A Film Canon

 

 

Queen Christina stands as Greta Garbo's apotheosis, providing her with the best possible constellation of influences and collaborators. Most basically, her proclivity for hyperbolic, melodramatic acting is tempered by the regal solemnity required by the role, while clarifying that solemnity in terms of the wealth of emotion that it restrains. Similarly, her exotic, dislocated persona is clarified as a product of her noble Swedish heritage, as well as (more latently) her bisexuality, as if coming out were conflated with coming home; a lesbian myth of origins. Admittedly, this is partly offset by the obligatory romantic interest, which requires Christina to articulate an apparently heterosexual desire to shed her masculine responsibilities in favour of womanhood. Nevertheless, there is also a sense in which she is inherently dislocated - or, more accurately, dislocated in a way that is incapable of being articulated, and so construed as something constitutional - which speaks to an even deeper yearning. However, the most spectacular relationship is between actor and director, just because, in Garbo, Mamoulian finds a face - and, more specifically, an eye - capable of achieving a panoramic grandiosity commensurate to his cinematographic vision, allowing him to finally fulfil his ambition of creating a film consisting of a single tracking shot. In one of the most striking scenes, Christina confesses, in a room hung with maps and globes, to wanting to remake the entire world as an artist, scientist, or philosopher might, presumably through her tendency to 'memorise' it; that is, to incorporate it into her own panoramic gaze. The resultant conflation of subjective and objective image culminates with the final shot, in which Garbo's face achieves the blank omniscience of a figurehead, albeit without a figurehead's capacity to point into the world, since it has effectively become the world, with all the complexity and ambiguity that entails.