1POPULAR CINEMA

attention to questions of perception. Its pitfalls are thematized in relation
to the power of the gaze and the experience of objectification. From a young
woman’s beautiful face in close-up, the camera moves along eight similarlooking
women dressed in fashionable suit jackets and coats, adorned with
small caps or cloches, and all armed with the obligatory confident smile.
Then the extensive traveling shot comes to a halt on the face of a very different-looking
woman. Her eyes are averted, her cropped hair covered by
a beret, and her hunched shoulders the very expression of painful selfawareness.
Suddenly, an off-screen voice shouts: “You!” The woman looks
up, frightened, turns her head to the left and the right, and then—visibly
confused—stares straight ahead. “Yes, you!” the male voice insists. With
the camera now placed behind her, she rises and moves toward an officiallooking
man positioned in front of the group. In the following reverse shot,
the camera is located slightly above the man’s head to demonstrate how she
eagerly complies with his request: “Why don’t you come here?”
The personnel manager’s subsequent questions about her typing skills
confirm that the company indeed has an opening for a secretary. Much to
the surprise of the other contenders, the “ugly girl” is hired—as we find out
shortly afterward, precisely because she is ugly. With a slight smirk, the
manager takes her to the accounting department. He opens the door to an
open-floor office with numerous similar-looking young men seated at almost
identical desks. Now it is her inquisitive gaze that becomes identified
with a mobile camera registering various expressions of shock and dismay.
Repeating the shot /reverse-shot pattern from the opening sequence,
the camera’s point of view moves back and forth between the young woman
and the accountants, with the manager serving as an occasional mediator.
“Gentlemen, this is the new secretary,” he declares. “I hope that you will
finally be able to work in peace.” Of course, the organizing principle behind
this game of perceptions is the consensus, reached through suggestive
glances among the men, that the new secretary is indeed unattractive and
destined to become the target of cruel jokes and mean pranks.
While identification with the camera’s point of view is predicated on
certain unspoken assumptions about femininity, the editing establishes a
more dialogic structure and, in so doing, bears witness to the violence inherent
in the exchange of looks and perceptions. On the most basic level,
the man is confirmed as the bearer and the woman as the object of the gaze.
Such objectification links the exercise of male power to an ability to humiliate
others. The woman’s return gaze seems to bear out her lack of agency.
Made in 1933 33