Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave: Performance and the politics of singularity

As candidates for critical evaluation, Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave constitute both an apropos and an unexpected pair. The mid-sixties crest of the British New Wave swept them both into stardom on both sides of the Atlantic, but nowhere onscreen have their paths intersected. Both actresses share a long history of allegiances to leftist and radical causes, and both have worked somewhat sporadically over the course of their spectacularly durable careers. It seems clearer in Redgrave's case that the first circumstance has led directly to the second; nevertheless she has appeared in almost twice as many films as Christie during the same forty years, even while keeping one foot planted in the legitimate theater, where Christie has demonstrated almost no aspiration to work on the stage. In the context of this volume, both actresses invite but also unsettle the rubric of "Movie Stars of the Seventies" for reasons related, however disparately, to their political as well as their artistic energies. At the simplest level, the seventies was not a period of remarkable productivity for these performers, both of whom slowed the pace of their film work to almost half of what it had been in their breakout years of the previous decade. Unlike Jane Fonda, who largely retreated from liberal soap-boxing in the eighties and from acting in the nineties, and unlike Glenda Jackson, who established a full-time vocation in electoral politics only by renouncing artistic labor, Christie and Redgrave survive (and inspire) as two touchstone figures from an era of aesthetically adventurous and ideologically attentive popular cinema who have never relinquished their investments in art or in politics. Still, to inquire into the histories and personae of Christie and Redgrave is to disturb, rethink, and hopefully expand the notion of the "political actress," a phrase that names neither a self-evident nor an oxymoronic position. In the narrowest sense, the investigator discovers that Christie's and Redgrave's lives both on and off the movie screen defy as often as they corroborate several mainstays of their popular legacies. For example, Christie's career is often recounted as though she works much less than she actually does. Her perceived cycles of reclusion and reemergence correspond to and perhaps even derive from the evolving, ambiguous relations to "real-world" political struggles that Christie and her characters have evinced over time. Her notoriety as a great beauty has the frequent effect of eclipsing her political probity and agency, and her opting for radical campaigns over glamorous self-commodification has sometimes been misperceived, when it has been acknowledged at all, as an outright forfeiture of career and public life. On the other hand, her stalwart choices in the eighties, especially, to collaborate almost exclusively with feminist, experimental, or counter-hegemonic filmmakers and activists may imply a clearer, less idiosyncratic relation to politics than Christie and her image have in fact sustained. Redgrave, largely due to one notorious phrase ("Zionist hoodlums"), holds so much more renown than Christie does as a public-sphere agitator that we are prone to making opposite errors in judgment: reducing her diverse social-justice campaigns to single issues or monolithic stances; assuming that her professional life has been more frequently or legibly beholden to her ideological convictions than is actually the case; and classifying her as an isolated or fringe figure when, to a surprising degree, many of Redgrave's film roles starting in the late seventies raise the hopeful possibility of coalition and camaraderie, particularly among women, as sites for political awakening and action. Both actresses embody but also question the workings of metonymy, of who or what "stands" for whom or for what in the ideological as well as the mimetic senses of "representation" - particularly since their films often etherealize and compartmentalize their images, such that they "stand for" ideas that elude easy comprehension, in subversive as well as more mainstream projects. Both women, formerly iconic of sixties youth culture, proceeded in and after the seventies to labor in films dedicated to complicating iconicity and critiquing versions of history. For that reason, close study of their images helps to reveal how popular film can construct meaning and emit political resonance through mechanisms other than direct narrative content or such ideologically loaded forms as Brechtian alienation or Eisensteinian dialectic. Specifically, through miming Deleuzian concepts like singularity, the time-image, and the becoming-woman, the images of Christie and Redgrave, traced across their careers, evoke nascent and fragile permeabilities between the individual and the ideological. Through their styles of artistry, their bodies of work, and the formal contexts of their films, both women figure "identity" and even "politics" in unusual ways - that is, through a series of diffuse relations, contradictions, extratextual echoes, and molecular contingencies, rather than speaking principally to such overt political frameworks as war, bureaucracy, governance, and protest.