The Last Woman

21/07/2023

Film    Download PDF  

The Architexture of Our Lives

Imagine if a film is not a story of what takes place but a work about where it takes place. One way of looking at this is to think of Hollywood’s relationship with locale. Films like Casablanca and Gaslight might be set in Morocco in the former instance, and England and Italy in the latter, but the Swedish emigree Ingrid Bergman didn’t need to travel back to Europe or on to Africa for either production: they were filmed entirely in studios in California. Bergman isn’t chosen by accident: she would leave Hollywood and (scandalously) her husband, marrying the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. While Bergman was in Hollywood making wonderful films with artificial means, Rossellini was in Europe making films no less good but far more verisimilitudinous. While Bergman in 1942 was filming Casablanca with Bogart and director Michael Curtiz showing nobility and sacrifice during WWII on a studio lot, in 1946, just after the war, with Paisa, Rossellini was filming in the bombed-out streets of Rome, Florence and Naples. Before that, he had made Rome, Open City, and just after it, Germany Year Zero: all three location shoots. Rossellini didn’t only fall in love with Bergman, he also wished to reconfigure her star image. Stephen Gundle says, “he wanted to save Bergman from the artificiality of Hollywood and subordinate her talents as an actress to his own highly personal style of cinema.” (‘Saint Ingrid at the Stake’) Bergman’s love resided in partly accepting this new aesthetic. “You see, I fell in love with him because he was so rare; I’d never met anyone like him before; I’d never met anyone with his kind of freedom.” (Ingrid Bergman: My Story) Central to that freedom was filming on location and if Rossellini transformed Bergman he would do still more to cinema. Jacques Rivette said: “I consider Rossellini to be the most modern of filmmakers, it is not without reason; nor is it through reason, either. It seems to me impossible to see Viaggio in Italia [Voyage to Italy] without receiving direct evidence of the fact that he opens a breach, and that all cinema, on pain of death, must pass through it.” (Cahiers du Cinema) Rivette wrote this in 1955, several years before his own debut with Paris nous apartient, and he was just one of many filmmakers who utilised locale for containing the work, as though the film didn’t quite exist without the specifics of location.

Yet let us return to our original inquiry, and propose that if Hollywood could often ignore the location altogether, and Rossellini insisted on making its presence of great importance, then what about a filmmaker who chooses to use locations not to absorb their characters into the environment filmed, but to realise a combinatory aesthetic that shows the locale as both an abstract expression of directorial concerns, while also insisting on the concrete presence of place? In different ways, Godard and Antonioni were vital to this tension. They obviously had no interest in returning to Hollywood-style production, where meaning would be created in the story and the mise en scene would be no less created to reflect it. A Hollywood director could generate a vivid mise en scene that would go further than the rudiments of conveying the plot but this would still often be within the confines of the studio: many of the great fifties films created a dense relationship with colour but while this gave a connotative complexity to character it didn’t demand the tension between the diegetic world of the film and the non-diegetic world of the location. In different ways Antonioni and Godard insisted on this, taking further Rossellini’s interest in locale but adding a greater expressivity, the sort of burgeoning connotation found in Voyage to Italy, where the relationship between Bergman and her husband, played by George Sanders, is contained by the Naples villa they stay in, the catacombs Bergman visits, and the pair’s trip to Pompeii — all carrying a meaning much greater than scene-setting. Yet Antonioni and Godard pushed this further, seeing in the cities they filmed an enigma they couldn’t quite comprehend, and placed characters in these environs to muse over what sort of self is likely to come out of such new milieux. Antonioni’s fellow Italian director, Marco Ferreri, pursued this in various works in the seventies but in no film more than The Last Woman. What Ferreri sought was “associations of images and historical dislocations [where] through these elaborate images”, it would allow one “to spatialise quite crucial images that affect or will affect our lives ” (Framework) It is a variation of a claim Fredric Jameson makes (via, Manfredo Tafuri, saying “… that the protopolitical aesthetic revolution first laid down in Schiller-i.e., we must change our existential experience and that will in itself be revolution-is virtually taken over word for word by le Corbusier: we change the space we live in and then we don't need political revolution.” ('Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology') Equally, what we find in the architectural explorations offered by Godard, Antonioni and perhaps especially Ferreri is why we do need a revolution. Ferreri added elsewhere, "when I find the image I consider essential, I want to film it, and move the camera as little as possible so as not to obstruct the image.” (Film Comment) Often these are images that allow for the potentially political within the limits of the architectural. 

Thinking of The Last Woman, what images in his work come to mind, how does he find those images that connote the civilization he seeks to explore and how different it might be from the neo-realist mise en scene countering Hollywood’s acceptance that images are created things rather than found realities? If images in Casablanca and Gaslight are studio sets that reflect a character’s milieu and their thoughts and feelings, and neo-realist cinema’s priority was to show that people were products of their milieu more than creations of it, Ferreri takes from Godard, Antonioni and others the idea that environments are capable of transforming us quite rapidly. The architecture that is built isn’t there merely to house our aspirations; it can transform what those aspirations may be. If we are, and increasingly can be seen as, products of our environment, then surely making space connotative to feeling is the wrong way round; space creates those feelings. 

     At the beginning of The Last Woman, we have Antonioni hyperbolised; Red Desert as an industrial Inferno. The first shot is a low-angle on a huge refinery. Into the shot comes a man on a motorbike, tiny against the building in the background. Ferreri cuts to another shot, this time a high-angle, long-shot with the river in the foreground, before cutting again to an empty frame of the factory before showing us what will become our central character, Gerard (Gerard Depardieu), and a colleague walking into it. They remain at the bottom of the frame while Ferreri holds the shot as they become central to the image. Then we see Gerard and his friend in tight close-up as Gerard says he “grew up in this shitty factory”. No doubt the factory reflects Gerard’s feelings and the scene proposes that Gerard is a product of this environment and cannot see himself outside of it. The friend says that they should go into business together but Gerard says he is a man of the factory: “what else am I going to do?…I believe in my job.” The exchange can leave Gerard appearing contradictory; a man who believes in his work who at the same time appears to hate it and is certainly frustrated by it as he then takes his anger out on a fellow employee. Ferreri shows us a world where autonomy and personal feelings seem secondary to the architecture of employment. It isn’t only that Gerard is dwarfed by the size of the refineries he works within, the apartments housing the workers give an equal sense of oppression and impregnability. When we see Gerard, his child and day-care worker Valerie (Ornella Muti) riding on his motorbike through the streets, Ferreri plays up the surrounding environment as though the freedom Gerard has going fast on a motorbike is weak next to the world that has been built up around him. As he passes along the main road running through the refinery and then out onto the motorway, past industrial chimneys, so he passes over to what seems like the other side of the river where the housing resides. Here we have the ‘International Style’, rectangular blocks fifteen to twenty stories high. Many of these are to be found in Creteil on the outskirts of Paris, but Ferreri uses them more abstractly than that. It isn’t a place just outside the capital but a potential non-space of capital, where workers reside. When Gerard pulls up at the building, the bike is again small within the frame, the camera panning to the right as he arrives. 

Marion Schmid notes in a fine chapter on film and architecture that “emerging at a time when architecture and the built environment were undergoing drastic changes due to the appearance of new materials (glass, iron and, soon, reinforced concrete), cinema quickly asserted its place as a medium perfectly in sync with modernity.” (Intermedial Dialogues) Yet in some ways, film was slow to pick up on the architectural if we accept that Hollywood had little interest in placing characters in actual locales but instead in studio lots, and even neo-realism was chiefly focused on the rubble of buildings rather than their architectural specificity. There are hints at this burgeoning aesthetic for example in Bicycle Thieves as characters are shown at the beginning of the film moving through the new builds on the outskirts of Rome, but this is modest next to the ‘architexture’ we find explored in Antonioni and others in the early sixties. Schmid uses the term, from Giuliana Bruno, to describe an interest in the visual as the architectural, when the effects “of spaces of dwelling on forms of living and feeling, becomes the tissue of life itself.” (Intermedial Dialogues) Schmid sees this vital to various Nouvelle vague filmmakers, including the too-little-known Guy Gilles, who uses Brest in a manner not too different from Resnais’s use of post-war modernised Boulogne in Muriel, and Godard’s utilisation of the high rises at La Courneuve with Two or Three Things I Know About Her. 

One could see this as the architectural turn in film, that despite cinema coinciding with modernist architecture it was often slow in depicting it on screen, no matter the Empire State Building’s occasional presence on film in works like King Kong and Love Affair, and despite the odd and important exceptions like Metropolis and Things to Come. However, these latter films were futuristic works and perhaps one reason why cinema might have seemed laggard in absorbing the architectural resided in whether the International Style was seen as a utopian future project or a vanity one. As Robert Hughes says, “in the years before and just after World War I, German architects spun endless fantasies on the theme of glass….Since there was no prospect of building any of them, the designs took on an extreme of speculative magniloquence.” (The Shock of the New) Equally, one of the most influential of interwar architects, Le Corbusier, “got only one chance to build high-rise mass housing in France” — after the war with Unite d’habitation, completed in 1952, Marseilles. Many of the buildings that coincided with the earlier years of cinema were hymns to capitalist vanity, from the Chrysler to the Empire State Building. “With finance flowing like wine, the newly-rich business tycoons got caught up in the craziness and felt compelled to memorialize their egos in steel and stone.” (Buildingtheskyline.org) In the post-war years, the egotism that produced high-buildings in the inter-war years became a municipal pragmatism — a way of getting a lot of people into modern housing. The well-known Lake Shore Drive may have been upmarket apartments designed by Mies van der Rohe but they could also resemble many a tall building that would have skimped on the interiors and been less salubrious in their location. The types of flats that became synonymous with inner-city poverty weren’t too far removed from the high ambitions of Le Corbusier and others. Writing about Glasgow’s Red Road estate, Francis McKee noted, “against the backdrop of profound poverty, the utopian aspirations that were always implicit in Le Corbusier’s plans for ‘cities in the sky’ became even more pronounced in Glasgow as both the council and the population looked forward to a bright new future. Within a few years of construction, the dream turned sour as the schemes were plagued by crime and violence.” (‘I Saw a City in the Clouds’) The utopian had become dystopian and, of course, Andrea Arnold would use the estate as a metonym for impoverished living in Red Road, six years before the first block was demolished in a matter of seconds in 2012. The dream took a lot longer to build than the nightmare to come down. 

Thinking of the architectural metonymically, Ferreri seems less interested in poverty than alienation, perhaps a problematic consistent with many directors of the sixties and seventies who wondered what vertical living might do to our relationship with others and our relationship with ourselves. If the high-rise could incorporate the ‘international style’ of the wealthy in their Lake Shore apartments and the brutalist architecture of the poor in Red Road, then better in some ways to couch the film as a question rather than a sorrowful answer. It isn’t to attack Arnold for ‘capturing’ poverty just as we needn’t criticise numerous filmmakers who set their films in a luxury apartment block to show a character’s level of material comfort, as in Sliver or The Wolf of Wall Street: it is a useful and short-hand way to register the circumstances of someone’s life. But Antonioni Godard, Resnais and Ferreri wonder what ontological problem might exist within the architectural solution found for contemporary living. In one scene in The Last Woman, Valerie sits on the bed giving Gerard fellatio as he stands with the baby’s dummy in his mouth, and the film then cuts to the next morning, and to a long shot of the block of flats and also other blocks in the same housing complex. Next, Gerard wakes up to find his new-found lover gone. He looks out the window and Ferreri films a low angle of the balcony as Gerard looks out and we see in the distance Valerie returning. As she walks towards the apartment, new properties are getting built and we can expect soon enough that the view Gerard will see won’t be very different from the one we have just seen. This will be row after row of high-rises that will block the horizon, a brutal intrusion into perception that might apparently be there to improve the quality of people’s lives as the apartments will have balconies, modern appliances and large windows allowing for much light, but will impoverish in other ways. When looking at the interiors of Gerard’s apartment, one sees how easily he moves through the space but the price to pay for internal square metres and comfort is evident in the exteriors that suggest a broader imprisonment. 

Frequently, Ferreri establishes shots that in another film might seem redundant — we know where he lives and know the area — but again and again, Ferreri returns us to the architecture. Even when this is motivated by dramatic concerns the shots linger, panning across a space and leaving the characters small within the frame. After his wife Gabrielle (Zouzou) and a friend arrive at the block of flats to take the baby back, their significance to the story isn’t matched by the visual schema of their arrival. When we see them getting out of the car, they are clearly seen within the frame but never become central to it: Ferreri focuses on the space they briefly occupy rather than the drama which their appearance indicates (where once in the flat a huge argument ensues). Shortly after Gabrielle and her friend leave, the film cuts again to an exterior shot, a lengthy pan across the flats which serves no apparent narrative purpose. But if we insist that Ferreri is interested in the architextural, in how architecture creates a sort of addition to the unconscious so that one is hardly aware of the structures in our lives, then what we have is the visual as the oppressive, which is at the same time an improvement. Writing on Bernard Buffet’s paintings of New York, Roland Barthes says, “this is the purpose of these numbered streets, inflexibly distributed according to regular distances: not to make the city into a huge machine and man into an automaton, as we are repeatedly and stupidly told by those for whom tortuosity and dirt are the gauges of spirituality, but on the contrary to master the distances and orientations by the mind, to put at one man’s disposal the space of these twelve million…” Barthes also notes, “Buffet geometrizes New York the better to depopulate it: everyone knows that abstraction is ‘sterile’.” (The Eiffel Tower) Barthes mocks this notion but we needn’t reject the cliche that abstraction is aseptic to find much in modern architecture ambiguously troubling, to feel it has been designed both contrary to our existence and simultaneously for the furtherance of it. On its opening in 1952, Le Corbusier saw his Marseilles block of flats as “the first manifestation of an environment suited to modern life…Made for men, it is made to the human scale," he said. "It has also the robustness which is inherent in modern technique, and it shows the new splendour of bare concrete.” (Dezeen) Robert Hughes amusingly notes that in Unité d’Habitation, Le Corbusier’s design for living was met with idiosyncratic resistance. While Le Corbusier reckoned it would show modern man how to live, instead many living in the building found ways to remain in the past. “The flats of the Unité are crammed with plastic chandeliers, imitation Louis XVI bergeres, and Monoprix ormolu — just the furniture Corbusier struggled against all his life.” (The Shock of the New) Hughes was writing on the building in 1980, and sees a failed project. Speaking of the roof he says: “Corbusier meant it to contain a gymnasium, a paddling pool for children, a palaestra for exercise and a bicycle track. Today the pool is cracked, the gymnasium closed (some optimist tried to resurrect it as a disco, which naturally failed), and the track littered with broken concrete and tangles of rusty scaffolding.” Coming in a chapter, ‘Trouble in Utopia’, Hughes sees dystopias aplenty in modern architecture but we might ask where is the cut-off point in deciding a project has failed. Phil Child says: “throughout the 1960s, some tower blocks rose to dizzying heights of 33 storeys. But they fell out of favour throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when they suffered a serious cultural backlash." There was for example, “most famously, Alice Coleman's Utopia on Trial [which] claimed that high-rise estates were breeding grounds for crime – a view repeated almost exactly by the influential 2013 Create Streets report, and echoed throughout popular culture by novels such as J G Ballard’s High-Rise. Just earlier this year, former Prime Minister David Cameron announced a 'blitz' on 'sink estates', to remove the 'brutal high-rise towers'." (The Conversation) However, Child looks at the resurrection not only of older high-rises but the building of new ones. Utopia was back. Amy Frearson, too, noted when looking at Unité d’habitation in 2014, two years after a fire damaged the building, that “when the building first opened, the seventh and eighth floors were home to an assortment of shops, eateries, galleries and a hostel where residents could invite guests to stay.” She says that “sixty years on they are much the same, although the hostel has become a hotel and many of the shops have been taken over by more specialist businesses, from medical practitioners to architects.” She also says that “the roof offered even more amenities, including a nursery, a running track and pools for paddling and swimming, but these days the space hosts an art programe masterminded by French designer Ora-Ïto.” (Dezeen) Le Corbusier creates an architectural dream in 1952 that Hughes sees as an ironic nightmare in 1980, and Frearson sees hope all over again in 2014. 

If Barthes is right to dismiss those who refuse to see anything good in architectural geometry, then we might respond by saying it depends on the given moment. Few were going to get excited about Kidbrooke Ferrier Estate in London or Red Road in Glasgow. Just as Red Road was used by Andrea Arnold before getting detonated, so Gary Oldman used Kidbrooke in Nil By Mouth long before it was demolished, and the Bonamy Estate not long before it happened to be. Here we have metonymies of architectural misery, housing estates built with the best of intentions and with the worst of results. But as Unité d’Habitation shows, it isn’t only that one man’s utopia is another’s hell but that depends too when the moment is defined. After all, the Glasgow tenements that were cleared and demolished were populated by the very people who would then move to Red Road, only to have their homes flattened many years later. Looking at images from the Gorbal slums from the 1960s, the destitution is clear but then so was the poverty in Red Road long before Arnold’s film was set there. It needn’t be axiomatic that high-rises indicate poverty even if we cannot deny that they often symbolise various modes of alienation. It is why we emphasised the luxury of Lake Shore and the impoverishment of Red Road. Unité d’Habitation proposes the high-rise needn’t necessarily be one thing or the other; time will dictate which of the two might be applicable. 

Returning to The Last Woman, Ferreri muses over the industrial, the architectural, and the consumerist seeing in the refinery where Gerard works, the housing complex he lives in, and the malls he visits, a world that may be made to the detriment of his being. Many will fit into this world well enough, seeing in the refinery a well-paid job, the apartment mod-cons and a world of leisure designed for convenience. When Gerard and Valerie go to dance, we see first an establishing shot of high-rises in the background and flat rectangles indicative of the out-of-town retail park. Entering the building, they pass restaurants and shops before descending into a basement with blood-red walls. They never make it into the club for various reasons but when Gerard says “…it’s not bad here”, we might wonder. This rests partly on Ferreri casting Depardieu, retaining the actor’s first name, his tattoos (long before they were middle-class fashionable), and constantly showing the actor without his clothes on. Depardieu, in the seventies especially, was an actor cast in roles suggesting he couldn’t be absorbed into society, culminating in his brilliant performance as the titular Loulou in Maurice Pialat’s 1980 film, where he plays a man who won’t work and only wants to eat, drink and screw. Speaking of his relationship with Pialat (with whom he made three films), Depardieu said, “we’re both out of the Middle Ages and we both love to eat.” (Depardieu: The Biography) In 70s films including Les Valseuses, The Wonderful Crook, Novecento, Buffet Froid and Ferreri’s Bye Bye Monkey, Depardieu looked indeed like someone who was only contingently in the modern age; that a part of him was a throwback to more primitive times. According to Imdb, “Depardieu gained 33 pounds before filming began” as he plays here a man who when he isn’t fiddling around with his penis is often seen gorging on food, using an electric carving knife to carve up a sausage, a knife that is mod-con as squeamish foreshadowing. At the end of the film, he will carve off his penis in a moment for which the film is now famous but one way of looking at this conclusion isn’t just to see it as a complicated statement about masculinity in a woman’s world — in a world where his wife is likely to gain custody of their child because of Gerard’s affair. The lack of agency is also there in the architecture that contains people both very visibly and all but unconsciously. 

Winston Churchill reckoned “we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us,” and Michael Bond, quoting this line, goes on to say “more than 70 years on, he would doubtless be pleased to learn that neuroscientists and psychologists have found plenty of evidence to back him up.” (BBC) Bond reckons urban architects have mused too little over the mental impact their metal frames have had on those occupying and surrounded by them. Bond goes as far as to say that “the lack of behavioural insight behind the modernist housing projects of that era, with their sense of isolation from the wider community and ill-conceived public spaces, made many of them feel, in the words of British grime artist Tinie Tempah, who grew up in one, as if they’d been “designed for you not to succeed”. (BBC) Seen from such a perspective, Gerard’s auto-castration needn’t be viewed as either obscure (as such an extreme action must surely appear), or misogynistic (Gerard’s reaction to his wife’s likely custody of their child) but the film’s visibility meeting its unconscious. Though much has been made inevitably of the ending, the film is less famous for the film’s relationship with the spaces Gerard works, lives and shops in. This indicates that architecture occupies a strange place in our lives, or at the very least our cinematic consciousness. Yet if Bond is right, this does extend to our broader existence, where we occupy buildings, move around and inside buildings, without giving them much thought. While it is common enough to say of other art forms what we feel about them, to remark on a piece of music, a novel, a film, or a play, they remain objects of our contemplation. Architecture however perhaps preoccupies us as we occupy it. But this preoccupation often isn’t conscious; it is a feeling one has in one’s body rather than a thought offered on the work itself. It is unlikely Tinie Tempah and his mates were thinking too much of the motivational impasses that such an environment in which he was brought up would create, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t creating this feeling. Tempah lived on the Aylesbury estate in London: like Bonamy and Kidbrooke and numerous others, an estate known for its high-rises and low expectations. “For decades, the Aylesbury estate in south London has been seen as a symbol of the failure of British social housing,” Andy Beckett said before nevertheless adding “but now – just as it is being demolished – many people are starting to think again.” (Guardian) Like those living in Le Corbusier’s Marseilles block, Londoners were beginning to think of their dwellings anew. Beckett notes that while “generalising about council housing in almost exactly the same terms that [David] Cameron would employ 19 years later, [Tony] Blair warned: “There are estates where the biggest employer is the drugs industry, where all that is left of the high hopes of the postwar planners is derelict concrete.” (Guardian) But Beckett speaks to various tenants in London high-rises and hears different views, including one woman who moved in to Ayslebury estate: “I couldn’t believe my luck. “A council flat in London!” 

Here we have a woman thinking through her home circumstances contrary to the way politicians like Blair and Cameron would wish her to see them. The point is that she chooses to think about them, allowing her to control the narrative of her home. In The Last Woman, there is little sense that Gerard does this; he is a man whose architectural unconscious controls him as readily as the libido that drives him. From a certain perspective, though, architecture can be phallically humbling just as it can be insistently turgescent. Will Self reckons, “sometimes a cigar may be just a cigar, but a skyscraper is always a big swaying dick vaunting the ambitions of late capitalism to reduce the human individual to the status and the proportions of a submissive worker ant.” (Guardian) For the people who put their names on these huge buildings, it can indeed be a willy-waving exercise, but for those living in another’s phallic dream, it can be a castrating nightmare. What exactly the world may be for Gerard we cannot quite say, which is part of Ferreri’s skill. If one accepts that the purpose of many great European filmmakers isn’t to symbolise categorically the architectural but to puzzle over its place in our lives, then Ferreri, like Godard, Antonioni and Resnais, is constantly placing Gerard in architectural situations all the better to comprehend an aspect of our contemporary condition. In one scene, we see Gerard turning up in the old town centre as Valerie leaves the factory owner’s apartment, who is also her former lover, played by Michel Piccoli. “What are you doing here?” she says, in reference to Gerard’s spying as Ferreri shows her in a tight close-up so that her face takes over most of the screen. But it may also be a comment on the barbarian at the gate; that Gerard has been banished to the suburbs while the wealthy, like Michel (Piccoli), can still live in the city centre, with its traditional cafes, shops and houses. 

      Little is made of this; there are no elaborate shots on the houses or buildings in the town centre since they demand no cause for reflection. This is where people have lived for generations while the high-rises are experiments in living, and Gerard a creature of that experimentation. It makes sense that Piccoli is cast opposite, and in opposition to, Depardieu. Ronald Bergan when writing Piccoli’s obituary saw his “speciality – the urbane bourgeois”, and nobody is likely to say that of Depardieu. It figures that Piccoli would be the wealthy figure living less in splendour than in architectural complacency: the transformation is for the workers and not for him, even if Ferreri in no way polemicises the contrast. Later in the film, when Gerard arrives home, Michel is in the sitting room standing with Gerard’s baby in his arms. “Excuse me, I think you’ve got the wrong baby,” Gerard says. “That one’s mine.” Michel is there with his new girlfriend, sitting on the couch next to Valerie, and the situation defies dialectics and class assumption, as if Ferreri is looking for the problematic instead of assuming he has found one. Like many scenes in the film and in Ferreri’s work, the tone can seem misogynistic. When the new lover puts her arm around Michel he wriggles out of her grasp seeing her as yet another clingy female. But such a reading seems too easy, just as the earlier scene when Gerard insults his wife could be read as women-hating if one assumes Gerard is our hero instead of the egoist his wife reckons he happens to be and the film gives plenty of evidence to confirm. When Gerard says in the earlier scene with his wife and her friend that what a woman wants is a penis between her legs, as he sticks a sausage between his naked thighs, it is hardly the most endearing argument for the phallus. In the later scene with Michel and Gerard, Valerie looks from one to the other and says, as the film moves from a long four-shot in the bedroom to a close-up on Valerie: “You’re all the same. You’re shit. Shit! Shit!” 

Yet the environment seems to matter more than the sexual, with the characters caught in a changing landscape that may in subject matter chiefly present itself as an obvious battle of the sexes but formally is fascinating partly because it is contained by the quizzical approach to the architectural. Michel says that “we didn’t respect women’s sexuality. We invented it for ourselves”, as this 1976 film concurs with arguments well-proposed by John Berger and Laura Mulvey in the mid-seventies concerning the now omnipresently written about male gaze. Gerard wonders what he is to do if he wants to live with a woman, and Michel has no answer. Yet what makes The Last Woman so interesting is that though it is a film about the conundrum of sexual desire, it is of more importance as a work concerned with how one lives with another in environs that are themselves potentially less than humanising. Rather than seeing The Last Woman as a film that either objectifies women or at least investigates the relationship between men and women, better still to see it as a work that objectifies both sexes in the pursuit of what was commonly called better ‘living conditions’ or ‘standards of living’. We’ve seen that Gerard’s flat is roomy and fully up to date but we have also mused over why Ferreri pays so much attention to the exteriors that suggest far more than just establishing shots. Near the end of the film, Gerard, his son Pierrot, and Valerie are seen in a silhouette as Gerard says to her, “the two of us will adore you all night.” The film cuts to an exterior long shot before showing us once again Gerard, Valerie and the child in the apartment, presumably hours later. One can see the exterior moment as a transition shot, as a way of registering time passing but it seems more that it is yet another instance where Ferreri wants to make clear any domestic drama is contained by an architectural reality. Sure, a minute later we do have a reason for the shot, with Gerard going to the balcony and seeing his friend in the far distance with a rifle in his hand asking Gerard if he wants to go hunting. However, while this justifies the earlier shot, makes it explicable, it can also seem to make it redundant. We only needed the one where Gerard goes on the balcony and makes out his friend, who then shouts up to him. However, by seeing the film as constantly attending to the architexture of its characters' lives, no such image need be deemed superfluous. One may notice too that this is a breeze-block world that Gerard often shuts out, even if the film refuses to do so. While the flat like all the others has a balcony to admire the view, there is nothing to see except apartments that look similar to the one in which one is living. Even when there is an expanse of land and a hint of a vista it appears it will be soon replaced, evident in the moment quoted when Valerie returns to the apartment early in the film, and a scene later on when we see Gerard looking out from the balcony and watching Valerie, Gerard’s ex-wife and child in the distance, with skeletal new apartments behind them. In numerous scenes even though it is daylight outside the curtains are closed. Gerard never comments on the view but the closed curtains indicate he has no great interest in it.

If we noted that cinema initially had little curiosity over an architecture of living, it rested partly on a burgeoning concern with dystopia evident in films like Metropolis and Things to Come. But into the late fifties and onwards, cinema absorbed not just the dystopian but also the sociologically negative and the socially affirmative, as well as the quizzical. If films like Gregory’s Girl, Boyfriends and Girlfriends and Beautiful Thing turned the suburbs into a winsome place of romance and possibility, Nil by Mouth, Red Road and Clockers did the opposite, but Ferreri draws on Godard and Antonioni (his cinematographer here, Luciano Tovoli shot The Passenger the year before) to keep in balance the architectural impact of buildings on our lives. In the foreground, The Last Woman tells a story of a man who won’t move with the times and cannot tolerate a woman’s changing role in contemporary society, and hence the famous ending where he takes the electric carving knife to his penis. In the background, though, is the environment in which such an action takes place. Dramatically, the castration remains obscure and Stanley Kauffmann goes so far as to say the act is “so appalling that it breaks the ‘frame’ of the film — it bursts out of the story to become an isolated atrocious act.” (Before My Eyes) While others have noted the presence of “the impersonal, dehumanizing factories, high-rises, shopping centres and superhighways” (The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers) they remain secondary to the story. However, rather than seeing the former action as inexplicable and the latter as background information, one can see that from a certain perspective the phallus as architectural grandiosity, which Will Self and so many others note in those high-rise hymns to capitalist expansion, is castrating when played out in the domestic, urban environment. After the deed is done, Ferreri cuts once again to the exterior: a slow zoom that starts on Gerard’s apartment and ends a moment later when we see Gerard’s flat in the context of all the others. If there is such a thing as architectural anonymity, and yet impregnability, this shot captures it. Ferreri follows with the closing shot of the film: a repeat more or less of an image near the beginning which would seem to be from the other side of the lake, from where the factory is. How can we not assume that the architectural is associated with his dreadful deed?

Near the end of the film, Valerie proposes “Can we invent something new? The family that you want is finished. Finished.” Ferreri himself reckoned: “It is unthinkable that we can change all of this without a change in society, in dress, in history, in the deep structure of the human being.” (‘Castration and Conformity’) It is as though the skyscraper that is like a ‘big swaying dick’ becomes the high-rise that diminishes rather than expands the ego. Critics have frequently referred to Gerard as a male chauvinist, or as Anna Migliozzi says, “a self-assured male supremacist by nature.” ('Castration and Conformity') This wouldn’t be entirely wrong but to view Gerard unsympathetically is to miss the ridiculous tragedy that he is caught within. “We’re patriarchs. Patriarchs of families that don’t exist anymore. We had rights. Nice rights. The right to fuck. It was so easy. Natural. Just screw. No problems.” As Gerard says this he is seated in the kitchen, Pierrot on his lap, as Gerard feeds him. All the while the camera slowly zooms in on Gerard, the sort of zoom use that Kubrick and Altman utilised in quite different ways to capture a question in the making. This isn’t the type of zoom Tonino Delli Colli utilised for Leone westerns, full of assertiveness in its narrative telling. No, this is the zoom shot that doesn’t quite know what the story is but one that it seeks to find. Delli Colli would go on to work with Ferreri as well (in Tales of Ordinary Madness and The Future is a Woman). He was always a very flexible cinematographer (he worked for Pasolini as well as Leone in the sixties) and he was someone who could just as easily offer the assertive as the enquiring, just as Tovoli worked for Dario Argento on Suspiria the year after The Last Woman. There is nothing to suggest that Ferreri wants assertiveness in the form and so we ought to be wary of creating it in prose that comments on the film. If the film is cinematographically a question, how do we attempt to answer it, especially if Ferreri asks it within the paradoxical? There Gerard is talking about the horrible place in which contemporary masculinity finds itself but there he is left holding the baby and happy to be doing so in a dwelling he himself doesn’t consciously acknowledge is oppressive. 

In The Last Woman, the form and content, the story and its presentation, do not come together but remain in disjunctive quizzicality so that we look at how the image of society Ferreri offers somehow helps explain the act to which his film concludes. Three-quarters of the way through the film, Gerard and Valerie go for a romantic walk and Valerie says to Gerard will he carry her in his arms. The film cuts to a long shot where the pair of them are small within the frame while the housing looms foreground and background. There is a small swimming pool in front of them which indicates luxury but it seems forlorn and when Gerard says he wants Valerie and thinks of the sea or a pool, there he is carrying her beside one. Yet the environment seems to mock his declaration rather than confirm it. After, the film shows Gerard looking out of the window of the hotel room they’ve just made love in, and what do we see but pretty much the same view the film has given us thus far? There are high rises and cranes in the distance; a motorway too. The romantic gesture is contained by a modern world that offers no objective correlative, no view that can match the romanticism of the moment and thus makes it absurd. Gerard and Valerie have taken a hotel room that resembles his flat, with a view no better. To comprehend The Last Woman is to see in this disjunction something of Gerard’s crisis, to see that while he may indeed be a male chauvinist, that times have changed and Gerard needs to change with them, then what do these changes consist of? If Gerard is expected to change his view of life then what sort of view should be offered outside his window to make it a life worth changing? The film doesn’t say, but we must surely infer from the extreme nature of the film’s ending that The Last Woman contains an aporia that cannot easily be overcome. It is this paradox that Ferreri leaves us with. The ending may be as assertive as in any film before it — few viewers won’t wince at the deed — but what it means is a lot harder to comprehend, and not a lot easier almost fifty years after it has been made, as we might look around us and muse over the buildings in which we dwell, and what they allow us to dwell upon. Yet part of one’s bafflement might be a little like Gerard’s - that we don’t quite see what is in front of our eyes and how it affects what might be going on in our minds.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin

The Last Woman

The Architexture of Our Lives

Imagine if a film is not a story of what takes place but a work about where it takes place. One way of looking at this is to think of Hollywood's relationship with locale. Films like Casablanca and Gaslight might be set in Morocco in the former instance, and England and Italy in the latter, but the Swedish emigree Ingrid Bergman didn't need to travel back to Europe or on to Africa for either production: they were filmed entirely in studios in California. Bergman isn't chosen by accident: she would leave Hollywood and (scandalously) her husband, marrying the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. While Bergman was in Hollywood making wonderful films with artificial means, Rossellini was in Europe making films no less good but far more verisimilitudinous. While Bergman in 1942 was filming Casablanca with Bogart and director Michael Curtiz showing nobility and sacrifice during WWII on a studio lot, in 1946, just after the war, with Paisa, Rossellini was filming in the bombed-out streets of Rome, Florence and Naples. Before that, he had made Rome, Open City, and just after it, Germany Year Zero: all three location shoots. Rossellini didn't only fall in love with Bergman, he also wished to reconfigure her star image. Stephen Gundle says, "he wanted to save Bergman from the artificiality of Hollywood and subordinate her talents as an actress to his own highly personal style of cinema." ('Saint Ingrid at the Stake') Bergman's love resided in partly accepting this new aesthetic. "You see, I fell in love with him because he was so rare; I'd never met anyone like him before; I'd never met anyone with his kind of freedom." (Ingrid Bergman: My Story) Central to that freedom was filming on location and if Rossellini transformed Bergman he would do still more to cinema. Jacques Rivette said: "I consider Rossellini to be the most modern of filmmakers, it is not without reason; nor is it through reason, either. It seems to me impossible to see Viaggio in Italia [Voyage to Italy] without receiving direct evidence of the fact that he opens a breach, and that all cinema, on pain of death, must pass through it." (Cahiers du Cinema) Rivette wrote this in 1955, several years before his own debut with Paris nous apartient, and he was just one of many filmmakers who utilised locale for containing the work, as though the film didn't quite exist without the specifics of location.

Yet let us return to our original inquiry, and propose that if Hollywood could often ignore the location altogether, and Rossellini insisted on making its presence of great importance, then what about a filmmaker who chooses to use locations not to absorb their characters into the environment filmed, but to realise a combinatory aesthetic that shows the locale as both an abstract expression of directorial concerns, while also insisting on the concrete presence of place? In different ways, Godard and Antonioni were vital to this tension. They obviously had no interest in returning to Hollywood-style production, where meaning would be created in the story and the mise en scene would be no less created to reflect it. A Hollywood director could generate a vivid mise en scene that would go further than the rudiments of conveying the plot but this would still often be within the confines of the studio: many of the great fifties films created a dense relationship with colour but while this gave a connotative complexity to character it didn't demand the tension between the diegetic world of the film and the non-diegetic world of the location. In different ways Antonioni and Godard insisted on this, taking further Rossellini's interest in locale but adding a greater expressivity, the sort of burgeoning connotation found in Voyage to Italy, where the relationship between Bergman and her husband, played by George Sanders, is contained by the Naples villa they stay in, the catacombs Bergman visits, and the pair's trip to Pompeii all carrying a meaning much greater than scene-setting. Yet Antonioni and Godard pushed this further, seeing in the cities they filmed an enigma they couldn't quite comprehend, and placed characters in these environs to muse over what sort of self is likely to come out of such new milieux. Antonioni's fellow Italian director, Marco Ferreri, pursued this in various works in the seventies but in no film more than The Last Woman. What Ferreri sought was "associations of images and historical dislocations [where] through these elaborate images", it would allow one "to spatialise quite crucial images that affect or will affect our lives " (Framework) It is a variation of a claim Fredric Jameson makes (via, Manfredo Tafuri, saying "... that the protopolitical aesthetic revolution first laid down in Schiller-i.e., we must change our existential experience and that will in itself be revolution-is virtually taken over word for word by le Corbusier: we change the space we live in and then we don't need political revolution." ('Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology') Equally, what we find in the architectural explorations offered by Godard, Antonioni and perhaps especially Ferreri is why we do need a revolution. Ferreri added elsewhere, when I find the image I consider essential, I want to film it, and move the camera as little as possible so as not to obstruct the image." (Film Comment) Often these are images that allow for the potentially political within the limits of the architectural.

Thinking of The Last Woman, what images in his work come to mind, how does he find those images that connote the civilization he seeks to explore and how different it might be from the neo-realist mise en scene countering Hollywood's acceptance that images are created things rather than found realities? If images in Casablanca and Gaslight are studio sets that reflect a character's milieu and their thoughts and feelings, and neo-realist cinema's priority was to show that people were products of their milieu more than creations of it, Ferreri takes from Godard, Antonioni and others the idea that environments are capable of transforming us quite rapidly. The architecture that is built isn't there merely to house our aspirations; it can transform what those aspirations may be. If we are, and increasingly can be seen as, products of our environment, then surely making space connotative to feeling is the wrong way round; space creates those feelings.

At the beginning of The Last Woman, we have Antonioni hyperbolised; Red Desert as an industrial Inferno. The first shot is a low-angle on a huge refinery. Into the shot comes a man on a motorbike, tiny against the building in the background. Ferreri cuts to another shot, this time a high-angle, long-shot with the river in the foreground, before cutting again to an empty frame of the factory before showing us what will become our central character, Gerard (Gerard Depardieu), and a colleague walking into it. They remain at the bottom of the frame while Ferreri holds the shot as they become central to the image. Then we see Gerard and his friend in tight close-up as Gerard says he "grew up in this shitty factory". No doubt the factory reflects Gerard's feelings and the scene proposes that Gerard is a product of this environment and cannot see himself outside of it. The friend says that they should go into business together but Gerard says he is a man of the factory: "what else am I going to do?...I believe in my job." The exchange can leave Gerard appearing contradictory; a man who believes in his work who at the same time appears to hate it and is certainly frustrated by it as he then takes his anger out on a fellow employee. Ferreri shows us a world where autonomy and personal feelings seem secondary to the architecture of employment. It isn't only that Gerard is dwarfed by the size of the refineries he works within, the apartments housing the workers give an equal sense of oppression and impregnability. When we see Gerard, his child and day-care worker Valerie (Ornella Muti) riding on his motorbike through the streets, Ferreri plays up the surrounding environment as though the freedom Gerard has going fast on a motorbike is weak next to the world that has been built up around him. As he passes along the main road running through the refinery and then out onto the motorway, past industrial chimneys, so he passes over to what seems like the other side of the river where the housing resides. Here we have the 'International Style', rectangular blocks fifteen to twenty stories high. Many of these are to be found in Creteil on the outskirts of Paris, but Ferreri uses them more abstractly than that. It isn't a place just outside the capital but a potential non-space of capital, where workers reside. When Gerard pulls up at the building, the bike is again small within the frame, the camera panning to the right as he arrives.

Marion Schmid notes in a fine chapter on film and architecture that "emerging at a time when architecture and the built environment were undergoing drastic changes due to the appearance of new materials (glass, iron and, soon, reinforced concrete), cinema quickly asserted its place as a medium perfectly in sync with modernity." (Intermedial Dialogues) Yet in some ways, film was slow to pick up on the architectural if we accept that Hollywood had little interest in placing characters in actual locales but instead in studio lots, and even neo-realism was chiefly focused on the rubble of buildings rather than their architectural specificity. There are hints at this burgeoning aesthetic for example in Bicycle Thieves as characters are shown at the beginning of the film moving through the new builds on the outskirts of Rome, but this is modest next to the 'architexture' we find explored in Antonioni and others in the early sixties. Schmid uses the term, from Giuliana Bruno, to describe an interest in the visual as the architectural, when the effects "of spaces of dwelling on forms of living and feeling, becomes the tissue of life itself." (Intermedial Dialogues) Schmid sees this vital to various Nouvelle vague filmmakers, including the too-little-known Guy Gilles, who uses Brest in a manner not too different from Resnais's use of post-war modernised Boulogne in Muriel, and Godard's utilisation of the high rises at La Courneuve with Two or Three Things I Know About Her.

One could see this as the architectural turn in film, that despite cinema coinciding with modernist architecture it was often slow in depicting it on screen, no matter the Empire State Building's occasional presence on film in works like King Kong and Love Affair, and despite the odd and important exceptions like Metropolis and Things to Come. However, these latter films were futuristic works and perhaps one reason why cinema might have seemed laggard in absorbing the architectural resided in whether the International Style was seen as a utopian future project or a vanity one. As Robert Hughes says, "in the years before and just after World War I, German architects spun endless fantasies on the theme of glass....Since there was no prospect of building any of them, the designs took on an extreme of speculative magniloquence." (The Shock of the New) Equally, one of the most influential of interwar architects, Le Corbusier, "got only one chance to build high-rise mass housing in France" after the war with Unite d'habitation, completed in 1952, Marseilles. Many of the buildings that coincided with the earlier years of cinema were hymns to capitalist vanity, from the Chrysler to the Empire State Building. "With finance flowing like wine, the newly-rich business tycoons got caught up in the craziness and felt compelled to memorialize their egos in steel and stone." (Buildingtheskyline.org) In the post-war years, the egotism that produced high-buildings in the inter-war years became a municipal pragmatism a way of getting a lot of people into modern housing. The well-known Lake Shore Drive may have been upmarket apartments designed by Mies van der Rohe but they could also resemble many a tall building that would have skimped on the interiors and been less salubrious in their location. The types of flats that became synonymous with inner-city poverty weren't too far removed from the high ambitions of Le Corbusier and others. Writing about Glasgow's Red Road estate, Francis McKee noted, "against the backdrop of profound poverty, the utopian aspirations that were always implicit in Le Corbusier's plans for 'cities in the sky' became even more pronounced in Glasgow as both the council and the population looked forward to a bright new future. Within a few years of construction, the dream turned sour as the schemes were plagued by crime and violence." ('I Saw a City in the Clouds') The utopian had become dystopian and, of course, Andrea Arnold would use the estate as a metonym for impoverished living in Red Road, six years before the first block was demolished in a matter of seconds in 2012. The dream took a lot longer to build than the nightmare to come down.

Thinking of the architectural metonymically, Ferreri seems less interested in poverty than alienation, perhaps a problematic consistent with many directors of the sixties and seventies who wondered what vertical living might do to our relationship with others and our relationship with ourselves. If the high-rise could incorporate the 'international style' of the wealthy in their Lake Shore apartments and the brutalist architecture of the poor in Red Road, then better in some ways to couch the film as a question rather than a sorrowful answer. It isn't to attack Arnold for 'capturing' poverty just as we needn't criticise numerous filmmakers who set their films in a luxury apartment block to show a character's level of material comfort, as in Sliver or The Wolf of Wall Street: it is a useful and short-hand way to register the circumstances of someone's life. But Antonioni Godard, Resnais and Ferreri wonder what ontological problem might exist within the architectural solution found for contemporary living. In one scene in The Last Woman, Valerie sits on the bed giving Gerard fellatio as he stands with the baby's dummy in his mouth, and the film then cuts to the next morning, and to a long shot of the block of flats and also other blocks in the same housing complex. Next, Gerard wakes up to find his new-found lover gone. He looks out the window and Ferreri films a low angle of the balcony as Gerard looks out and we see in the distance Valerie returning. As she walks towards the apartment, new properties are getting built and we can expect soon enough that the view Gerard will see won't be very different from the one we have just seen. This will be row after row of high-rises that will block the horizon, a brutal intrusion into perception that might apparently be there to improve the quality of people's lives as the apartments will have balconies, modern appliances and large windows allowing for much light, but will impoverish in other ways. When looking at the interiors of Gerard's apartment, one sees how easily he moves through the space but the price to pay for internal square metres and comfort is evident in the exteriors that suggest a broader imprisonment.

Frequently, Ferreri establishes shots that in another film might seem redundant we know where he lives and know the area but again and again, Ferreri returns us to the architecture. Even when this is motivated by dramatic concerns the shots linger, panning across a space and leaving the characters small within the frame. After his wife Gabrielle (Zouzou) and a friend arrive at the block of flats to take the baby back, their significance to the story isn't matched by the visual schema of their arrival. When we see them getting out of the car, they are clearly seen within the frame but never become central to it: Ferreri focuses on the space they briefly occupy rather than the drama which their appearance indicates (where once in the flat a huge argument ensues). Shortly after Gabrielle and her friend leave, the film cuts again to an exterior shot, a lengthy pan across the flats which serves no apparent narrative purpose. But if we insist that Ferreri is interested in the architextural, in how architecture creates a sort of addition to the unconscious so that one is hardly aware of the structures in our lives, then what we have is the visual as the oppressive, which is at the same time an improvement. Writing on Bernard Buffet's paintings of New York, Roland Barthes says, "this is the purpose of these numbered streets, inflexibly distributed according to regular distances: not to make the city into a huge machine and man into an automaton, as we are repeatedly and stupidly told by those for whom tortuosity and dirt are the gauges of spirituality, but on the contrary to master the distances and orientations by the mind, to put at one man's disposal the space of these twelve million..." Barthes also notes, "Buffet geometrizes New York the better to depopulate it: everyone knows that abstraction is 'sterile'." (The Eiffel Tower) Barthes mocks this notion but we needn't reject the cliche that abstraction is aseptic to find much in modern architecture ambiguously troubling, to feel it has been designed both contrary to our existence and simultaneously for the furtherance of it. On its opening in 1952, Le Corbusier saw his Marseilles block of flats as "the first manifestation of an environment suited to modern life...Made for men, it is made to the human scale, he said. It has also the robustness which is inherent in modern technique, and it shows the new splendour of bare concrete." (Dezeen) Robert Hughes amusingly notes that in Unit d'Habitation, Le Corbusier's design for living was met with idiosyncratic resistance. While Le Corbusier reckoned it would show modern man how to live, instead many living in the building found ways to remain in the past. "The flats of the Unit are crammed with plastic chandeliers, imitation Louis XVI bergeres, and Monoprix ormolu just the furniture Corbusier struggled against all his life." (The Shock of the New) Hughes was writing on the building in 1980, and sees a failed project. Speaking of the roof he says: "Corbusier meant it to contain a gymnasium, a paddling pool for children, a palaestra for exercise and a bicycle track. Today the pool is cracked, the gymnasium closed (some optimist tried to resurrect it as a disco, which naturally failed), and the track littered with broken concrete and tangles of rusty scaffolding." Coming in a chapter, 'Trouble in Utopia', Hughes sees dystopias aplenty in modern architecture but we might ask where is the cut-off point in deciding a project has failed. Phil Child says: "throughout the 1960s, some tower blocks rose to dizzying heights of 33 storeys. But they fell out of favour throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when they suffered a serious cultural backlash. There was for example, "most famously, Alice Coleman's Utopia on Trial [which] claimed that high-rise estates were breeding grounds for crime - a view repeated almost exactly by the influential 2013 Create Streets report, and echoed throughout popular culture by novels such as J G Ballard's High-Rise. Just earlier this year, former Prime Minister David Cameron announced a 'blitz' on 'sink estates', to remove the 'brutal high-rise towers'. (The Conversation) However, Child looks at the resurrection not only of older high-rises but the building of new ones. Utopia was back. Amy Frearson, too, noted when looking at Unit d'habitation in 2014, two years after a fire damaged the building, that "when the building first opened, the seventh and eighth floors were home to an assortment of shops, eateries, galleries and a hostel where residents could invite guests to stay." She says that "sixty years on they are much the same, although the hostel has become a hotel and many of the shops have been taken over by more specialist businesses, from medical practitioners to architects." She also says that "the roof offered even more amenities, including a nursery, a running track and pools for paddling and swimming, but these days the space hosts an art programe masterminded by French designer Ora-to." (Dezeen) Le Corbusier creates an architectural dream in 1952 that Hughes sees as an ironic nightmare in 1980, and Frearson sees hope all over again in 2014.

If Barthes is right to dismiss those who refuse to see anything good in architectural geometry, then we might respond by saying it depends on the given moment. Few were going to get excited about Kidbrooke Ferrier Estate in London or Red Road in Glasgow. Just as Red Road was used by Andrea Arnold before getting detonated, so Gary Oldman used Kidbrooke in Nil By Mouth long before it was demolished, and the Bonamy Estate not long before it happened to be. Here we have metonymies of architectural misery, housing estates built with the best of intentions and with the worst of results. But as Unit d'Habitation shows, it isn't only that one man's utopia is another's hell but that depends too when the moment is defined. After all, the Glasgow tenements that were cleared and demolished were populated by the very people who would then move to Red Road, only to have their homes flattened many years later. Looking at images from the Gorbal slums from the 1960s, the destitution is clear but then so was the poverty in Red Road long before Arnold's film was set there. It needn't be axiomatic that high-rises indicate poverty even if we cannot deny that they often symbolise various modes of alienation. It is why we emphasised the luxury of Lake Shore and the impoverishment of Red Road. Unit d'Habitation proposes the high-rise needn't necessarily be one thing or the other; time will dictate which of the two might be applicable.

Returning to The Last Woman, Ferreri muses over the industrial, the architectural, and the consumerist seeing in the refinery where Gerard works, the housing complex he lives in, and the malls he visits, a world that may be made to the detriment of his being. Many will fit into this world well enough, seeing in the refinery a well-paid job, the apartment mod-cons and a world of leisure designed for convenience. When Gerard and Valerie go to dance, we see first an establishing shot of high-rises in the background and flat rectangles indicative of the out-of-town retail park. Entering the building, they pass restaurants and shops before descending into a basement with blood-red walls. They never make it into the club for various reasons but when Gerard says "...it's not bad here", we might wonder. This rests partly on Ferreri casting Depardieu, retaining the actor's first name, his tattoos (long before they were middle-class fashionable), and constantly showing the actor without his clothes on. Depardieu, in the seventies especially, was an actor cast in roles suggesting he couldn't be absorbed into society, culminating in his brilliant performance as the titular Loulou in Maurice Pialat's 1980 film, where he plays a man who won't work and only wants to eat, drink and screw. Speaking of his relationship with Pialat (with whom he made three films), Depardieu said, "we're both out of the Middle Ages and we both love to eat." (Depardieu: The Biography) In 70s films including Les Valseuses, The Wonderful Crook, Novecento, Buffet Froid and Ferreri's Bye Bye Monkey, Depardieu looked indeed like someone who was only contingently in the modern age; that a part of him was a throwback to more primitive times. According to Imdb, "Depardieu gained 33 pounds before filming began" as he plays here a man who when he isn't fiddling around with his penis is often seen gorging on food, using an electric carving knife to carve up a sausage, a knife that is mod-con as squeamish foreshadowing. At the end of the film, he will carve off his penis in a moment for which the film is now famous but one way of looking at this conclusion isn't just to see it as a complicated statement about masculinity in a woman's world in a world where his wife is likely to gain custody of their child because of Gerard's affair. The lack of agency is also there in the architecture that contains people both very visibly and all but unconsciously.

Winston Churchill reckoned "we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us," and Michael Bond, quoting this line, goes on to say "more than 70 years on, he would doubtless be pleased to learn that neuroscientists and psychologists have found plenty of evidence to back him up." (BBC) Bond reckons urban architects have mused too little over the mental impact their metal frames have had on those occupying and surrounded by them. Bond goes as far as to say that "the lack of behavioural insight behind the modernist housing projects of that era, with their sense of isolation from the wider community and ill-conceived public spaces, made many of them feel, in the words of British grime artist Tinie Tempah, who grew up in one, as if they'd been "designed for you not to succeed". (BBC) Seen from such a perspective, Gerard's auto-castration needn't be viewed as either obscure (as such an extreme action must surely appear), or misogynistic (Gerard's reaction to his wife's likely custody of their child) but the film's visibility meeting its unconscious. Though much has been made inevitably of the ending, the film is less famous for the film's relationship with the spaces Gerard works, lives and shops in. This indicates that architecture occupies a strange place in our lives, or at the very least our cinematic consciousness. Yet if Bond is right, this does extend to our broader existence, where we occupy buildings, move around and inside buildings, without giving them much thought. While it is common enough to say of other art forms what we feel about them, to remark on a piece of music, a novel, a film, or a play, they remain objects of our contemplation. Architecture however perhaps preoccupies us as we occupy it. But this preoccupation often isn't conscious; it is a feeling one has in one's body rather than a thought offered on the work itself. It is unlikely Tinie Tempah and his mates were thinking too much of the motivational impasses that such an environment in which he was brought up would create, but that doesn't mean it wasn't creating this feeling. Tempah lived on the Aylesbury estate in London: like Bonamy and Kidbrooke and numerous others, an estate known for its high-rises and low expectations. "For decades, the Aylesbury estate in south London has been seen as a symbol of the failure of British social housing," Andy Beckett said before nevertheless adding "but now - just as it is being demolished - many people are starting to think again." (Guardian) Like those living in Le Corbusier's Marseilles block, Londoners were beginning to think of their dwellings anew. Beckett notes that while "generalising about council housing in almost exactly the same terms that [David] Cameron would employ 19 years later, [Tony] Blair warned: "There are estates where the biggest employer is the drugs industry, where all that is left of the high hopes of the postwar planners is derelict concrete." (Guardian) But Beckett speaks to various tenants in London high-rises and hears different views, including one woman who moved in to Ayslebury estate: "I couldn't believe my luck. "A council flat in London!"

Here we have a woman thinking through her home circumstances contrary to the way politicians like Blair and Cameron would wish her to see them. The point is that she chooses to think about them, allowing her to control the narrative of her home. In The Last Woman, there is little sense that Gerard does this; he is a man whose architectural unconscious controls him as readily as the libido that drives him. From a certain perspective, though, architecture can be phallically humbling just as it can be insistently turgescent. Will Self reckons, "sometimes a cigar may be just a cigar, but a skyscraper is always a big swaying dick vaunting the ambitions of late capitalism to reduce the human individual to the status and the proportions of a submissive worker ant." (Guardian) For the people who put their names on these huge buildings, it can indeed be a willy-waving exercise, but for those living in another's phallic dream, it can be a castrating nightmare. What exactly the world may be for Gerard we cannot quite say, which is part of Ferreri's skill. If one accepts that the purpose of many great European filmmakers isn't to symbolise categorically the architectural but to puzzle over its place in our lives, then Ferreri, like Godard, Antonioni and Resnais, is constantly placing Gerard in architectural situations all the better to comprehend an aspect of our contemporary condition. In one scene, we see Gerard turning up in the old town centre as Valerie leaves the factory owner's apartment, who is also her former lover, played by Michel Piccoli. "What are you doing here?" she says, in reference to Gerard's spying as Ferreri shows her in a tight close-up so that her face takes over most of the screen. But it may also be a comment on the barbarian at the gate; that Gerard has been banished to the suburbs while the wealthy, like Michel (Piccoli), can still live in the city centre, with its traditional cafes, shops and houses.

Little is made of this; there are no elaborate shots on the houses or buildings in the town centre since they demand no cause for reflection. This is where people have lived for generations while the high-rises are experiments in living, and Gerard a creature of that experimentation. It makes sense that Piccoli is cast opposite, and in opposition to, Depardieu. Ronald Bergan when writing Piccoli's obituary saw his "speciality - the urbane bourgeois", and nobody is likely to say that of Depardieu. It figures that Piccoli would be the wealthy figure living less in splendour than in architectural complacency: the transformation is for the workers and not for him, even if Ferreri in no way polemicises the contrast. Later in the film, when Gerard arrives home, Michel is in the sitting room standing with Gerard's baby in his arms. "Excuse me, I think you've got the wrong baby," Gerard says. "That one's mine." Michel is there with his new girlfriend, sitting on the couch next to Valerie, and the situation defies dialectics and class assumption, as if Ferreri is looking for the problematic instead of assuming he has found one. Like many scenes in the film and in Ferreri's work, the tone can seem misogynistic. When the new lover puts her arm around Michel he wriggles out of her grasp seeing her as yet another clingy female. But such a reading seems too easy, just as the earlier scene when Gerard insults his wife could be read as women-hating if one assumes Gerard is our hero instead of the egoist his wife reckons he happens to be and the film gives plenty of evidence to confirm. When Gerard says in the earlier scene with his wife and her friend that what a woman wants is a penis between her legs, as he sticks a sausage between his naked thighs, it is hardly the most endearing argument for the phallus. In the later scene with Michel and Gerard, Valerie looks from one to the other and says, as the film moves from a long four-shot in the bedroom to a close-up on Valerie: "You're all the same. You're shit. Shit! Shit!"

Yet the environment seems to matter more than the sexual, with the characters caught in a changing landscape that may in subject matter chiefly present itself as an obvious battle of the sexes but formally is fascinating partly because it is contained by the quizzical approach to the architectural. Michel says that "we didn't respect women's sexuality. We invented it for ourselves", as this 1976 film concurs with arguments well-proposed by John Berger and Laura Mulvey in the mid-seventies concerning the now omnipresently written about male gaze. Gerard wonders what he is to do if he wants to live with a woman, and Michel has no answer. Yet what makes The Last Woman so interesting is that though it is a film about the conundrum of sexual desire, it is of more importance as a work concerned with how one lives with another in environs that are themselves potentially less than humanising. Rather than seeing The Last Woman as a film that either objectifies women or at least investigates the relationship between men and women, better still to see it as a work that objectifies both sexes in the pursuit of what was commonly called better 'living conditions' or 'standards of living'. We've seen that Gerard's flat is roomy and fully up to date but we have also mused over why Ferreri pays so much attention to the exteriors that suggest far more than just establishing shots. Near the end of the film, Gerard, his son Pierrot, and Valerie are seen in a silhouette as Gerard says to her, "the two of us will adore you all night." The film cuts to an exterior long shot before showing us once again Gerard, Valerie and the child in the apartment, presumably hours later. One can see the exterior moment as a transition shot, as a way of registering time passing but it seems more that it is yet another instance where Ferreri wants to make clear any domestic drama is contained by an architectural reality. Sure, a minute later we do have a reason for the shot, with Gerard going to the balcony and seeing his friend in the far distance with a rifle in his hand asking Gerard if he wants to go hunting. However, while this justifies the earlier shot, makes it explicable, it can also seem to make it redundant. We only needed the one where Gerard goes on the balcony and makes out his friend, who then shouts up to him. However, by seeing the film as constantly attending to the architexture of its characters' lives, no such image need be deemed superfluous. One may notice too that this is a breeze-block world that Gerard often shuts out, even if the film refuses to do so. While the flat like all the others has a balcony to admire the view, there is nothing to see except apartments that look similar to the one in which one is living. Even when there is an expanse of land and a hint of a vista it appears it will be soon replaced, evident in the moment quoted when Valerie returns to the apartment early in the film, and a scene later on when we see Gerard looking out from the balcony and watching Valerie, Gerard's ex-wife and child in the distance, with skeletal new apartments behind them. In numerous scenes even though it is daylight outside the curtains are closed. Gerard never comments on the view but the closed curtains indicate he has no great interest in it.

If we noted that cinema initially had little curiosity over an architecture of living, it rested partly on a burgeoning concern with dystopia evident in films like Metropolis and Things to Come. But into the late fifties and onwards, cinema absorbed not just the dystopian but also the sociologically negative and the socially affirmative, as well as the quizzical. If films like Gregory's Girl, Boyfriends and Girlfriends and Beautiful Thing turned the suburbs into a winsome place of romance and possibility, Nil by Mouth, Red Road and Clockers did the opposite, but Ferreri draws on Godard and Antonioni (his cinematographer here, Luciano Tovoli shot The Passenger the year before) to keep in balance the architectural impact of buildings on our lives. In the foreground, The Last Woman tells a story of a man who won't move with the times and cannot tolerate a woman's changing role in contemporary society, and hence the famous ending where he takes the electric carving knife to his penis. In the background, though, is the environment in which such an action takes place. Dramatically, the castration remains obscure and Stanley Kauffmann goes so far as to say the act is "so appalling that it breaks the 'frame' of the film it bursts out of the story to become an isolated atrocious act." (Before My Eyes) While others have noted the presence of "the impersonal, dehumanizing factories, high-rises, shopping centres and superhighways" (The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers) they remain secondary to the story. However, rather than seeing the former action as inexplicable and the latter as background information, one can see that from a certain perspective the phallus as architectural grandiosity, which Will Self and so many others note in those high-rise hymns to capitalist expansion, is castrating when played out in the domestic, urban environment. After the deed is done, Ferreri cuts once again to the exterior: a slow zoom that starts on Gerard's apartment and ends a moment later when we see Gerard's flat in the context of all the others. If there is such a thing as architectural anonymity, and yet impregnability, this shot captures it. Ferreri follows with the closing shot of the film: a repeat more or less of an image near the beginning which would seem to be from the other side of the lake, from where the factory is. How can we not assume that the architectural is associated with his dreadful deed?

Near the end of the film, Valerie proposes "Can we invent something new? The family that you want is finished. Finished." Ferreri himself reckoned: "It is unthinkable that we can change all of this without a change in society, in dress, in history, in the deep structure of the human being." ('Castration and Conformity') It is as though the skyscraper that is like a 'big swaying dick' becomes the high-rise that diminishes rather than expands the ego. Critics have frequently referred to Gerard as a male chauvinist, or as Anna Migliozzi says, "a self-assured male supremacist by nature." ('Castration and Conformity') This wouldn't be entirely wrong but to view Gerard unsympathetically is to miss the ridiculous tragedy that he is caught within. "We're patriarchs. Patriarchs of families that don't exist anymore. We had rights. Nice rights. The right to fuck. It was so easy. Natural. Just screw. No problems." As Gerard says this he is seated in the kitchen, Pierrot on his lap, as Gerard feeds him. All the while the camera slowly zooms in on Gerard, the sort of zoom use that Kubrick and Altman utilised in quite different ways to capture a question in the making. This isn't the type of zoom Tonino Delli Colli utilised for Leone westerns, full of assertiveness in its narrative telling. No, this is the zoom shot that doesn't quite know what the story is but one that it seeks to find. Delli Colli would go on to work with Ferreri as well (in Tales of Ordinary Madness and The Future is a Woman). He was always a very flexible cinematographer (he worked for Pasolini as well as Leone in the sixties) and he was someone who could just as easily offer the assertive as the enquiring, just as Tovoli worked for Dario Argento on Suspiria the year after The Last Woman. There is nothing to suggest that Ferreri wants assertiveness in the form and so we ought to be wary of creating it in prose that comments on the film. If the film is cinematographically a question, how do we attempt to answer it, especially if Ferreri asks it within the paradoxical? There Gerard is talking about the horrible place in which contemporary masculinity finds itself but there he is left holding the baby and happy to be doing so in a dwelling he himself doesn't consciously acknowledge is oppressive.

In The Last Woman, the form and content, the story and its presentation, do not come together but remain in disjunctive quizzicality so that we look at how the image of society Ferreri offers somehow helps explain the act to which his film concludes. Three-quarters of the way through the film, Gerard and Valerie go for a romantic walk and Valerie says to Gerard will he carry her in his arms. The film cuts to a long shot where the pair of them are small within the frame while the housing looms foreground and background. There is a small swimming pool in front of them which indicates luxury but it seems forlorn and when Gerard says he wants Valerie and thinks of the sea or a pool, there he is carrying her beside one. Yet the environment seems to mock his declaration rather than confirm it. After, the film shows Gerard looking out of the window of the hotel room they've just made love in, and what do we see but pretty much the same view the film has given us thus far? There are high rises and cranes in the distance; a motorway too. The romantic gesture is contained by a modern world that offers no objective correlative, no view that can match the romanticism of the moment and thus makes it absurd. Gerard and Valerie have taken a hotel room that resembles his flat, with a view no better. To comprehend The Last Woman is to see in this disjunction something of Gerard's crisis, to see that while he may indeed be a male chauvinist, that times have changed and Gerard needs to change with them, then what do these changes consist of? If Gerard is expected to change his view of life then what sort of view should be offered outside his window to make it a life worth changing? The film doesn't say, but we must surely infer from the extreme nature of the film's ending that The Last Woman contains an aporia that cannot easily be overcome. It is this paradox that Ferreri leaves us with. The ending may be as assertive as in any film before it few viewers won't wince at the deed but what it means is a lot harder to comprehend, and not a lot easier almost fifty years after it has been made, as we might look around us and muse over the buildings in which we dwell, and what they allow us to dwell upon. Yet part of one's bafflement might be a little like Gerard's - that we don't quite see what is in front of our eyes and how it affects what might be going on in our minds.


© Tony McKibbin