’s car, semantically positioning the spectator within the genre. These shots misdirect the viewer: shortly after this, the car’s flow on the freeway is slowed when it runs out of petrol. Where the American road movie is predicated on the expansiveness of a journey into the limitless frontier and the self-affirming freedom this journey offers the individual, the borders of the European road movie, reveal ‘political, linguistic, cultural, social’ difference and manifest a ‘final line of resistance between a mythical us and an equally mythical them’ (Everett 2009: 168-9). In the European road movie, self-knowledge thus becomes bound with the function of borders as markers of difference. The laxity of these borders thus loosens the grip of understanding that the subject has on himself (and, in the genre, typically it is himself; see Everett 2009: 167).

In their final conversation before her abduction, Saskia asks Rex if she can drive to their next destination. He reluctantly agrees, handing her the keys; her desire to buy a new keychain (with the letter ‘R’ for Rex) leads to her encounter with Raymond. The car, then, offers neither freedom nor self-identification for Saskia. In fact, there is only a single sequence in the film that affords Saskia a clear point-of-view shot. However, this shot is mediated by Raymond’s memory. In flashback, Saskia is shown entering the rest station store, while in voiceover, Raymond describes the moment to Rex as ‘Destiny, Mr Hofman.’ The scene cuts to a shaky, handheld shot of Saskia’s artificial point of view, as imagined by Raymond and Rex. Through this (double) male imaginary, Saskia, embodied by the handheld camera, floats as if pulled along by some invisible force. The cinematography is consciously motivated by Raymond’s belief in some preordained ‘destiny,’ rather than female subjectivity.

As Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael note in Transnational Horror Cinema, the title of The Vanishing upon its release in France was L’homme qui voulait savoir (‘The Man Who Wanted to Know’), indicating the film’s thematic prioritisation of the epistemophilic tendencies of Rex (2017: 57). The pair suggest that the film might more aptly have been titled ‘The Men Who Wanted to Know’ (2017: 57). Rex and Raymond’s dual obsessions with knowledge parallels the frustrated epistemophilic yearning of the audience, who despite the flashback scene in which Raymond recounts his abduction of Saskia, are only ever entirely certain of Rex’s death. What then of Rex’s visible death in my reading of absent female death? I suggest that Rex’s horrific death prioritises the narrative primacy of homosocial rivalry and that his death also figures feminine passivity in multiple ways.

Rex and Raymond’s dynamic is aroused by epistemophilic competition, and as the film takes up the cues of the road movie when these rivals meet, Rex is increasingly rendered passive, feminised, and unsure of his identity. Once feminised, Rex’s attainment of knowledge mandates punishment (echoing Eve and Pandora). At their eventual meeting, Raymond implores Rex to ‘Come with me to France and you’ll know everything’ after revealing the car keys that had gone missing with Saskia. Raymond, in an ironic act of chivalry, opens his car door for Rex, who slides into the passenger seat. Raymond’s flashback, recounted to Rex, depicts him opening the car door for would-be female victims in the same manner, though he laments: ‘I couldn’t get the women I wanted into my car.’ (Interestingly, in Krabbé’s novel, The Golden Egg, upon which the film was based, Raymond expresses that his ideal victim would have been a young, beautiful mother, exampling the ‘dead mother’ trope described above, Krabbé 1993 [1984]: 58). A flashback shot of Raymond in the restroom recalls Rex’s search for Saskia in the same restroom earlier in the film, where Rex dashes between the women’s and men’s bathrooms, and is told by patrons in both of these gendered areas that he is in the wrong space.

Raymond’s offering of knowledge through this narrativisation arises from his promise that ‘I’ll tell you everything’ on the condition that the pair are not stopped at border control to have their passports inspected. Tense music rises as Raymond and Rex approach the border; they are waved through. The open, unrestricted border of the Schengen Area offers tangible knowledge for Rex. However, it also signals the existence of the necessary but extraneous knowledge located in the foreign other of Raymond, to whose epistemic authority Rex must submit. Here, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of the homosocial relationship’s routing through women, and especially her analysis of cuckoldry, is brought to mind. For Kosofsky Sedgwick, the cuckoldry bond is

necessarily hierarchical in structure, with an ‘active’ participant who is clearly in the ascendancy over the ‘passive’ one. Most characteristically, the difference of power occurs in the form of a difference of knowledge (2015: 50).

Rex and Raymond’s epistemophilic engagement plays out the ‘asymmetrical relation of cognitive transcendence’ described by Kosofsky Sedgwick (2015: 50), which culminates in the camera’s revelation of Rex’s live burial.

In her Fetishism and Curiosity, Mulvey’s consideration of the epistemophilic gaze draws on the Pandora allegory, in which the curious woman illicitly opens and peers into the vessel under her guard. Mulvey writes that ‘curiosity projects itself onto, and into, space through its drive to investigate and uncover secrets’ but notes that for women, this gaze carries ‘connotations of transgression and danger’ (1996: 68). On the one hand, Rex’s burial as a literal entering into the space of curiosity, an opening of the box (triply figured here as Saskia’s, Pandora’s, and Ellen Emerson’s), does indicate transgression and danger: his death is guaranteed. However, unlike Saskia, Rex’s death is afforded visibility in a scene whose primary function is actually Rex’s self-affirmation. From inside the wooden box, Rex screams, ‘I am Rex Hofman!’ In his decision to adopt passivity and embrace death, Rex enacts The Country Wife’s Horner, who ‘voluntarily embodies’ and thus controls the ‘schism in women’s status within the male homosocial erotic economy’ (Kosofsky Sedgwick 2015: 57). Rex’s epistemophilic orientation almost exactly parallels Horner’s willingness ‘not to undergo, but himself to represent ‘castration’’ and because ‘he withdraws from the role of rival to that of object’ he is able to ‘achieve an unrivalled power as an active subject. Only because he is a man, however, does his renunciation actually increase his mobility and power’ (Kosofsky Sedgwick 2015: 57).

Significantly, Saskia’s light literally makes Rex’s final moments visible to the audience. Earlier in the film, Saskia gifts Rex, a non-smoker, a cigarette lighter so that he can light her cigarettes. While it is Saskia’s light that allows the audience to see in this sequence, what we ultimately bear witness to is Rex’s epistemic victory and his own self-affirmation (see Fig. 2), echoing a point from Bronfen: ‘is the invocation of the dead beloved an attempt to preserve her artificially against death, or an attempt to eternalise the poet’s skill?’ (1992: 365).

 

 

 

As a whole, the film reveals how Rex works to preserve Saskia within an eternal fantasy, conjuring inertia and stasis amidst the movement and laxity of the motherland’s borders. When alive, Johanna ter Steege’s Saskia receives less than 10 minutes of ‘real’ screen time. The remaining seven-and-a-half minutes of her on-screen presence are mediated by memories of male characters (a total of around five minutes) or by photographs (taken by Rex) reproduced on posters or in the media (about two-and-a-half minutes; see Fig. 3).

Ironically, it is through the absence of Saskia, through a curtailing of her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness,’ which, as Vanacker notes, is literally ‘hidden in a box’ (1995: 100), that Saskia is rendered iconic. Vanacker writes that

Saskia’s kidnapping takes away her filmic role as a spectacle… the film is distinctly conscious of its own complicity with the relationship between the look and gender, and indicates awareness of the ambiguity of its own visualism (1995: 100).

Though the to-be-looked-at-ness of Saskia’s dead body at first seems quashed by the film’s denunciation of visuality, the mental image of her dead body—amplified in the mind by the aposiopetic strategy—and the sacrificial function of her death as ratifying male knowledge and identity, bespeaks the patriarchal ordering of women, even in their absence.

Picnic at Hanging Rock: Earthly Sara… Eternal Miranda 

In Picnic at Hanging Rock, three students of Appleyard College, along with a governess, vanish during a Saint Valentine’s Day picnic. Eventually, one girl returns, but by the end of the film, the mystery remains unresolved, an amplifying silence that speaks of death. In tracing the fallout that follows the disappearances, the film incessantly turns to the idealised image of one of the missing girls, Miranda (Anne Lambert), whose absence in particular haunts the film. Set in 1900, the aesthetic qualities of Peter Weir’s fin de siècle film have come to typify the so-called Australian Gothic, a mode of filmmaking prominent in Australia since the 1970s that has been described as ‘modernist’ and ‘grotesque’ (Craven 2020: 163). Through this Gothic mode, in which the haunted manor houses and ruined abbeys of Europe are substituted by the Australian natural landscape, Weir draws on the ‘pessimistic and haunted mythos of the bush in the settle imaginary’ (Craven 2020: 163), and in doing so unveils anxieties about the stability of ‘Australianness’ as understood in the cultural context of 1970s Australia. Where dead women in L’avventura and The Vanishing are both relegated and transformed into muse so that old identities might be mourned, and then ultimately reaffirmed, Picnic’s figuration of Miranda as muse reflects attempts at locating and creating identity within a ‘juvenile’ epoch produced by multiple junctures in space and history. The absent death of Miranda—’one of cinema’s most defining iconic images of youthful female beauty’ (Backman Rogers 2022: 46, my emphasis)—shores up an anxiety arising not from the clinging to any particular idea of the nation, but rather out of a longing for the idea itself.

Graeme Turner has noted how Australian cinema in the 1970s played a significant role in the construction of a national identity. He writes, ‘films concerned themselves almost exclusively with the representation of the past’ because in order to construct a culture, ‘Australian cinema had to demonstrate that the nation had a past’ (1993: 105). Of course, the histories represented on screen more often than not neglected any meaningful representation of the nation’s Indigenous history. Josephine May notes that ‘Australia in the 1970s was old enough to break free of the inauthentic colonising culture and embrace its own’ (2006: 9) and notes ‘the ambiguity at the centre of the postcolonial subject’s consciousness’ (2006: 5). Australian culture was therefore figured as liminal, on the cusp between youth and maturity, between colonial and ‘post’-colonial (but, only for the white subject). This orientation is similarly figured in Miranda’s location at the cusp of girlhood and womanhood, and the fin de siècle setting (which, in the Australian context, also signals the cusp of Australian Federation in 1901, the point at which the colonies of Australia united to form the Commonwealth of Australia). Thus, Australian national identity and its self-conscious ‘youth’ is here conditioned by and packaged for the European gaze. The tension between the desire to signify an Australian identity demarcated from the colonial motherland, and the signalling of that difference through the visual language of colonialism[5] (ultimately, so as to maintain a cultural proximity to Europeanness), also conditions Miranda’s ambiguity. Miranda’s embodiment of an Australian identity constituted by irreconcilable contradictions offers a way of reconsidering her figuration as a dead muse. Unlike Anna and Saskia, whose immortalisation offers relief, Miranda’s musing offers an empty space within which unstable national identities can simultaneously dwell.

Miranda’s overtly constructed, idealised and unattainable femininity is presented in Picnic through and for multifarious gazes—male, colonial, and sapphic—which sometimes diverge and sometimes overlap. Along with the obsessed and objectifying Michael (Dominic Guard) and the sapphic Sara Waybourne (Margaret Nelson), Miranda also becomes the colonial, feminine ideal in the eyes of the Appleyard teachers, especially Mademoiselle de Poitiers (Helen Morse). Miranda’s presentation to the audience through point-of-view shots, imaginations, recollections, and fantasies mediated by the subjectivities of Michael, Sara, Mademoiselle Poitiers, and others enacts the film’s shifting configurations of gazing and identification. Miranda as unknowable object is presented through an ‘impossible gaze,’ a configuration of looking that structures the ‘phantasmic narrative’ for Slavoj Žižek (2008: 21). ‘Apropos of a phantasmic scene,’ writes Žižek ‘the question to be asked is thus always: for which gaze is it staged? Which narrative is it destined to support?’ (2008: 21). What national narrative does Miranda as fantasy in life, and the eternal continuation of that fantasy as a passive, dead muse support? What is inscribed on her dead body by virtue of its absenting?

The imagined corpse of Miranda’s death as a site that bears multiple meanings shores up the instability of an Australian identity increasingly complicated in regard to its relationship with Englishness in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1960s, as Michelle Arrow writes, ‘long-held ideas about Australia’s national identity and character were being questioned across the ideological spectrum’ and the seventies as a decade was characterised by a ‘new’ nationalism, ‘expressed in a wave of cultural activity nurtured by government funding’ (Arrow 2022: 184). In 1973, Britain joined the European Common Market, marking the ‘end’ of the British Empire, and around the same time, public intellectuals began to reconsider the extent to which Australian founding mythologies could help identify an authentic Australian identity (see Arrow 2022: 184–85). This complication of national identity inflects the presentation of Miranda in Weir’s film, whose iconicity and idealised femininity indicate her separation from reality (existing in ‘a dream, within a dream’) in life, and then especially in death (see Fig. 4).

 

 

In her analysis of earlier Australian Gothic Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971), Alison Horbury notes that rejecting one ‘meaning’ of a film (or, following Žižek, rejecting the narrative that a specific gaze impresses) completely hinges on the spectator’s ‘identification with an alternative public fantasy’ that itself depends on ‘countless other forms of public mythmaking’ (2020: 199). Miranda’s narrative ambivalence renders her a site for multiple meanings rather than one that creates them. In life, Miranda is characterised as possessing an ‘ambivalent duality’ and demanding a performance of Lambert ‘grounded in vacancy, negativity and absence’ (Backman Rogers 2022: 72). For Backman Rogers, Miranda’s vacancy and liminality, even before her disappearance, affords the projection of the patriarchal imaginary onto her living person (2022: 72). The lost girl offers a mirror for the ‘missing’ identity of a culturally unstable Australia, searching to create that identity through the cinema in the 1970s. Following her implied death, the absence of Miranda’s corpse makes room for the amplification of inscriptions about this identity authored from multiple imaginings, ad infinitum.

Miranda’s vacancy is presented alongside her idealisation, and this idealisation is only made possible in the film’s grammar through the articulation of a corresponding anti-ideal: the character of Sara Waybourne. Sara is the earthly counterpart whose own act of worship enables Miranda’s divinity. This formulation echoes the irony of the film’s generic patterning: the Gothic mode is deployed to demarcate Australianness from Europeanness, but this articulation also depends on a fluency in European cultural markers. Much like the irony of this generic reverence, Sara’s gaze on Miranda is sapphic, while Sara herself serves to support the narrative’s commentary on the feminine ideal. Sara bolsters Miranda’s musings through her own sapphic gaze, but also through the visibility of her corpse.

By the end of the film, five women are dead, but visuality is only afforded to Sara’s corpse, whose body is discovered in the college’s greenhouse by Mr Whitehead (Frank Gunnell) (see Fig. 5).

 

 

In this scene, the camera lingers in a close-up of Sara’s chalky face, as blood drips from her ears, mouth, and broken nose, pooling beneath her body and staining her white nightgown. Sara’s eyes are wide open (she is not at rest), though her gaze is not directed anywhere (she is cut off from a symbolic sight). The crushed pansies echo her brother Albert’s (John Jarratt) dream, recounted in the preceding scene:

I had a funny dream last night. There was this smell.

Real strong. It was like, like I was wide awake.

Dead quiet. Pansies. That’s what it smelt like.

The pansies bear significance, given that the word ‘pansy’ has historically been used as a homophobic slur in the English-speaking world; further, there is an irony in Sara being framed by flowers that symbolise remembrance, etymologically derived from the French pensée (Macquarie Dictionary Online, 2024). The sapphic Sara is often a forgotten figure within the fiction, as well as by collective cultural remembrances of the film; Miranda eclipses Sara in both spaces by virtue of her figuration as muse, a quality that the aposiopesis amplifies so much so that Miranda ultimately becomes apotheosised.

Sara’s corporeal death is the antithesis of Miranda’s apotheosising. Sara’s corpse, surrounded by dirt and flora, is given to the earth in death, yet she is posed inside a greenhouse, surrounded by potted plants: this is not a return to sublime nature. Sara remains earthly, fleshy, and corporeal. The gesture towards the olfactory (‘… this smell. Real strong’), an oft-neglected sense in cinema, inflects not only Albert’s dream but also Mr Whitehead’s performance upon his entrance into the greenhouse. Before he gazes upon Sara’s body, Whitehead sniffs the air and grimaces. Sara’s body is overtly sensorial, an organic counterpart fundamentally opposed to Miranda’s absent, iconic, and idealised femininity, whose ambiguity permits inscription and fantasy. The overtly symbolic staging of Sara’s corpse, as I have read it above, echoes de Beauvoir’s contentions regarding woman as symbol, referred to in my reading of L’avventura. But because this corpse is framed, staged, and constrained in some ways by cinematic space and time, there are limits to this othering. Conversely, the othering of Miranda’s absent corpse gestures to Horbury’s invocation of the Lacanian Real: ‘[p]leasure in a Real cinematic gaze is subsequently not a pleasure associated with mastery of the object but with its absence, because in its absence the subject maintains their desire’ (2020: 201).

If there is a pleasurable or at least objectifying gaze associated with Sara’s corpse, what might her visible corpse be offering the viewer a mastery of? If Miranda’s absence offers the expression of multivalent identity, what does Sara’s presence cut off? Luciana Wrege Rassier and Cynthia Beatrice Costa emphasise that Sara is around thirteen years old and Miranda is eighteen in Lindsay’s original novel (in the original screenplay, Sara is eleven and Miranda is about 16-17, see Green 1974: ii). They also emphasise that, because Sara is a destitute orphan, the age gap in the book takes on a maternal quality for Sara, which Miranda, as a privileged character, may not recognise. But, this yearning becomes romantic, rather than maternal, in Weir’s adaptation (2017: 203). Sara’s death, then, with its artificial relation to the land (potted flowers in a greenhouse), shores up the ontology of the colonial subject, artificially placed in the land. Her death, then, is not just punishment for her lesbianism, but an admonishment of her lesbianism as a transgression of the maternal attachment to Miranda: the colonial subject who acknowledges a historical dependence upon the English motherland but then transforms that relationship into one of worship. The film suggests that the instability of the ‘post’-colonial subject attempting to form a unique cultural identity in the mid-twentieth century cannot assuage their ambiguity through a reverence for the past.

Thus, Miranda’s vacuity, absence, and mystery are offered as an ideal space to house the ambiguous sense of identity created by junctures of history and culture. Sara’s fixity in death offsets Miranda’s ambiguity, and it is this ambiguity that structures the film. Conjecture and unfettered imagination ultimately become the spectatorial positions prioritised by the film. A specific exchange between Mr Whitehead and Tom (Tony Llewellyn-Jones) knits together the conjectural patriarchal imagination and morbid death fantasies. Mr Whitehead accepts that ‘some things simply do not have answers’; Tom insists that there must be an answer to the mystery of Miranda’s disappearance, beginning a morbid conjecture into what might have happened, smirking as he says, ‘you know….’ Tom’s line here is aposiopetic, cutting himself short of revealing the full extent of his thought, a ‘you know’ that suggests death as something too extreme to be spoken (echoing Sell—it is a pause that anticipates a fertilisation by the imagination), while also amplifying this death’s inscription elsewhere (or, perhaps elsewhom). In killing off Miranda, but then absenting that death, Miranda remains eternally ambiguous. Following Anna Backman Rogers, ‘to draw back the curtain is to reveal ugly—and often banal—realities’ (2022: 70). This is what Sara reveals, the ugly realities of history. Miranda is thus continuously absented, continuously abstracted from reality through a recursive series of fantasies, fantasies that are dependent upon the imagining of her death. Conclusion

The absence of a woman’s corpse, as occurs in these three films, seems to suggest an impulse to avoid graphic depictions of gendered death and thereby its fetishisation. At large, however, these absences encourage the mental image of death by virtue of aposiopetic amplification, creating a new site for patriarchal (and national) inscriptions. Following their deaths, Anna, Saskia, and Miranda no longer exist within a traditional field of vision; instead, as spectres and muses, they are envisioned eternally in the mind. As a result of this limitlessness, the dead muse gives access to more in her absent death, than in life. Hidden from vision, Anna, Saskia, and Miranda become infinite bearers of imaginary meaning. In this transcendence, they have no limitations; silenced, they cannot say no.

Notes

[1] In another scene, fellow day-tripper Patrizia (Esemeralda Ruspoli) discusses the impact of her own now-dead mother on her life, in particular, her absence. She says, ‘even I had a mother. She was part Austrian, but she was still my mother. My childhood was like a tennis match; they bounced me back and forth, here and there…(Antonioni 1963: 197). Interestingly, Patrizia’s mother’s absence and the negative effects on Patrizia are imbricated with her multinational qualities.

[2] In March of 1832, Emerson wrote in a diary entry: ‘I visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin. He then ceased writing to the dead Ellen in his journals, and never elaborated on the moment of the coffin’s opening, a reticence that has intrigued literary scholars since (see Ellis 2021).

[3] Epistemophilia is a translation of ‘Wisstrieb’ offered by James Strachey. It is elsewhere translated as ‘inquisitiveness’ and ‘drive for knowledge’ (see Freud 1957 [1909]: 245; Brooks 2001).

[4] Freud would later suggest that the knowledge drive’s origin in the question of babies was not true of girls’ drive, and then only true for some boys. (See Brooks 1993: 300 n. 18).

[5] Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert explains that the generic tropes of the Gothic have their roots in the British Empire’s colonial project. The Gothic, writes Paravisini-Gebert ‘from its earliest history in England and Europe’ was tied to ‘colonial settings, characters, and realities as frequent embodiments of the forbidding and frightening… By the 1790s Gothic writers were quick to realise that Britain’s growing empire could prove a vast source of frightening “others”‘ (2008: 229).