CHAPTER 17

Married to the Eiffel Tower: notes on love,

loss and replacement

Agnieszka Piotrowska

Married to the Eiffel Tower (2008) is the piece of work that I am probably
best known for as a filmmaker. I do not particularly like this fact, given that
I have done much interesting work since, but this still appears to be the
case. Maybe it is the reason why I have never written about the film, even
though at least some of my academic writings deal with my film work. My
monograph Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film (2014) men-
tions it in passing, while it has a whole chapter devoted to another film of
mine entitled The Conman with 14 Wives (2007)  – a relatively obscure
piece of work.
Psychoanalysis and Ethics is about the relationship between the filmmaker
and the subject of her/his films. In it I named the strong attachment that
can develop in that relationship, an attachment I have called, following
psychoanalytic clinical practice, ‘transference’. Transference is a feeling
similar to love, which must accompany an analyst/analysand relationship
for the work in the clinic to go on at all. The notion of transference, once
taken out of the clinical context, is controversial and in my book I discuss
it at length, following the work of Freud himself as well as Jacques Lacan
and other psychoanalysts and thinkers (Freud 1958 [1915]; Lacan 1998;

A. Piotrowska (*)
University of Bedfordshire, Luton, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 177

J. Owen, N. Segal (eds.), On Replacement,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76011-7_17
178 AGNIESZKA PIOTROWSKA

Gueguen 1995). What I did not write about, either then or since, is a
negative transference that can also happen occasionally. Is my best-known
piece of work an example of such an occurrence?
Since that first monograph I have written extensively about my practice
research in Zimbabwe (for example Piotrowska 2014, 2016) and refer-
enced other film work such as The Best Job in the World (Piotrowska 2013)
using psychoanalysis. However, I still have not mentioned Married to the
Eiffel Tower. There are many reasons and in this chapter I will reflect on
some for the first time. Before I do this, I want to turn to a theoretical
article – which I have mentioned elsewhere (Piotrowska 2014), but which
needs evoking here. What is relevant in Comolli’s essay for my writing is
the emphasis on the positive and the creation of something special between
the filmmaker and the subject of her film. It confirmed my whole thesis;
what it did not do was note that another situation can sometimes occur –
as it did in Married to the Eiffel Tower.

In 1999, Jean-Louis Comolli published an important article titled

‘Documentary Journey to the Land of the Head Shrinkers’ in October – a
journal of art and critical theory. The article was written at a specific
moment when the French government was about to introduce tighter
controls regarding the use of images by filmmakers and broadcasters,
including the right to decide how one’s image is used. In essence, Comolli
is violently against such a notion, as he feels that it would encroach on the
delicate process in which the filmmakers and the filmed are united, as he
puts it, in a ‘community of desire’ (47).
The article was published some twenty years after the heyday of Cahiers du
cinéma, in which documentary featured only marginally. Despite the historical
trend, Comolli insists that documentary projects deserve proper attention –
‘The cinema began as documentary and the documentary as cinema […]
Contempt is a documentary of Brigitte Bardot’s body’ (36) – and that any film
has the key documentary component, which is the relationship between  a
‘given time (that of recording) and a place (the scene), a body (the actor) and
a machine (responsible for recording)’ (36). It is the filmed encounter of body
and machine, he says, that will be recorded and viewed again by at least one
spectator. For Comolli ‘this reproducibility of the encounter’ (36) is the war-
rant of its reality. It attests to its existence – it is documentary.
He also makes a potentially important point from a psychoanalytical
viewpoint: that this recorded encounter is offered to the viewer as ‘the scene
in repetition’ (37) because the viewer knows that there is a possibility of
 MARRIED TO THE EIFFEL TOWER: LOVE AND LOSS 179

seeing it again, somehow, somewhere. There is a sense of sharing space

and time – the viewer shares it with the creators of the encounters, with
the technology and with those who are in it. Comolli is fascinated by tech-
nology: ‘Life goes on, and the machine remains’ (37). In a collection
about replacement this is important. Long before I or anybody thought of
transference outside a clinic in the documentary encounter, Comolli talks
about the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject of the film,
and the relationship between the spectator and the documentary text, as a
replacement of a kind – of other relationships, present and past – which
the documentary experience – both the actual experience of the production
process and that evoked in its reproduction and subsequent viewing  –
makes it more possible to control, to tame. I would argue therefore that it
becomes a replacement for an actual lived experience – rather than just a
memory of it.
Comolli further argues that in a film the work of the cinematic scene is
actually the prefiguration of the moment of absence,

intensifying through it this moment of presence, so as to intensify, finally,

the presence of bodies through the promise of their coming absence. The
image of the actor’s body, absent but represented, finds a response, and pos-
sibly a hidden correspondence, in the real body of the spectator – a presence,
certainly, but as if absent from itself in projection toward a screen. (37)

Comolli sees the whole notion of the rights of potential subjects of the
films as part of an attempt to commodify everything in a capitalist system.
Far from empowering the subject of documentary, he controversially pro-
nounces such a claim ‘senseless and dangerous’ (44). I am mentioning it
here for a reason and will return to it in due course.
Comolli views the key issue as the question of freedom. He emphasises
the special nature of the relationship between the filmmaker and her sub-
jects: ‘It’s fairly clear that the link between documentary filmmakers and
those who agree to be in their films is essentially undefined and undefin-
able. A “two of us” is created, an ensemble that’s not stated as such’ (45).
He then goes on to define this relationship ‘as a community of desire;
those who are filmed, whether from Africa, Paris, or Quebec, clearly share
the film with the one who shoots it. Sharing means that they’re wholly
present, without reserve, that they are giving what they have and also what
they don’t have’ (45, my emphasis).
180 AGNIESZKA PIOTROWSKA

For Comolli the process of filming is a fragile and precious gift for all
those involved: the filmmakers end up with a film, but the filmed ones are
also privileged because the process of filming ‘involves a break, the ordi-
nary becoming extraordinary’ (47). He evokes the famous Lacanian phrase
‘To give what one has not, that is love’ (45), without referencing Lacan.
Comolli stops short of actually spelling this out but he seems to be clear
enough: documentary encounter is not just a discourse of desire; it may
well be a discourse of love. I cited this extensively in my 2014 monograph
supporting my argument about transference love – however, very clearly
there are circumstances where the argument does not work.

If my whole notion that transference in documentary is like love confirms

Comolli’s writings about the importance of shared experience with the
people one works with on a documentary, then my experience of Married
to the Eiffel Tower denies it. The women in the film were heavily traumatised –
in one way or another – and my work with them aimed at presenting them
well, as human beings who have found another way of being ‘normal’ –
not as a defence. I also wanted to present the film as a political gesture
against heteronormative ideas about what relationships ought to be like,
and neoliberal values influencing emotions. I respected the women I
worked with here and I respected their desire to tell their stories. In the
film, one of them says very clearly: ‘this is the first time that I am given the
voice to talk to the human race – I want to be listened to. I want people
to listen to me, to really listen to me and see what I have to say’. And so,
I think they did – the film is continuously commented on as one of the
most important documentary pieces created in the last twenty years.1 It
has been screened all over the world. Its semi-illegal Vimeo site has had
hundreds of thousands of views and it has recently (2016) been rescreened
on Netflix. Whatever my intentions might have been, people watch the film
because of their curiosity about how these women take care of their sexual
and emotional needs. I stand by my film – it is well made. It is satisfying to
have created a film that is still relevant and moves so many people.
However, inside the production process, the relationships were not
easy – the women we featured really did not like other people and neither
I nor my associate producer Vari Innes, who has since gone on to become
a reality TV producer-director, were completely exempt from these reserva-
tions. Almost all of these women had been traumatised in one way or
another by their difficult relationships with those who should have been
the guardians of their health and wellbeing – their parents or, more specifically,
 MARRIED TO THE EIFFEL TOWER: LOVE AND LOSS 181

their fathers. The large objects the women fell in love with replaced the
security and safety of those who let them down – in their childhood but
also more recently – in their daily encounters with the outside world. The
‘replacement’ part of it was very clear and very painful – even without any
theoretical frameworks, Oedipal traumas or other causal effects. The objects
offered a safe haven for the women in the film: they were controlled and
controllable, they were fantasies which were nourishing, they offered some-
thing the world simply failed to deliver for these individuals. My associate
producer and I found ourselves struggling – this was a professional job and
we were paid well to make the film on time and on budget for a tough
British broadcaster, Channel 5. We were paid to deliver an amusing film
and to endure setbacks and difficulties in the course of making it. We strug-
gled but were each other’s support and safeguards. We felt sad for the
women and questioned why we should be putting them on television. The
project certainly replaced something important in their lives: a sense of
belonging, a sense of recognition, a sense of being a part of something
bigger – like a family, indeed – which fits perfectly into Comolli’s schemes,
as described above. But the fact of the matter was that to achieve that result
we had to put ourselves on the line in many ways – feeling, as we did, that
our contributors did not like us at all, that Comolli’s ‘community of desire’
did not quite kick in here, that they wanted to be able to form relationships
with other people the way we appeared to be able to do, however difficult
our own lives might have been. Simply, we were different from them.
A year before I embarked on my PhD on film and psychoanalysis, I
sensed dimly the reasons for our difficulties, without being able to name
them: my associate producer Vari and myself were coping but, if truth be
told, only just – we had feelings of frustration and anger, we had to field
the rage of the contributors, which we were never allowed to disclose or
share or do anything about at all. We hired film crews around the world,
as the film was technically a mixed-medium project, meaning I shot some
of it and used bigger crews to achieve the more glossy beautiful images.
These moments with the crews were helpful to us – as we too were begin-
ning to enter the strange world of objectum sexuality and the idea of
replacing human relationships by those with objects began to appear fairly
attractive to us too. We began discussing the attractiveness of the fences
and the bridges – we were laughing at ourselves but both of us had diffi-
cult relationships with our fathers too, as it happened – like the women of
our film. Ironically, in due course I chose the work of psychoanalyst
182 AGNIESZKA PIOTROWSKA

Jacques Lacan as my main theoretical paradigm; he identifies the father –

and not the mother – as the key holder of a person’s identity and sanity.
Vari and I spent a lot of time discussing our own relationships to our
fathers. Was the whole process of making the documentary a replacement
for a proper therapy or analysis? Perhaps.
And then, in the middle of production, when I was in San Francisco
filming the main subject of the documentary, Erica La Tour Eiffel, aka
Naisho, who declared her strong feelings for the Golden Gate Bridge, my
father had a stroke and fell into a coma. I had a text from a close relative
in Poland saying ‘if I were you, I would get on the plane and come home.
Now.’ I was furious and it was deeply inconvenient  – and I could not
believe it as I had spoken to my father only the day before. ‘Are you sure?’
I said to the relative; ‘Are you absolutely sure that he is not just going to
wake up tomorrow?’ ‘He is not waking up. You need to get on the plane
and come to Poland, to the hospital. Now’, said the relative. I arrived in
Poland on a Wednesday morning, my husband and son arrived two days
later; my father never woke up, and he died the following Monday.
My father was old. Every father is old but mine was really old – he had
had a whole life before he met my mother and had to change everything,
for her and me. I should have known he was going to die. But I thought
he wouldn’t. I felt angry and betrayed, and abandoned.
The funeral took place the following Friday. My father had wanted to
lie in state. He was a vain man. ‘Make sure I look handsome’, he said in his
will. ‘I can do this’, I thought, ‘no problem’. On the morning of the
funeral I went to the funeral parlour and saw him – in a coffin, wearing an
old suit, a white shirt and a navy-blue checked tie. He looked awful – they
had lost his dentures in the hospital. His sunken face made him look unlike
the father I knew and loved. ‘You cannot be serious’, I said to the two men
who showed his body to me; ‘we must fix this – bring some toilet tissue
and we will stick it into his mouth to make him look better’. They looked
stunned and brought it to me and I tried to open his mouth and could
not, and so I cried, and then with rage I started rummaging in my hand-
bag, looking for make-up, foundation and blusher to put on his face, tears
streaming down my face. The two attendants stopped me then, looking
horrified: ‘lady, please leave this now and wait in the car – we will call you
when we have prepared him better’. And so they did. At the funeral, on 17
March, there was a military band playing salutes, as he was a war hero.
There were unexpected crowds: mourners coming up to me whispering
condolences I was unwilling to accept. I thought I should give a speech
but felt I might not be able to. As Poland is such a patriarchal society, I
 MARRIED TO THE EIFFEL TOWER: LOVE AND LOSS 183

would have been excused if I had been unable to perform – women are
weak. I was his only child. My two cousins, who were my father’s nephews
(and like adopted sons), were supposed to speak, but couldn’t. They were
sobbing uncontrollably instead. ‘Oh for goodness sake’, I said and gave
the speech. I vomited straight afterwards.
On Monday I called my executive producer Justine Kershaw from Blink
Films and said I was flying back to resume the production. ‘Are you sure
about this?’ ‘I am perfectly sure’, I replied confidently. Replacing mourn-
ing with a production seemed an excellent plan.
And so Vari and I met in Sweden to work with Frau Berliner Mauer –
who talked a lot about her father, the model-maker, who passed on to her
his love for objects. I remember standing on the bridge in Sweden, crying,
and Vari saying ‘you shouldn’t be here, you must go back’. But I stayed –
the production schedule was tight and we had a broadcast date and per-
haps the whole project started replacing the need to mourn the losses that
are irreplaceable and the gaps which can never be filled. We just keep
going because what else can one do?
We went to Paris and Berlin – and our relationships with the subjects of
the film were deteriorating  – they were annoyed at my sadness, which
perhaps reminded them of their own. Naisho was keen to get intimate
with the Eiffel Tower and asked for the crew to form a kind of wall around
a particular section of it – a section she sat on and talked about how it felt
to feel the coldness of the steel against her body. This scene formed a
beautiful sequence and the ending of the film, which is – if I may be so
bold – a great ending: moving and life affirming.
Naisho was happy with the film – the ‘community of desire’ as described
by Comolli seemed to have worked after all. And then she changed her
mind. ‘Remove the ending’, she said in an email: ‘I don’t want my inti-
macy with Eiffel Tower to be seen in this film’. I felt rising panic – this
would have destroyed the whole film – the great finale was what made it.
My executive producer said to me: ‘We are not removing anything, her
permission is clear and in fact it was her idea. Let me deal with this’.
The film went out unchanged. Naisho became vitriolic for a time but
then made a whole career of her objectum sexuality, giving speeches at
conferences and on talk shows. Amy, who was so vociferous about the
voice being given to her, left the objectum sexuality chatrooms as there
were some internal difficulties – she loved the film but in the end it could
never replace her sense of profound loneliness and of being misunder-
stood by the world at large.
184 AGNIESZKA PIOTROWSKA

I collapsed after the film was broadcast on television, to great reviews.

I cried for a month – and in a way have not stopped crying since, which of
course is not quite true, as life has a way of replacing even the most painful
memories with better ones. My father, who was an academic, left some
money for me in his will: ‘do what you want with it of course, but you do
have a good brain and are quite tenacious – for a woman. I always wanted
you to do a doctorate – would you consider it?’

NOTE
1. See for example https://filmow.com/listas/indiewire-s-stranger-than-
fiction-16-documentaries-that-will-blow-your-mind-l53668/.

REFERENCES
Comolli, Jean-Louis, 1999, ‘Documentary Journey to the Land of the Head
Shrinkers’, tr. A. Michelson, October, 90, 36–49
Freud, Sigmund, 1958 [1915], ‘Observations on Transference-Love (Further
Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III)’, in Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol XII, tr. & ed.
James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press & the Institute of Psychoanalysis),
157–167
Green, André & Gregorio Kohon, 2005, Love and its Vicissitudes (London:
Routledge)
Gross, Larry, John Stuart Katz & Jay Ruby, 1988, Image Ethics: The Moral Subjects
in Film, Photographs and Television (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Gueguen, Philippe, 1995, ‘Transference as Deception’, in Richard Feldstein,
Bruce Fink & Maire Jaanus, eds., Reading Seminar XI (New York: State
University of New York Press), 77–91
Lacan, Jacques, 1998 [1981], Seminar XI.  The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Alan Sheridan (London & New York:
W. W. Norton)
Lacan, Jacques, 2001 [1960–1961], Le séminaire VIII: Le Transfert (Paris: Seuil)
Lévinas, Emmanuel, 1981 [1974], Otherwise than Being, tr. Alphonso Lingis (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff)
Piotrowska, Agnieszka, 2013, ‘The Horror of a Doppelgänger in Documentary
Film’, in New Review of Film and Television Studies, 302–313 https://doi.org
/10.1080/17400309.2013.807208, last accessed March 2016
Piotrowska, Agnieszka, 2014, Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary film
(London: Routledge)
Piotrowska, Agnieszka, 2016, Black and White: cinema, arts and the politics in
Zimbabwe (London: Routledge)