City Vision—
The Urban Sights and Desires
in “Rispondetemi” by Léa Pool
Outline
 City



Vision & Dream:
Multiple Way
Visual Pleasure
Visual Control
 Lea
Pool
 “Rispondetemi” from Montreal vu par
City Vision

Different Ways 
 ways of seeing: gaze, glance, look, etc.
 angles and scope: bottom up or top down
 devices: camera, peep hole, surveillance camera
 perspectives: detached, critical, participatory
abstraction, aestheticizing, historicizing, Subliminal
imprint, etc.
 social positions: city planners (filing clerks included),
mappers, artists, workers, etc. – Artists as a Painter of
Modern City
Visual Pleasures
 Multiple
Sites with multiple Sights, Power
Positions and Desires
 Desires
and Sights (gaze included): Who is seeing and
who being seen?
 male sexual gaze: Porn house, Strip bar  women
internalize the gaze;
 Consumer desire, Personal projections
 critical view, historical perspective
Visual Control

(Height = Control) Power Positions: What is seen?
Where? on the street or on top of a tower or
skyscraper, at people or the buildings
 (Large
Size and Space= Control) City of
Spectacle
filled with images; can be artistic;
 implosion of images  nothing but images;
 Does the city watch over us? Traffic control, census,
TV wall, surveillance camera, etc.

Visual Organization/Message:
Artist-Flâneuse
1) Institutions vs. Artists on the margins (their multiple
spaces)
 Institutions – church, school, gallery, media, patronage
--and their dogmas.
Visual representation – architecture and constructions
 Artists – marginalized but also secluded
 Multiple space in their “places” and multiple
perspectives on art.
2) Flâneurial observation of the city
Flâneur & Flâneuse
Flâneur: strolling, anonymously, on the street, in the
crowd and observing fast-changing scene around
him.  intoxicated, re-organizing
 Visual organization and/or physical embodiment of
urban modernism: from artistic observation to
commodified existence (e.g. window-shopper).
 Artist-Flâneuse: “the very boundary-lessness of the
metropolis gives her. . . an impulse to see beyond
the limits of the self, to occupy imaginative
positions other than her own.” “Introduction: Women Writing the City.” Heron,

Liz, ed. City Women.
Pool, Rozema and Chu as Flâneuse
1.
2.
Multiple/Palimpsestic, De-Centering, Critical
and/or Participatory
Re-creation of the architecture from without
“The system of architecture from within is characterized
by an idealistic logic that can assume neither
contradiction nor negation and therefore it’s based upon
the suppression of either one of two opposite terms.
This is best represented by the consistent repression of
women. Woman is excluded. . . .
It is in that outside that she stands. It is from that
outside that she can project better than anyone the
critical look.” (Diane Agrest 366)
City and Dream
Invisible Cities
 both random, with an inner meaing, an inner
perspective, a discourse (76)
Benjamin
“It is as if the moderns are talking in their sleep:
talking, asking, wishing, but unaware of the meaing
of the work. In this sense, commodities become
fetish…” (78)
Sleepwalking in the City: Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud
in the World of Dreams
Dreaming//Walking in a City
 state
of sleeping and waking; dreams also guardian
of moder
 most vivid before being awake (p 139) 
Benjamin attempts to wake the modern world up,
uncovers the hidden desires and fears of modern
city
City constructs dreams
 Both
a collection of images
 An elaborate play of remembering and forgetting.
The logic of condensation, displacement, and
substitution (84)
Léa Pool



General themes: exile,
Swiss-Jewish; b at
rootlessness, melancholy and a
Soglio, Switzerland, 1950) quest for identity.
Left Switzerland for
 The use of artist figure
Quebec in 1978.
Recent films:
Earlier Work:


'Strass Café' (1980), inspired by 
the work of Marguerite Duras.

'La Femme de l'hôtel' (1984),
'Anne Trister' (1986),
‘A corps perdu' (1988),
'La Demoiselle sauvage' (1991)
"Rispondetemi“ (1991)
'Mouvements du désir' (1994)
Emporte-moi (1999)十三歲的情人
Lost and Delirious (2001)
The Blue Butterfly (2004) 藍蝶飛舞
Pool’s Stye

"Pool's films operate within a tradition of feminist cinema,
both in their subject matter and aesthetic approach. While
critics have been divided about the brand of feminism she
embraces, her work undoubtedly challenges traditional
representations of women. Her cinematic style eschews
the objectifying gaze that typifies mainstream film; as a
woman director she is clearly cognizant of the power of
the apparatus and foregrounds this issue with characters
who themselves wield cameras (Andrea in A Woman in
Waiting, Anne in Anne Trister, and Hanna in Set Me
Free)."
Lea Pool: Quebecois Independence
Supports it: "I have a greater inclination to say Yes,
because it's important to give us our place.''
 "Frontiers bother me. I‘d rather open up than close things
down. So it's neither a Yes, nor a No with eyes closed. It
has a lot to do with how and when the question is posed.''
And if Quebec becomes independent, she wonders if that
might rob its artists of their raison d'etre. “Creativity
comes from the lack of something. If there is no need to
defend anything, there isn't the same drive to create.''

Pool and her films
 "When
someone asks why I didn't 'go further' with
a film, I say that it's because it was where I was in
my life when I made it -- not just in terms of my
sexuality, but my identity. My films act as a mirror,
reflecting who I am. I have grown, and it's all there
in my films.“ (source)
Pool: Some Major Themes




Missing the mother
Isolation
Seeking Female Companion
City Vision
Woman in Isolation: La demoiselle sauvage (1991)
The Photographer in Straight from the Heart
"The Corroding City":
 image of a fragmented
and complaining self )
 the banquet guests -photography: "giving
structure to life";
"collecting life is easier
than understanding it“


“Rispondetemi”
Plot: Sarah in the ambulance,
struggling for her life with
glances of her past and views of
the city
 What contrasts can you make
between the city and the woman?
 What parts of her past is
presented? Any central themes?
 How does the film end?
Concrete City Body with memories
 Lea
Pool: “I wanted to show all the shots of
Montreal in slow motion, in contrast to the actual
speed of the vehicle. These places seem to be out
of sync, their rhythm has no relationship with real
life. This is the concrete city, downtown, where
the architecture is impressive, but also cold and
unknown. . . . These are places without
memory. .. . ”
City Vision symbolic of
Present Situation
Up at Tall, dark and
overpowering buildings 
1) Overpowering constructions
2) Narrow straits

Ambulance Actions Symbolic of
Present Situation
Losing heart beat
 Breasts Exposed (and Heart
Stricken)
 Hands loosened, held and
responded to, pulled free

City Vision // Memories
no pupils, no heart beat 
Sarah as an orphan and a
child
 heart beat, breathing sounds
 teenage Sarah, fear of the
man outside the door
 breathing sounds  quarrel
in the rain

City Vision // Memories of Being
Marginalized
What do these memories mean?

City Vision // Sentiment about the past

Straight and even look ahead, or up at the sky  efforts at
communication
1. With mother (IV drip)
 2. With a boyfriend,
 3. Arriving at the hospital, responding to the rescuer.

Camera Circling the houses 
girl friend

The Ending
 Lesbianism
is a solution but not the only one.
 At the end, there are two meaningful
communications (as opposed the failures before)
For your Reference
 Emporte-Moi




(Set me Free) Montreal in 1963
The mother’s making a dress for her
Conflicts in the family
Religious identities at school.
the ending: the daughter with a video camera