2. Music and the Materials of History
Alexander Kluge
3. Kluge's Assault on History
Trauma, Testimony, and Difference in The Patriot
The task of the materialist historian is to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history.
—WALTER BENJAMIN
I don't believe in dialectics as a mode of abstract thought. I believe in a dialectic we can feel with our fingertips.
—ALEXANDER KLUGE
INTRODUCTION
Benjamin's desire for explosive historiography describes the project of many New German Cinema directors. It operated in the different appearances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony discussed in the Introduction. Literal "blasts" occur in a wide array of other films—not surprising for a movement concerned with World War II and its aftermath. Even those not set on the battlefield dramatize the explosive efforts needed to force Germany to come to terms with the past: Germany, Pale Mother, Lili Marleen, and Maria Braun all have explosions that connect their female protagonists to war and, in the case of Maria Braun, to memory and forgetfulness. As Benjamin makes clear, these blasts function as attacks on the materials of history itself: its myths, its omissions, its tools, its institutional supports, and the many pieces that go missing.
Benjamin's program is well suited to almost all of the socially and politically motivated directors of the movement, but his ideas reverberate with special force in the work of Alexander Kluge. At a formal level alone, the director's strategies can be called explosive: the collage-like structures of films like The Patriot and The Power of Emotion tear apart diegetic settings and narrative structures, interrupting them with intertitles, oral disposition, extradiegetic inserts, and with a provocative porousness between documentary and fiction. Kluge's cinema—as well as his creative and theoretical writings—offers a veritable glut of visual and acoustic objets trouvés, citations of the known and unknown, artifacts of high and less-than-high
In keeping with Kluge's punning rendition of materialist dialectics, there is a pressing, insistent physicality to the pieces that constitute his collage-like works both thematically and formally. They take form in the stereoscopic views, tinted film footage, and discussions of obsolete scrap metal in The Blind Director, the knee and the bush that witness battles from the eastern front in World War II, the elephants in Artists Under the Big Top, whose memory of a deadly circus fire is as weighty as the imprisoned beasts themselves. With The Patriot—and the questions it poses about history, survival, and bodies—its material objects function as witnesses of the past, texts upon which personal and public stories are marked. In that regard, they serve as physical reminders of the endurability of that past, literalizing its ongoing presence. Kluge's obsession with blasting open seemingly sealed, impermeable narratives and histories (and constructing new stories from their remains) continues in The Power of Emotion. Here, bodies are actants operating in larger economies of emotion and commerce such as opera and prostitution. The film's sustained focus on opera brings music into the spotlight more than The Patriot did (in a way, The Patriot is a prelude to The Power of Emotion, providing tools with which the latter film may itself be "blasted open").
Both films devote considerable energy to human bodies and how histories are inscribed on them or brought into being through them. Given Kluge's interest in materialism and materiality, that emphasis is hardly surprising. Yet both his theoretical work and his film work construct human bodies problematically, particularly when national, ethnic, and, especially, gendered features are involved.
The Patriot and The Power of Emotion examine the question of history through speaking and singing bodies, respectively. Of special concern to The Patriot is the speech of survivors, those who experienced trauma, and to an extent, the film proposes traumatic representation as its strategy of stylized remembrance. Just as we traced Peer Raben's interest in modernist shock back to interwar modernism, Kluge's focus on trauma draws our attention to shock's aftereffects, situating his concerns within post war scenarios. That movement away from shock is evidenced in his emphasis on bodies that endure different forms of trauma, a focus that raises the question of survival, which in turn is intimately tied to knowledge, power, and privilege. The Patriot seems to construct new forms of remembrance through speaking witnesses and the wounds of traumatized bodies, suggestive of the oral histories used to recount the Shoah. Yet its critics have
TEACHERS, CRITICS, AND CORPORALS:
HISTORY IN A BLENDER
Hessian high school history teacher Gabi Teichert is one of Kluge's most endearing characters. She graces the cover of Rainer Lewandoski's Die Filme von Alexander Kluge, and Anton Kaes devotes a chapter to her in From Hitler to Heimat."Gabi," as she is usually called, makes her first cameo in Germany in Autumn as an archaeologist trying to extract secrets from German soil. The next year, she struggles "to present history in a patriotic fashion" in her own feature. In The Patriot, Gabi Teichert is the historical materialist incarnate, armed with a pickaxe and torchlight, battling wintry ice and storms to get at "better materials" of German history. In her underground study, the teacher takes saws, drills, and mallets to books, literally attacking les grands récits she deems inadequate to the task of a "patriotic representation of history." (Books are, after all, history's "byproducts," as she tells a bewildered party member at an actual Social Democrat convention.) Gabi's zeal to get at this history ends up distracting and tiring her: she is less able to function at school and grows increasingly detached. Over the course of the film, her experiences are constantly interrupted by various nondiegetic story fragments, old drawings, photographs, and manipulated film footage; one of the few unifying tropes of the film is Kluge's voice-over. The Patriot ends on a quasi-upbeat note on New Year's Day, with Gabi optimistically (naively?) facing the upcoming year. After this, the film fades to video blue.
Clearly Gabi's quest responds to Benjamin's call for history-making as a form of critical archaeology. But she does more than that. Gabi joins any number of female characters in the New German Cinema intent on piecing together histories from leftover pieces of the past: modern Trümmerfrauen, the women who sifted through rubble of the war for useful building materials. To be sure, actual Trümmerfrauen conducted their work with little interest in correcting history, but rather out of sheer survival. Their iconographic role as figures rebuilding "Germany" was potent enough for an entire genre of films to emerge around them in the late 1940s and, a full generation later, the New German Cinema would reference both the Trümmerfrauen and the Trümmerfilm in Germany, Pale Mother, Maria Braun, The Patriot, and other films. Real Trümmerfrauen joined fictional female
Post-1968 German cinema features as many excavations as it does explosions. Perhaps most famous is Sonja in Michael Verhoeven's Das Schreckliche Mädchen / The Nasty Girl (1990), who digs into the local archives for a school essay, "My Hometown During the Third Reich," and exposes her town's complicity with the Nazis (like most of Verhoeven's work, The Nasty Girl is based on actual events). The guarded vaults of Sonja's town library and records are clear references to institutionally suppressed stories and spaces. Gabi Teichert tries to "dig up" materials of Germany's past, turning to what lies literally buried in German soil (in doing this she turns the Nazi worship of "blood and soil" on its head). If in the end Verhoeven's Sonja uncovers more useable material than Gabi does, each is still ostracized by her community for having made the effort.
In a more masculine vein, Benjamin likened his work to that of an "engineer" who "builds" as he "blasts."[2] Kluge similarly referred to his films as "construction sites,"[3] no different from the work of those who build railroads and bridges or who found cities, except, as he said, that he does not use straight lines. Lines create order, tradition, and direction, paving the way for cause and effect, linear logic, and teleologically driven stories/ histories / constructions. Not surprisingly, organizing centers are hard to find in Kluge's work, and he repeatedly asserts that his films are incomplete and must be filled in or "constructed" by readers/critics/viewers. Narrative scraps and stories disperse, repeat, and interweave among themselves. This was so much the case with The Power of Emotion that reviewers in Germany complained they could not locate a "story" at all, to which Kluge replied that, on the contrary, there were twenty-six—deploying the ironic statistics that run through his work.
Gabi pursues Kluge's interest in the "ruins that have become treasures" most obviously in terms of what Germany has buried in its violent past and its equally violent attempts to keep it covered—the historical issue so many Young German and New German Cinema directors confronted. But Kluge's emphasis on excavation, on bringing ruins to light, means not only recovering repressed materials, but scrutinizing them in a new light and transforming trash into tools. Like Benjamin, he shuns large, institutionalized artifacts in favor of banal objects like abandoned buildings, small city streets, toys, fairy tales, wishes, worn-out images, and old pieces of music.
These, he felt, were the tools out of which counter-histories could be produced. To introduce repressed memories and buried forms meant the possibility of recharging those meanings, even of changing the contexts into which they might now be placed. Given the similarity of Kluge's interests to Benjamin's, it is hardly incidental that the director relies heavily on metaphors of verticality and depth, which were common in modernist epistemology (psychoanalysis, realist theories of photographic technology, and so on). Kluge uses them to describe Gabi's efforts, in which the character assumes some form of exegetic "truth" might be found beneath layers of distortion and disguise. So infused is The Patriot with Gabi's efforts to excavate and uncover that at one point the film asks the question of how deep into the earth one may legally dig.[4] Once more, taking his lead from Benjamin, Kluge says, "What had been mere commodities for earlier times are for the amateur archaeologists who dig them out, treasures," a point Miriam Hansen has developed. She writes that Kluge's films "engage in salvaging historical rubble from the drift of amnesia, taking on objects as cumbersome as the battle of Stalingrad" or as small as the dead soldier's knee that narrates The Patriot, exemplifying what she calls "events breaking into discourse." "The method," she continues, "is allegorical … wresting fragments from petrified contexts and inserting them into a new discourse while preserving their strange and jarring character."[5]
Ruins have fascinated Kluge since his first short film, Brutality in Stone, which opens on the architectural debris of Nazi meeting spots in and around Nuremberg. Their function as material witnesses is confirmed by the accompanying voice-over: "The deserted structures of the Nationalist Socialist Party reactivate, as stone witnesses, the memory of that epoch, which ended in the most horrible catastrophe of German history." It is only superficially contradictory to say that ruins show the transitory nature of social and political systems as well as the capacity of these systems to endure. Much the same thing was the case for Benjamin writing before the Shoah, for whom nineteenth-century bourgeois culture was a chief reference point, as Susan Buck-Morss stresses in her analysis of the Passagenwerk.[6] The same tension is evident in his rumination on history, in which ruins offer the uncontestable evidence of the victor's spoils and also the "barbarous document of history." Benjamin makes the point in his famous analysis of Paul Klee's 1920 painting "Angelus Novus," the "angel of history" who casts a slightly terrified backward glance on the accumulated destruction that is the byproduct of historical progress. "Where we perceive a chain of events," Benjamin writes, "he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet."[7]
In his earlier, more optimistic work, Benjamin construed ruins rather differently. Allegorical readings of ruins and overlooked objects could reveal the "courage" of the nonvictorious for having once functioned as tools for work, play, fantasies, and so on. The very banality of these objects seems to give them their significance. It is this early Benjamin, the advocate of allegorical readings of everyday artifacts, with whom Kluge has the most in common.
Whether as ruins of official culture or of repressed hopes, objects are marked by their own material histories, contexts that are borrowed and temporary rather than fully possessed. This may be the most direct link between Benjamin and Kluge. Since objects do not exist without the inscription of history, temporality is evident even in the most inanimate things; hence the positioning of ruins as possible witnesses. In The Patriot, for instance, Kluge flatly states, "Here is a puddle. A puddle has a life span of three days"; then he introduces a bush as being forty kilometers from the Polish border, near a town "formerly called Koningsberg. Of course, the bush is not aware of this." In his 1964 "fact novel" on the battle of Stalingrad, Schlachtbeschreibung / The Battle, Kluge offers a tip from a military manual: in sufficient thickness, snow can protect soldiers from bullets. The same emphasis on the material life of things was voiced by survivor Primo Levi in his postwar memoirs: in the camps, he wrote, "death begins in the shoes."[8]
Objects are thus as much infused with history as history is with objects. But, as Kluge and Benjamin maintain, artifacts are not nearly as important as the uses to which they are put or the critical interpretations that draw out what Benjamin calls their "expressive potential," as Levi's observation also illuminates. Allegorical readings achieve that for Benjamin; Kluge postulates a form of active interpretation called Zusammenhang— literally, a hanging-together or connection-making.[9] Both reading strategies do violence to the original meaning(s) of their artifacts, much like a fragment does violence to the unity or integrity of a physical object, including, as we will see, the human body. Here the disunified (or, with Kracauer's mass ornament, speciously unified) quality of the artifact is especially important. Kluge's films are filled with fragments that don't add up or provide any unifying structure. No one history of Germany is available; no singular, idealized nation-body exists. Nor is there a clear alternative history to discover and apply. This apparent lack of historiographical strategy is itself a strategy, for Kluge makes it more or less impossible to believe that alternative histories already exist. As Hans Kellner states, "I do not believe there are ‘stories’ out there in the archives or monuments of the past, waiting to be resurrected and told. Neither human activity nor the existing records of
The epitome of that honest historian, Gabi Teichert follows a similarly circuitous route. Her approach to historical understanding recalls what Benjamin articulates in his "Work of Art" essay. Eschewing the hagiographic distanciation and inaccessibility that art required before mechanical reproduction, Gabi's tools dig directly into the "byproducts of history" (i.e., books) and thus eradicate the mythologizing aura of History. In this sense, Kluge's patriot is as probing as the cine-surgeon Benjamin hypothesized: it's just that she becomes, as Benjamin put it, "distracted" by her subject matter. In fact, The Patriot suggests that the sheer abundance of artifacts she uncovers generates the same paralyzing overload that Benjamin and Kracauer had criticized in commodity culture. Gabi, its seems, has accumulated too much—and processed too little.
Gabi recalls the sort of laborer, the "magical" producer of phantasmagoria, Benjamin associated with aesthetic production prior to mass reproduction, hinting at the carryover of older aesthetic and epistemological forms. In contrast to the illuminated, institutional public places in which Gabi appears—and where she seems the most unproductive and lost—her study/workplace is dark, dimly lit, not unlike a developing room. It appears to be underground. Secret and shrouded, the "buried," unacknowledged work she performs there is reminiscent of the vertical mise-en-scène of Metropolis, whose Workers' City forms the foundation for the leisure activities of the aristocrats above. In an equally literal fashion, Gabi "synthesizes" her findings, loading pages of books into a beaker filled with potion and placing them in a blender. Drinking her concoction to soak up knowledge, Gabi's act raises the question of whether internalizing the potion (recall modernity's call to absorb shock as a defensive measure) will enable her to break through the impasse of German history. It certainly dramatizes her (Kluge's?) desire to incorporate that Germanness into her identity and her very body.
As we are shown Gabi's underground lab, Kluge states: "The soul of a person who works hard is like a factory, workshop, cellar, or a witch's kitchen." Conducting experiments with gravity from a staircase, probing the heavens through her telescopes, with her frothy potions and fleece coat, Gabi recalls nothing less than a medieval alchemist. Here too ghosts of Metropolis abound, notably that of Rotwang, who like Gabi is obsessed with the past, in the form of his departed Hel, whose loss is displaced onto his robotic, missing hand. In Metropolis, Rotwang's anachronistic existence
Historian as alchemist: Gabi Teichert in the "witch's kitchen" of Kluge's The Patriot. Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.
It is perhaps no accident that Gabi Teichert does not succeed at her task. There are a number of reasons why, perhaps not the least of which is her belief in a "patriotic" rendering of a history as full of carnage as Germany's. Her belief is presented as stubbornly naive, as is her faith in the retrievability of an authenticating truth through objects, interviews, or other means. Thus for as much as the film treats Gabi's work with affection (some say condescension), her character is unable to provide the Zuarbeit, the additional or supplemental work, to create meanings and connections (Zusammenhänge) on her own. Gabi cannot change the course of history, or even how it is taught. She is equally ill-equipped to handle the present, unable to hold her own in departmental meetings with male colleagues, whose responses to her range from patronizing irritation to supreme indifference.
In an important detail, Gabi's lack of basic survival skills is shared by another female character in The Patriot, Gerta Baethe, whom we are told perished with her children during a World War II Allied attack: "There were explosions heard in the distance. She was dressing the children when the bombs hit the air raid shelter of Koch's Printing Works. … It was no time for starting a strategy …, Gerta Baethe. The bombs fall on this woman in 1944. She wants to defend herself. But her last chance to check the misery of 1944 was in 1928. Gerta Baethe could have organized with other women." Interestingly, the film presents her story as "material for Monday's history lesson" for Gabi's class. Her case is read, interrupted, and discussed by several students as well as by Kluge's dry, nondiegetic voiceover. The Patriot makes two other possible references to Gerta. Before she is introduced, we briefly see an image interpreted by Kluge's voice-over: "A woman, two children, 1944, in a bomb shelter." Later, when we see images of a woman seeking shelter in what looks to be footage from an old fiction film, Kluge flatly states, "Gerta Baethe: strategy of below."
Strategies from above and below recur throughout the film in a variety of visual and thematic motifs. Gerta's and Gabi's digging into the earth "below" illustrates the latter; visual evidence of organization imposed "from above" is shown through numerous aerial points of view (especially as bombs are dropped) and the low-angle stills of contemporary and Naziera officials. Adding to this vertical topography is the information that in 1939, "Gerta Baethe knew a man from the Todt Organization who wanted to build canals [across alpine regions] and not an Autobahn across Germany."[12] In a stunning detail, once this unnamed character is introduced, Kluge's voice-over assumes the first person: "We had it completely planned," eschewing the disengaged third person that he uses to discuss Gerta, who was, after all, a victim for being unable to plan or produce a strategy from below. Given that Kluge's voice-overs seldom slip into the first person, the move here is conspicuous. As the film moves on, we see sketched plans for digging tunnels through the Alps and images showing passageways, links, and connections (forms of "organization") associated with the ground, as opposed to the organizational forms and strategies imposed "from above."
As a member of the Todt Organization (an official, if nonmilitary, auxiliary of the Nazi government, see n. 12), Gerta's friend can scarcely be associated with any meaningful kind of resistance, even if his disinterest in the Autobahn implies a possible deviation from official party lines or duties. With Nazi workers imposing forms of organization upon the earth, Kluge places operations "from below" onto party members and resistance figures, complicating what would otherwise be a simple top-down model of
In a way, The Patriot presents Gerta's inability to organize as entirely reasonable: "For a strategic perspective to start up, as Gerta wished on April 8th, seventy thousand teachers would have had to work twenty years." Organizing people, changing history, requires a lot of collective labor, calculated in Kluge's typically comic statistics. And, as he has written specifically in reference to the issue of organizing "women's labor," there is "no applied thought, no representational form, and thus no ‘organization’ that demonstrates a real ability to produce such alternative modes of living. Therefore it is not a matter of adapting women to politics, but of adapting politics to women's problems."[13]
Despite this claim, and despite Kluge's critique of history as a causal chain of events (Gerta's inability to defend herself in 1944 is somehow a result of her inability to organize sixteen years earlier) and his lampooning of progress as a statistically measurable phenomenon (seventy thousand teachers working twenty years), Kluge's presentation of Gerta cannot shake the sense of blaming the victim. The proportions of this blame intensify when Gerta's fate is compared to that of male victims of the war, as I have already noted with Gerta's anonymous male companion, and as I will argue in relation to Corporal Wieland's knee.
ALTERNATIVE LABOR FORCES: BURIED FEMININE ENERGY
[Film's utopian strain in the] unsophisticated imagination … is buried under a thick layer of cultural garbage. It has to be dug out. This project of excavation, not at all a utopian notion, can be realized only through our work.
To find is more important than to invent.
—ALEXANDER KLUGE
If Gerta was insufficiently "organized," Gabi Teichert is even less organized, even if the consequences in her case are not fatal. No shortage exists of feminist criticism of Kluge for the way he mocks, patronizes, or silences
It is not incidental that Sander uses a domestic example to elaborate Kluge's idea of the "unwanted within the wanted." (What to do with all that foot powder?) If the "feminine" labor process Gabi's work represents for the director is so crucial, what is supposed to be done with the unexpected results and undesirable byproducts Sander describes? Heidi Schlüpmann criticizes Kluge's elevation of women's strengths, which are simultaneously considered weaknesses by the "dominant reality principle."[15] It is only through recourse to stubborn, "unwanted" forms of logic or alternative "realities" that hegemonic perceptions can be dislodged for Kluge. But, as Schlüpmann argues, his exploration of women's own social and psychic fantasies never gets very far: their value as metaphor in this other process is what matters to him.
Gabi Teichert is a case in point. Her desires and fantasies remain stubbornly unarticulated—all we know is that she seeks "better material" with which to teach German history. We know that she is a female patriot (a contradiction in terms, for Sander),[16] and therefore "takes an interest in the country's dead." These, of course, are Kluge's interests, not necessarily those of women. Gabi's hands-on approach to history literalizes Kluge's "dialectic you can feel with your hands" (the "synthesis" of which is achieved as she drinks her potions). In historiographic terms, her method contrasts with that of idealist histories and the progressive teleological narratives they usually imply. At a school meeting, for instance, one of her unsympathetic male colleagues argues, "History is written in a certain way for certain reasons," with no intention of challenging the motives underlying such "reasons." If Gabi is illustrating, doing, or performing the kind of critical work advocated by the director, why then is his first-person voiceover never given to her, and why is she given so little of her own voice to begin with? What does Gabi (or Gerta) represent for Kluge?
VOICING HISTORY
B. Ruby Rich offers a particularly trenchant critique of Kluge's treatment of voice and speech in her analysis of Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin / Occasional Work of a Female Slave (1973). Its heroine, Roswitha, is like Gabi in that she tries to work for social change (as an abortion worker) but ends up alone and disaffected. Rich argues that although Kluge's female protagonists are given sympathetic goals, he maintains a detached, nearly condemnatory distance from them: "Pretending to offer a sympathetic analysis, Kluge instead offers a frame-up."[17] This is formally achieved through narrational voice-overs and intertitles. Rich goes on to note, "The narrator holds a position of omniscience as a deus ex machina privy to information unavailable to the film's characters and inaccessible within the film text. In this guise, the narrator quickly becomes the favored replacement for the viewer in search of identification. The narrator, in his display of wit and wisdom, wins the respect of the viewer over the course of the film. The viewer … unit[es] in a spirit of smug superiority with the narrator over and against the character(s)."[18] The silencing of female characters that Rich condemns in Kluge's voice-overs becomes even more important when women are placed into operatic contexts, as we shall see in the discussion of The Power of Emotion. Contrasting Occasional Work to Sander's Redupers, Rich simply calls Kluge's work "antifeminis[t]."[19]
Helke Sander is another outspoken critic of Kluge who uses his techniques and terms for her critiques. Her 1984 film Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe / The Trouble with Love, for instance, was in many ways a response to The Power of Emotion, adopting its fragmented story style and using a female voice-over to challenge Kluge's representations of women. Discussing The Blind Director (which Sander humorously wanted to retitle "The Assault of the White Man on the Rest of Time"),[20] she argues that, like "his thesis that our emotions are locked in various [historical] stages of development," Kluge's own attitude towards women is arrested in 1529, before Copernicus changed the idea that "the sun still revolved around the earth and the male was in god's image, the focus of creation."[21] Interestingly, and despite this stinger, Sander states in the same piece that "his anti-drama is a form … his form of kindness," that opens itself up to new uses, deliberately activating undesirable repressed desires.[22](It is highly improbable, for instance, that Kluge's lapse into the first person with the man from Todt was unintentional.)
Both as solo author and in his sociological work with Oskar Negt, notably Geschichte und Eigensinn / History and Obstinacy (1981) and Öffentlichkeit
For them, this potential labor force entails ways of thinking and organizing that are currently excluded from what they somewhat anachronistically call (even in 1972) the "bourgeois sphere." In metaphors pertinent to The Patriot, they argue that that which lies buried, when activated and organized, has explosive potential; it can form a constituent part of a number of alternative, unpredictable "counter public spheres." Like Kluge's careful refusal to present alternative histories as singular or unified, this laborform is not conceptualized as altogether separate or "other," not a utopia situated at the far end of a social spectrum awaiting recognition or dusting off. Born of bits and pieces, this alternative sphere never quite adds up, functioning as a potentiality or, again, "the unwanted within the wanted." Misunderstandings, gaps, or details that escape full mastery or understanding, for instance,[24] contain "the raw material of protest and the potential beginnings of a ‘proletarian’ or ‘counter public sphere.’"[25] Thus he was concerned with both used and unused parts of a social past, like untapped labor or emotions, or behaviors that don't "fit" within institutionalized, accepted notions of experience. In stressing their obstinacy and persistence, Kluge (theoretically at least) deprives them of the sense of being victimized, an idea that is crucial to the survivors depicted in The Power of Emotion and The Patriot.
Negt and Kluge wrote History and Obstinacy while The Patriot was being made, and the dense sociological treatise shares some of the film's unusual features. A highly atypical academic work, it refuses generic boundaries and conventions, with theoretical exposition abruptly breaking off; pages are punctuated by quotations, photographs, drawings, fairy tales,
Collagistic social theory in Negt and Kluge's Geschichte und Eigensinn / History and Obstinancy, p. 488. Courtesy of Zweitausendeins Press.
Although presented as a botched opportunity, Gerta Baethe's case remains critical for Negt and Kluge. Rather than restore neglected stories at individualized levels (as Steven Spielberg did with Oskar Schindler), they
Negt and Kluge controversially describe the untapped "productive force" as feminine. They maintain that this feminine mode of production is a residual of an earlier, matriarchal mode of production eclipsed by capitalism (their argument is reminiscent of Engels's history of the bourgeois family in that regard). Capitalism here is a negligent father, a system unable to fulfill, respond to, or even acknowledge human needs. Feminine productivity apparently acknowledges need, and does so, according to Negt and Kluge, in the exemplary form of motherhood. Their nearly biological exemplification of women's "labor" has drawn heated and justifiable criticism from feminists for decades, and Kluge has had a difficult time dispelling the idea that his concept of femininity is somatically driven. Debates were especially intense after the release of The Occasional Work of a Female Slave, prompting a flurry of exchanges between Kluge and members of frauen und film.[27] While this is not the place to reproduce that debate, it is worth underscoring the tension between Kluge's contention that the undercompensated "feminized" labor capacity is a consequence of socio-historical phenomena and the weight he places on women's labor in childbirth and child rearing. On the one hand, one could construe his literalized examples of female labor as part of his materializing aesthetic—Kluge refers to bodies as "sites of social experience and political resistance," after all.[28] Yet that doesn't change the fact that he fails to examine these resistances beyond the narrow symbolic function ascribed them, nor does he consider the historical and social particularities of women's labor.
To be sure, Kluge and Negt's binarist presentation of male/female systems, forces, or historical epochs is a product of its time (male-female oppositions were common in the 1970s, even in feminism). Yet it has never been enough to reverse the equation and devalue the masculine term (linking it to an alienating capitalist system, for instance), and associate femininity with pre-or post-capitalist alternatives, especially when they are encumbered with such clichéd qualities as "nurturing." (Indeed, it is highly
The repercussions of these theoretical positions are played out on the human figures that inhabit Kluge's diegetic worlds. Female leads operate against a backdrop of unsympathetic male characters and masculinized institutions: Anita G is shuffled from one cold place/man to another in the West Germany of Yesterday Girl; the misguided Ferdinand is overinvolved with his guard duties in Der starke Ferdinand / Strongman Ferdinand (1976). As even these characters establish, the assembled "fragments" and "ruins" Kluge calls bodies get marked and gendered quite differently. Women's bodies are constructed in terms of (illogical, blundering) potentiality in Kluge's films; male bodies as (unmoving, blundering) actuality.[30] Neither sex succeeds in narrative-or character-centered terms, and in contrast to the clean metaphoric correspondences of films like Germany, Pale Mother or The Tin Drum, the body itself—be it male or female, German or not—is a haphazard collection of fissures, potentials, pieces. The fact that it never functions as a totality suggests how open "it" is to change, to alternatives, even to resistance. But Kluge makes no guarantees about those outcomes; indeed, they don't occur in his films, recalling Fassbinder's Franz Biberkopf and Elvira. To cast it a bit pessimistically, modernist (and postmodernist) fragmentation, so epistemologically, hermeneutically, and even politically cherished, may be nothing more than the inability to "pull together" or to perform Zusammenhan g.
THE BODY AS RUINED FRAGMENT
In reality, every human being is a concerto of different capacities or elements. … Human images are composed of fragments; they are fragments of ruins. … Each experience, the experience of resisting as well as the experience of a defeat, constructs little personalities that coexist. … I want to develop a massive quantity of differentiating capacities, to differentiate the subcutaneous from the dominant aspects.
—ALEXANDER KLUGE
Aesthetics was born as a discourse of the body.
—TERRY EAGLETON
For Kluge, the human body is an unstable power center of potential. It is inscribed with hegemonic patterns of work, thought, and feeling, as it is with opposing ones. This conception enables him, theoretically, to position subjectivity within history rather than have it simply function as a site of passive reflection. A line from The Patriot,"history is the history of bodies," is significant in that regard, with proof coming in the form of the knee-narrator, a "character" that has attracted as much critical commentary as Gabi Teichert, and one to which she has been often compared. The knee is all that remains of a young Corporal Wieland, a German officer killed just days before the end at Stalingrad, the notorious battle of 1942–43 in which thousands of German troops perished in an extravagantly ill-conceived campaign that Hitler, rebuking his military advisors, refused to see as hopeless. The knee comes from a poem by Christian Morgenstern read in Kluge's voice-over:
| A knee walks the earth alone. | |
| It is a knee, nothing else. | |
| It is no tree, it is no tent, | |
| It is a knee, nothing else. | |
| Once there was a man, | |
| Cut down in war. | |
| Only his knee remained untouched, | |
| Like some holy relic. | |
| Ever since: | |
| A knee walks the earth, alone. |
The corporal's knee is an illogical, impossible leftover, the absurdity of whose narration is acknowledged later in the film: "You don't have to accept what I'm saying. Actually I'm not a knee at all—I have no speech organ. I'm not a kneecap, not the space behind it, the upper leg or the lower leg. They died. But I'm the connection, the joint." Absurd (and chatty) though it may be, the knee/director/"holy relic" shifts effortlessly from speaking poetry ("A knee walks the earth, alone") to bearing witness (detailing conditions at Stalingrad) to reciting Latin, covering in this way more ground than even our man in the Todt Organization. But its speech becomes progressively fractured and unsure of itself: "I say ‘fundamental’ too often," or "At this point I wanted to say something more … but I forgot what I wanted to say." It defensively asserts its superiority to the brain—the dead brain cannot quote Charlemagne; the brain cannot keep pace with the knee, ever "forward striding."
To an extent, the absurdity of the knee's being able to speak (much less the nutty things it says) undercuts its authority. But as the perfect
In addition to having the apparent respect of the film's director, the nomadic knee has that of his fellow dead as well: he tells us that they refer to him as "the Father of Accuracy." Even the soundtrack pays him an indirect, troubling homage. After introducing Gabi Teichert, we see film footage of barely identifiable war carnage through a red filter, over which is played the powerful theme for Alain Resnais's documentary on Holocaust memory and responsibility, Night and Fog by Hanns Eisler. Although the music helps concretize the historical context of the abstracted, manipulated images at this point, it does so from a very different perspective than it did in Resnais's film. Anton Kaes observes: "This musical quotation may hint at a consciousness that does not want to exclude Auschwitz from the patriotic Trauerarbeit. But even those who can appreciate the subtle allusion to the [theme] from Night and Fog are soon pulled back to the side of the German war victims because the music is combined with images of German soldiers at Stalingrad. The victims of the Germans at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and many other concentration camps are not part of the picture."[33] Kaes is right to voice objections about using Eisler's piece to mourn the German military dead, given that it was initially composed to honor the dead that this military produced. As a fragment of these soldiers and their "ever-accurate spokesman," the Nazi official's knee becomes the recipient of the mourning in The Patriot, which in Resnais's text had belonged to Nazism's victims. (The piece makes another troubling reappearance when the man from the Todt Organization is introduced.) While it is difficult to imagine that Kluge intended this effect to be without irony or contradiction, irony is difficult to find.
The knee goes on to speak over a series of postcard-like images of Germany at its bucolic best—springtime blossoms, castles, landscapes—kitschy presentations of Nation replacing the previous red-soaked images of war. It is difficult to gauge whether these tacky images are offered as critique, or if the knee is simply more successful at summoning forth the "better [more pleasant?] material" of German history than Gabi is. Indeed, just as the patriotic history teacher is introduced as "taking an interest in Germany's dead," the knee, speaking for itself, remarks over these images:
It's said that I'm interested in history. That's right, of course. I can't forget the story that I'd still be a part of something bigger, if Corporal Wieland, my former master, part of something bigger, part of our beautiful Germany. … As a German knee I'm naturally interested, above all, in German history: the emperors, peasants, blossoms, trees, farms, meadows, plants.
As "part of something bigger … our beautiful Germany," the knee is an obvious emblem of a limping, homeless nation, lamenting a lost unity that is as phantasmatic as the knee itself. But its speech, as well as its ability to speak, points to a peculiar, Klugian form of history that includes in its materials plants, body parts, buildings, and other neglected artifacts—the kind of buried matter Gabi might be excavating. Critics, however, have not failed to notice the contrast between Gabi's very physical historical work and the more cerebral abstractions of the chimerical knee. The film itself progresses along these very lines, in fact, moving from a dense melange of concrete "German" materials at the beginning—plants, castles, war footage, soldiers, and so on—to a highly abstract closing shot after Gabi faces the new year. Near the end of the film, the screen fades to a blank screen with a quote from Karl Krause: "The more closely you look at a word, the more it recedes." After these words disappear, Kluge adds the word "Germany." Over this image the final chorale Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is played.
Psychoanalysts have observed that if the dead keep returning, they must never have been "properly buried" in the first place.[34] Our roaming narrator does not disagree:
I must clear up at once a fundamental error: that we dead are somehow dead. Wrong. We're full of protest and energy. Who wants to die? We march through history and examine it. How can we escape history that will kill us all?… I want to set things straight, no one is completely gone when they're dead. The knee remains. I speak; I am a part of people, a part of history.
The knee is "a part of history" that he passionately contends has been ignored. It dramatizes being cut off from history, and its logic-defying endurance is suggestive of the untapped histories and underlying labor forces in which Kluge sees so much potential. But how "cut off" is he really? Compared to fellow historian Gabi Teichert, who is a mere assembler and instructor of historical material, the knee is that as well as a participant in history. At once raw material and historian, wound and witness, the knee proves to be the central character of The Patriot and its most significant historian.
Even anatomy adds to the knee's overdetermined privilege. Comprised of the patella, a floating bone attached to the leg by fragile ligaments, its very structure puts "betweenness" into relief. We might recall here Kluge's remark in the preceding chapter about the "space between shots" and the "after-images" as the sites of cinema's truly "subversive work." The knee literally embodies the exegetic practice of Zusammenhang,"hanging betweenness,"[35] a joint and punning "articulation" of bodily tissue connecting calf to thigh, poetry to science, living to dead, shot to shot. (Not incidentally, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Kluge's editor, suggested using the poem by Morgenstern.) All of this makes it easy to see why the knee ultimately fares better than Gabi, who cannot provide viable answers to the "Question of Zusammenhang," the section in which she and her girlfriends struggle over Schiller's text to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. What the knee of The Patriot finally represents is less an object, character, or even a metaphor than a critical point of view: "As a dead knee I naturally have a different perspective on things." Gliding between past and present, living and dead, its position is akin to Klee's angel, "forward-moving, if backward-looking," inhabiting the in-between spaces so esteemed by Kluge.
By moving from character-body to wound and then following its existence after death, Kluge pushes Fassbinder/Raben's notion of physical "shock" into the realm of aftershock. To be sure, all of them want to unsettle conventional perception and thought, but Kluge is ultimately concerned with the aftereffects of shocks as materials in and of themselves. If, as we hear in The Power of Emotion, bodies can only take so much and then, after a point, they rise up and explode, what happens when the body has no choice, when explosion or trauma is imposed on it?
SOME SPEAK, OTHERS DON'T
Clinically speaking, trauma is an extreme form of neurosis in which patients "suffer from reminiscences," as Freud and Breuer described hysteria. Past traumas get articulated via delayed, displaced symptoms acted out by an unknowing body. Just as Breuer and Freud once commented that the hysteric experiences her life as both observer and participant, Cathy Caruth claims that trauma produces a "double telling"[36] between experience and articulation. We can see these kinds of divisions already taking shape in the corporal's knee.
Be they physical, psychological, or both, traumatic experiences incite later patterns of repetition, flashbacks, and countless other delays and displacements. So extreme is this disturbance to standard representation and
Traumatic memory and representation thus reveal how inaccessible the Real is to us: it only surfaces in fragments, errors of speech, altered bodies. Historiographically, the process shows how remembrance overcomes retrievability, and that remembrance itself will be unsettled by the illogical forms that traumatic representation can take—not unlike the machinations of Kluge's films. The question this raises, then, is how it can be articulated at all, particularly in light of the ego/body's tendency to shield it from symbolization. What can the body say, what does it remember, how does it speak? For Caruth, the injury becomes "a voice that is … released through the wound."[40] The very word "trauma" is in fact etymologically derived from "wound."
In the New German Cinema, wounds appear frequently, staging historical trauma on particular bodies—Biberkopf's amputated arm comes to mind, as do the tattooed numbers on camp survivors' forearms. But even when trauma affects actual people—not just film characters—its scars and effects originate not from the body but from a source often characterized as otherworldly. In this way, trauma challenges the way that bodies and subjects are read and interpreted. The wounded remains of Corporal Wieland, for instance, can hardly be read through psychological realism. What all of this suggests is that when personal memory and trauma are activated, larger social stages are at work.
No shortage of scholars has considered the symptomology of the wound—and the divided, imperfect body it conjures up—alongside the German condition. For a country that has seen more disunity than cohesion or unity, the idea certainly makes sense. In that way, the wound exaggerates the material
Gendered wounds in "Whore with War Cripple [Dirne und Kriegsverletzer (Zwei Opfer des Kapitalismus)]," by Otto Dix (1923). Reprinted by kind permission of Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte.
Leslie Adelson pursues the idea in her study of female bodies in postwar German literature. Arguing that human cells are treated as carriers of
Disabled speech in Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother
As I noted in chapter One, Freud's model of somatic conversion in hysteria influenced film scholars analyzing melodramatic excess in the 1980s. Yet over half a century earlier, in 1918, Sándor Ferenczi provocatively referred to postwar traumatic symptoms as "a museum of glaring hysterical symptoms"[44] of defense formations "in the service of the instinct of selfpreservation against the repetition of the unpleasant occurrence."[45] These defense formations saturate The Patriot: the quirky reflections of the knee, for instance, intimate that it is protecting and repressing something. What is eluding symbolization; what are the wounds trying to say? The idea of wounds articulating hidden trauma is clearly central to The Patriot's stylistic strategies. But as Adelson reminds us, there is no such entity as "the" body. Circumscribed in difference, bodies' wounds speak differently. And some do not speak at all.
Much as Kluge's work differentiates bodies of survivors in problematic gendered terms, official definitions of trauma (and of course, hysteria) reproduce these same biases, as Laura S. Brown has noted. The (then recently
In this way, Brown notes how classical psychoanalysis masculinizes trauma and turns it into a public affair of widespread concern. By contrast, Freud's hysterical female patients suffered from the unseen, unaddressed traumas of day-to-day domestic life, recalling the unarticulated histories, forces, and experiences that Kluge also feminizes. Thus symptoms of traumatized war patients, widely experienced and publicly witnessed, seemed a less contestable fact than "ordinary hysteria," whose diffuse causes were difficult to ascertain. Indeed, World War I offered Freud, Ferenczi, Ernst Jones, and Karl Abraham an ample forum through which their theories could reach wider audiences. They used evidence of war traumas to challenge critics who disputed the sexual basis of neuroses, observing that if the same trauma could provoke severe neurosis in one veteran and not another, then war wasn't the primary cause of the symptoms.
Commenting on the physical nature of these symptoms, Ernst Simmel maintained, "The psycho-analytical explanation of the war neurosis has proved with wonderful clearness the correctness of the Freudian views on hysteria. … The body is the instrument of the mind upon which it (the mind) allows its unconscious to manifest itself in plastic and mimic expression."[47] Such physical expressivity recalls how trauma can turn the body itself into a historical actant. Contemporary theory's focus on identity's performative nature in this way is not restricted to academic classrooms or to dragshow runways. Rather we see its operation in specific historical contexts, even situations as extreme as war, the staging of which demands unnatural and unimaginable human acts. Paul Fussell's study of literary representations of World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, traces the war's metaphoric and conceptual "theatricalization" across a variety of genres—poetry, military instructions, and especially, memoirs. (World War II, he argued, would continue the "show" through cinematic metaphors.) Perhaps artifice and heightened performativity are effective ways to depict those traumas that can never really be conveyed.
Traumatic representation acknowledges that while there is an important history at work, no precise experience, event, or signified can be brought forth. This is not to say that it cannot be represented, but that it cannot be recovered by representation. As Shoah survivors have shown, narrating traumatic events does not really retrieve past events but rather is a form of indirect recovery. (Claude Lanzmann, by refusing to use archival footage in Shoah, acknowledged this idea.) That same irrecoverability also explains the repetitive forms that traumatic representation takes. The challenge is to find ways of moving past the vicious circularity we saw operating in melancholia and melodrama. Lanzmann seems to acknowledge this as well in the film's incessant returns to the train tracks near the entrance to Auschwitz.
The Patriot and The Power of Emotion are, to a certain extent, governed by traumatic representation. They deploy some very physical motifs: air raids, fires, injured bodies, excavations, and cold laboratories; trauma stalks their narrative strategies through illogical interviews, character silences, direct address to the camera, failed attempts to speak, and the unleashing of feelings that have no direct, appropriate correspondence to the situation at hand. Characters and scenes continue from film to film—not unlike the repetitive nature of trauma and hysteria.[48] Both obsessively present the power of natural elements (ice and historical "materials" for The Patriot, fire and emotion for The Power of Emotion), the means by which those elements are controlled (history books, fire brigades, opera houses), and the persistence of what Kluge calls at one point the "wishes, bodies, ribs" that don't fit in. Collectively, these details give a thematic and stylistic nod to the unconscious mechanisms of human memory. One of The Patriot's most powerful intertitles neatly sums up the impossibility of historical retrieval and the residual power of the aftertrace. By adding the word "Germany" to the line by Karl Krause ("the more closely you look at a word, the more it recedes"), narrative truth, meaning, history, and nation reappear and recede, just like memory itself.
Claiming that memory can only restore indirectly is not the same thing as saying that memory is never accurate. But it is displaced, filtered. And it is in those displacements that people can momentarily extend themselves or draw others into their experiences. The Shoah continues to demonstrate the need to bear witness to the wounded identities history might otherwise silence or leave behind. Consider concentration camp survivors, whose subjectivity was effaced through the deadly machinery of the camps. Referred to as "pieces," their heads and bodies were shaved, not just to humiliate, but to make these people as identical as possible; numbers replaced names as signs of obliterated subjectivity. Shoshana Felman writes, "What constitutes the outrage of the Holocaust … is not so much death in itself,
In addition to being unable to experience or understand trauma as it occurs, the sufferer has little way of articulating it at the time. Dori Laub writes that the Shoah presented a "world in which the very imagination of the Other was no longer possible. There was no longer an other to which one could say ‘Thou’ in the hope of being heard, of being recognised as a subject, of being answered."[50] Primo Levi described a recurrent nightmare that plagued him even after leaving the camps, in which he would stand in front of family and friends. He spoke to them, but they carried on as if he were absent. Levi was surprised to learn that other survivors had the identical nightmare.
As I have already suggested, The Patriot seems to be looking for a recipient for all of its traumatic memory. Packed with direct stares into the camera (notably, Gabi's) and lines like the knee's "I have a right to be heard," its diegetic porousness helps produce the spaces and cracks through which to make potential connections. Filled with history's "stranded objects," discarded bodies, repressed energies, ruins, and debris, The Patriot seems to engage in a form of homeopathic remembrance—with poisonous doses of the past, old fragments put into new contexts and presented to listeners for them to make meaningful, personal connections to history. Eric Santner even singled out the film for consideration in his epilogue. But, as he argued, The Patriot ultimately does not create that kind of dialogue with alterity and supportive social space.
INTROJECTING HISTORY
As I noted in chapter One, introjection is an important means by which autoerotic attachments are extended. According to Abraham and Torok, "By including the object—whence the name introjection—the process expands the self," including the instincts and desires attached to the object as well.[51] Constructing the self involves an ongoing system of introjections, a process they describe as "gradual, slow, laborious, mediated, effective."[52] Incorporation, by contrast, is a phantasmatic process that in a sense disguises itself as the introjection it is unable to perform. Instead of the self extending outward, incorporation brings a foreign object inward into the self, encrypting it and sealing it off from consciousness. In hiding the object and the loss it represents, it is a refusal to mourn.
The chief paradox of incorporation is that the foreign body is perceived as detached from the self precisely for being so deeply guarded and concealed
Abraham and Torok's contention that "Introjection speaks. … Incorporation keeps still" becomes almost damning in light of The Patriot's avowed interest in giving voice to what history leaves behind and in permitting certain dead figures to resurrect themselves in obstreperous protest.[54] The problem is having the knee function as sole survivor and wounded witness, which implies that only the experience of German troops was traumatic—thereby adding nation and militarism to the already gendered trauma Laura Brown observed. If Kluge laments the sixty thousand civilians who perished in the night Hamburg was bombed, he stops counting there. The film does not count non-German others nor assess the undesirable, murderous aspects of Germanness itself. It is a curious withholding in light of its formal mechanisms, stylistic strategies that would seem to allow open relationships like that to emerge.
Put another way, Kluge's/Wieland's/Morgenstern's knee initially suggests the possibility of articulating a previously unknown history. It raises the possibility of entering into a history of others to whom its appeals to listen are obstreperous and insistent. But what neglected alterity can this knee possibly represent? What does it mean to give the "right to speak" to the knee of a Wehrmacht official, to have it speak on behalf of the nation's dead? After the film was made, knees like Wieland's were honored at Bitburg by conservative real-life patriots Ronald Reagan and Helmuth Kohl, but these frightening realities only show the urgency of the questions. When a wound testifies, it is usually to its own repression and victimization; it is usually not victimizing, as the military knee would surely have been. Why didn't Kluge use the knee of a Pole killed during Germany's invasion? Or the knee of a camp prisoner whose leg had been amputated without anesthesia?
The Patriot's "traumatic" style seems to include the characteristics of introjection listed above. It boasts a dazzling array of still photographs, film footage, dreams, pictures, and musical pieces mixed and entangled in a way
SURVIVING DEATH TO TALK ABOUT IT
With the exception of burial ceremonies, death usually abolishes the social differences ascribed to bodies when they had been alive. "Paradoxically," as Elisabeth Bronfen argues, "this obliteration of gender, along with all other socially constructed features, is represented in Western culture through a gendered body, the superlatively beautiful, desirable feminine corpse."[57] Yet this "superlatively beautiful" female body is precisely what recedes in Kluge's work, and the body that supplants it is that of the Nazi soldier, Corporal Wieland. In another context, Kluge writes, "[A]s a personality, a man is a dilapidated ruin, a bearer of characteristics who lugs them around, as it were, in a sack or suitcase. With every social upheaval, certain pieces of this luggage remain behind. This is the basis for a specific, ahistorical radicality."[58] If "the dead are never as dead as one believes," we need to contrast
Since survival is intertwined with speech the obvious question The Patriot raises is that if feminine labor is such an esteemed force, why is the man's dead knee so vocal? Why is Gabi Teichert, equally concerned about "Germany's dead," so silent, unable to defend or even speak for herself? In the film's diegetic world, a colleague chides Gabi's quietness at a school meeting since, he claims, she had been "talking their ears off" earlier, condemning both her silence and speech. As I noted earlier, Kluge's voice-over speaks for her, as opposed to speaking as the knee or as Gerta Baethe's male companion. Gabi's speech, as Helke Sander notes, often takes the form of reading others' words—in contrast to the knee, which, literally born of another's poem, moves on to talk freely and obstreperously on its own.[59]
The construction of wounds, speech, and physical survival in The Patriot is troubling on a variety of levels. The trauma of war experienced by a knee is cruelly ludicrous when compared to the trauma experienced by the millions of others who were not defending Nazism or who were its direct targets. Whereas military, male bodies are kept alive to recount their stories, women are reduced either to unambiguous death or to the hysterical silence Gabi's colleagues would impose upon her. The obvious irony is that the buried female labor force Kluge extols for its political and theoretical potential fails to surface in The Patriot, whereas the male body part—of a Nazi soldier, no less—does, intimating that this is the repressed energy, the supposedly undervalued alterity returning for not having been "properly buried." Certainly Kluge was aware of the controversial nature of his choice, and at the very least, such a decision demonstrates that the process of Zusammenhang is not tied to a particular ideological project. Or perhaps this was a way for him to emulate characters like Gabi, who embark on an admirable aim to better their worlds only to botch it horribly, putting new structures to bad uses, leaving it for us to respond differently.
So we never learn about Gerta's experience, nor that of the other women with whom she was supposed to have organized. The exclusion of their histories, coupled with that of the victims of the Shoah, creates an unlikely climate for an I-Thou relationship of witnessing and testimony. Instead, that speech remains underground, unaccounted for, nor even recounted—a one-sided Zusammenhang. Was Gerta's sacrifice necessary for male agency and work to be made possible, whether as a destructive force,
To be sure, male victimization and resurrection play large roles in a number of films of the New German Cinema, which is populated by countless tyrants, vampires, and pitiful underdogs. But the wounds inflicted on male bodies in movies like Berlin Alexanderplatz (the aging newspaper vendor and, of course, Franz Biberkopf) do not deter them from carrying on, even undergoing, in Franz's case, a weird religious redemption at the abattoir. By contrast, female characters such as Mieze and Lina simply die from their wounds, just like Gerta Baethe, not living on as speaking fragments, holy relics, or historical witnesses. Berlin Alexanderplatz may compulsively restage Lina's death in flashback, but that ultimately gives us more information about Biberkopf's inability to break out of established patterns than about her.
THE SOUNDS OF GERMANY
In many ways, the score of The Patriot seems to help Gabi in her quest for "better" German materials. As Anton Kaes and Peter Lutze have noted, it is constituted overwhelmingly by German and Austrian pieces that are, in fact, key to giving structural coherence to the fractured, collagistic text: "The most disparate juxtapositions of images," Kaes writes, "are held together and united by music, mostly classical German pieces."[60] One conspicuous example occurs near the end of the film, as Gabi looks forward to the "new materials" the upcoming 365 days have in store for her. The Patriot concludes with an instrumental recording of the Chorale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Perfectly recorded, it seems to correct the earlier, damaged version she and her friends engaged with at the kitchen table. By withholding the lyrics, there is an additional sense that the women's attempts to understand the words are withdrawn as well. Unscratched, unscathed, "corrected," it is hard to detect much irony in this weighty sign of Germanness. Two years earlier, Syberberg had ended his epoch Our Hitler with a pristine recording of the same Chorale (with text), and as I argued before, there it is difficult to contest the piece's anticipatory sense of purpose, pride, and promise. Could Kluge be making a dry comment on Syberberg's exalted use of it as the finale to his "patriotic" Trauerarbeit? Or might he have considered the movement so much a spent, allegorical ruin that, like the film's male characters, it could be "resurrected
In the end, it may be impossible to resolve the film's uncritical use of Beethoven. Yet, however firmly "Germany" seems to be acoustically reinstated, it is rendered far more ephemeral and unstable in its visual presentation in the same final image, when the word "Deutschland" fades from view. That ephemerality is crucial, for whatever contradictory understandings of Germany The Patriot indicates, it stresses that the memories with which history and nation are entwined are lost to us. Although their aftereffects can be presented, the events themselves cannot be, much as "Deutschland" recedes from view in the one shot near the end. Interestingly, Kluge has stated in lectures that Germany is a country of contested borders and uneven histories, and is an imaginary state, much like the "imagined community" Benedict Anderson places at the heart of nationhood. One could argue that "Germany" is a disappearing object of The Patriot's story line, just as Gabi's patriotic history of it recedes the more she struggles.
The risk that Kluge takes here is in making the Shoah recede as well. While acknowledged in modest details like Eisler's music, it is frequently pushed aside as the film concerns itself with losses inflicted on German soil or to German citizens and troops. Perhaps The Patriot's surfeit of information is overcompensating for the inability of words and images ever to "make present" the enormity of that trauma. Perhaps the Shoah appears in thickly disguised, stylistic moments such as the old film footage washed in red. Yet because the film's examples rarely concern themselves with victims caused by German involvement, it is hard to pursue that kind of analysis very far. The Patriot operates according to processes akin to the fantasy of incorporation rather than to the work of introjection; it even points to the introjection of which it is incapable. Ironically, in taking in so much clutter, objects, and debris, the text hides or encrypts more basic traumas, foreclosing the possible "I-you" dialogue that talking wounds might engender, foreclosing that empathetic space in which we might receive what wounds have to tell us today. But if the film finally abandons that project, as Gabi must do with hers, its basic structures remain intact. For The Patriot's traumatic style demonstrates the importance of empathetic confrontation and of making Zusammenhänge with alterity. Perhaps it is up to us after all to find "better material" for that work to begin.
4. Undoing Act 5
History, Bodies, and Operatic Remains:
Kluge's The Power of Emotion
In every opera that deals with redemption, a woman is sacrificed in Act 5.
—THE POWER OF EMOTION
For years I have been attempting through literary and filmic means to change opera stories: to disarm the fifth act. … We must work to develop an imaginary opera, to bring forward an alternative opera world.
—ALEXANDER KLUGE
THE POWER PLANT OF TRAGEDY
Just as trauma and allegorical readings disable conventional narrative/historical forms, so too does opera, at least in the hands of Kluge, whose extraordinary The Power of Emotion blasts open its nineteenth-century forms. Scattered across the text like so many interrupted arias, unidentified rehearsals, performance fragments, manipulated film footage, stereoscopic mattes, time-lapse set changes, ironic voice-overs, fictional interviews, dozens of operas, and other European art music become the stuff out of which this 1983 film is literally made.
Why opera? For one thing, because opera generates and trades in fantasy, spectacle, music, and emotion. Music's affiliation with human feelings, besides providing a diversion from material realities, were key components of Romantic aesthetic ideology, which dominated nineteenth-century German music and continues to influence western concepts of musical production and function. Kluge, however, rarely allows music such escape or transcendence. If the Beethoven sing-along in The Patriot divests the Chorale of its transcendent luster, The Power of Emotion goes even further in deconstructing music, tackling music's institutionalization rather than music per se. For one thing, although Kluge does not appear to challenge the Romantic association of music with human emotions, he makes it clear that social and economic forces work to keep that association in place.
Kluge de-idealizes that relationship in no uncertain terms. For instance, we see selected scenes of an early silent film version of Verdi's Aida and hear musical quotations from the opera scattered throughout the film. But audiences cannot immerse themselves in the music or get caught up in its passionate story. Not only do we hear Kluge's ironic commentary over Aida's presentation, but we are never shown a full performance of it, only fragments, rehearsals, bits of music going by, not unlike what Godard did in One plus One (1969). The Power of Emotion refuses to reproduce Aida and other operatic works whole, or even to identify most of them—credits do not even list sources, although the opening credits acknowledge the laborers who produced the live music at the Frankfurt Municipal Theatre and Opera. The book that accompanied the film's release identified a large number of music and film quotations, yet even there, dozens of references are unlisted. Neither the initial Prelude from Parsifal that opens the film nor the rehearsal of the opera's Communion scene taken from Syberberg's film of the same name is mentioned.[1] What is more, the opera-fragments presented are rarely synchronized. We hear pieces from Aida that come from another point in the opera than those depicted in the silent film version we're watching—a text that modifies Verdi's story line to begin with. Sixty-five minutes into Kluge's film, we hear orchestral music from the Prelude to Aida, and the vocal material that follows comes from an earlier point in the opera's story line than the film leads us to believe: Aida is reluctantly tricking Radames into revealing an Egyptian military secret and is overheard by her Ethiopian father. That, in turn, is overheard by the Egyptian princess Amneris, who screams at Radames, "Traitor!" After the sound fades out for a few seconds, Kluge resumes Verdi's music at a point that precedes where he left off and carries it through into the next film sequence. Kluge's voice-over also missummarizes some of the operas: Radames and Aida, for instance, are never freed from the tomb. In short, we have neither a reliable narrator nor a narrational agent. But perhaps this mimics the unreliable, fantastic nature of operas' stories. By withholding information and parceling it out in "incorrect" doses, Kluge is able to chip away at their fetish-value, treating them as so much cultural clutter. In so doing, he divests operas like Aida of their auratic lure and presents them with so much blood on their hands.
In a key passage to which I have already referred, Kluge calls the opera house a "power plant [Kraftwerk] of emotion" that processes valuable raw material into consumable goods. Rather than accepting the goods wholesale, however, Kluge turns to their production, focusing on the material behind the fantasies and underneath the spectacle, blasting them out in so many directions. By taking the bulk of his examples from the mid-to late
The "power plant of emotion" in Kluge's The Power of Emotion
Again like The Patriot, The Power of Emotion both solicits and frustrates interpretation. How to unpack such already deconstructive, critical texts? The Power of Emotion is even more collagistic and less narratively cohesive than The Patriot. Though fewer in number, the film's diegetic story fragments are more diverse in scope, and there are no central figures like Gabi or the knee to offer much in the way of continuity. The Power of Emotion therefore has to rely more on film style than on character, diegetic situation, or theme to tackle historical and historiographic issues. And whereas The Patriot stressed the importance of forgotten objects, The Power of Emotion concerns itself primarily with the objects or "matter" of human feelings. He presents them as harboring a potentially explosive, disruptive force because their needs, he shows, are simply not being met: avenues for their expression
If we accept that abbreviated, multiple story lines, scraps of film footage, photographs, paintings, old popular songs, and glimpsed opera performances are connected to emotions, then Kluge's film demonstrates their power by dint of sheer presentational force. These materials, and especially those connected to opera, suggest something more than can really be presented. His collagistic style creates fissures that are not simply indicative of absences, although they can do that, but are signs of what the Real cannot accommodate—as might have been the case with the Shoah in The Patriot. At the least, The Power of Emotion's "ragpicker" style (the term is Miriam Hansen's), along with the huge volume of materials it presents, dramatizes the real challenge of Zusammenhänge. The point is directly made in a fictional interview during "The Opera House Fire" section. Ostensibly discussing Janácek's The Makropulos Affair, in which a woman drinks a potion that enables her to live three hundred years, an official at the opera house makes what in effect is a comment on The Power of Emotion:"There are really so many connections you could make, it is impossible to get them all."
Kluge's multidirectional critique of nineteenth-century opera constructs his subject variously as narrative form, historical phenomenon, cinematic precursor, and trader in unhappy feelings. For him, it is an industry that capitalizes on human misery, glorifies defeat, and disguises the material aspects of its production. Especially crucial is how tragic opera encourages audiences to buy into its fatalistic worldview, and Kluge aggressively directs his line of fire in that direction. He acknowledges the force of such large-scale emotional manipulation, as well as the untapped power of the stubborn, illogical, abandoned smaller emotions, which don't fit into the predetermined scenarios that institutions like opera, film, the legal system, romantic love, history-making, and war permit. Most of the operas' stories Kluge examines boil down to a struggle for survival, and the question of who survives will be raised throughout this chapter, as it was in the last. Why, for instance, as the opening quote states, does a woman have to be sacrificed in act 5?
In the face of all this deadly business, it seems imperative to produce some kind of alternative. The Power of Emotion is a rather unusual text in Kluge's oeuvre because it openly takes up that challenge. Although it deeply condemns the predetermination, inevitability, and fatalism of tragic operatic narrative, it offers more than deconstructive critique, more than ironic depictions of hapless characters struggling to change their personal
It seems to me that these "recommendations" are much more possible than they were in The Patriot. The Power of Emotion contains a story fragment that literally undoes the deadliness Kluge associates with the last acts of tragic operas, giving a rare, if not altogether unironic, glimpse of optimism. In its final and longest sequence, The Power of Emotion follows what by any reasonable measure would be the murder of a character and his subsequent resuscitation by the couple that finds him. Because of Kluge's emphasis on the material aspects of human bodies—whether as historical ruin, operatic performer, carrier of emotion, or narrative victim—that resuscitation is particularly significant. (Small wonder that the film refers frequently to Parsifal, Wagner's operatic tale of redemption.) The matter recalls The Patriot, which bestowed redemption upon certain characters and withheld it from others. As we will see, The Power of Emotion continues to differentiate bodies problematically when it comes to their survival, sacrifice, death, and resurrection, but a better ending is in sight.
THE TALE OF THE INEVITABLE TRAGEDY:
SPECTACLE, COMMODITY, AND WAR
Ironically, The Power of Emotion contains so many stories that one would be hard-pressed to call it a narrative film. It is just as difficult to describe. It opens with a time-lapse segment of the Frankfurt skyline at dawn and proceeds to shots of corpses, a birth, a funeral, silent film segments, stereopticon images, documentary footage, photographs, drawings, opera scenes, rehearsals, set changes, character interviews, parts of the opera house, and opera itself. These pieces are interspersed among brief stories in which, for example, a woman goes on trial for having shot her husband (introduced, like most sections in the film, with an intertitle, "The Shot") or a man is tried for having raped a comatose woman while "saving" her from a suicide attempt. Recurring characters include fortunetellers and matchmakers, opera stars and firefighters, prostitutes and pimps.
To establish the mid-to late-nineteenth-century European setting of the opera house, Kluge turns to a narrational form usually unconcerned
Not all nineteenth-century hopes were dashed when the Crystal Palace burned to the ground. As Kluge's voice-over tells us, "Another project begun in the nineteenth century was the power plant of emotion, the opera house." The reference is the film's strongest shorthand to establish how industry, capital, and cultural forms are able to control something so nominally private and "uncontrollable" as human feeling. It is no accident that an extreme high angle introduces the state opera house in Frankfurt, a paragon of measured architectural classicism and an example of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus. As a power plant, the opera's similarity to the "fantasy factory" of Hollywood is immediately clenched. In fact, Kluge presents them both as management centers of human emotions that control audience identification and expectation. In the context of latenineteenth-century Europe, the opera house marketed its own illusions of grandeur and wholeness—the culmination of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk that was theorized slightly earlier. As industrialized plant, however, its production is anything but all-unifying. It comes into being through a variety of compartments, and its workers come into contact with only one aspect of the final product. It is hardly coincidental that the opera and its grand spectacle flourished alongside the rise of industrialization, rationalized labor, and a middle class with growing leisure needs. Kluge underscores the point by presenting the opera house and its productions piecemeal, through extremely brief sections like "Lighting" and "Facade." The film even separates pictures of the blueprints of the Crystal Palace from the construction workers who executed them. In this detail Kluge stylistically conveys the fragmentary nature of the opera house's production and the heterogeneity
The frayed lines of the opera house in The Power of Emotion
But the power lines of the opera house, as Kluge whispers to us, "were flawed from the start"—the opera house was never equipped for its task. Because it processes emotion into something too bombastic for human use, the power plant, according to Kluge's logic, is an institution grounded in ruination, an extension of the machinery of war, industry, and capital. Opera is what it just happens to spit out, just a singing ruin. And before we can rework the ruin, we must actively "undo" it, as he words it, putting a positive spin on what Catherine Clément had written in her Opéra, ou la defaite des femmes / Opera, or the Undoing of Women, published in France just before the release of his film.
By focussing on tragic opera, Kluge reveals the extent to which "deadly outcomes" are rendered not just inevitable but desirable. They seal a contract with the public that he finds extremely deleterious, and the film draws equivalencies between what Kluge calls the "drama of inescapable tragedy" and the idea of history as an unchangeable narrative equally marked by
But I don't know that in act 1.
SHE:
Yet you have played this role eighty-four times.
HE:
Yes, it is a very successful piece.
SHE:
Then you really ought to know the awful ending by now.
HE:
I do, but not in act 1.
SHE:
But you're not dumb.
HE:
I most certainly am not.
SHE:
Then at 8:10 in act 1 you know from previous performances what is going to happen at 10:30 in act 5.
HE:
So?
SHE:
Then why do you have a "spark of hope on your face"?
HE:
Because I don't know act 5 in act 1.
SHE:
Do you think that the opera could end differently?
HE:
Of course.
SHE:
But it doesn't, eighty-four times in a row.
HE:
Yes, it's a very successful piece.
SHE:
That explains the eighty-four performances. But it still doesn't have a happy ending.
HE:
Do you have something against success?
The illogical, circular question-and-answer format is a staple in Kluge's repertoire. It usually occurs in scenes with judges, politicians, or other members of official institutions. Kluge himself appropriates these tactics in a famous exchange with Jutta Brückner, who had compared The Power of Emotion unfavorably to the profemale sensuality she found in Saura's Carmen, released the same year. Kluge declares that, for his part, he finds little in the way of emotions in Bizet's story, and calls for a Brechtian means of dealing with it. He states that when "Don Jose is about to stab Carmen," the proceedings should be "interrupted" in order to "discuss the situation." It must be said that Kluge's reference to the opera's dearth of emotions jars with his comment that "I have seen the opera Carmen 48 times, my sister has seen it 17 times, my father 108, and my grandmother
Kluge's obsessive counting and providing figures shows the limits of quantitative data and rationality in explaining historical outcome, as we saw with the number of laborers it would have taken to save Gerta Baethe or the fatally useless ciphers and ledgers of The Battle. They also reveal the director's fascination with historical and temporal manipulation, and with time more generally. His production company, for instance, is named Kairos, after the Greek word for time that arrives in unexpected, ephemeral, productive flashes, in contrast to chronos, the constant, developmental, logical aspect of time that clocks keep. The Power of Emotion, for its part, places feelings on their own timelines, stressing their endurance as well as their capacity for "sudden and brutal explosion." Particularly important are what the director calls, in a typically somatic metaphor, "subcutaneous" emotions, just as Germany's "buried" history had been approached in The Patriot. A brief scene in The Power of Emotion shows a bomb being carefully dragged out of a forest, where it had been lying for "thirty-eight years, its fuse intact." Cinema's own ability to protract, condense, and manipulate time is also in evidence from the extraordinary opening scene, in which time-lapse photography moves us quickly from late night to early morning. Elsewhere, film time and movement are speeded up when an extreme high-angle shot reveals an extremely rapid change of opera sets.
Much like the plot of The Makropulos Affair, the various references, techniques, and materials in The Power of Emotion cut across a wide path of history. Clips of silent films, like Lang's Kriemhilds Rache / Kriemhild's Revenge (1924), and the use of mattes, iris, tinting, and stereoscopic views invoke the early years of cinema history. We have sequences from Nazi cinema, as well as documentary footage of a contemporary high-rise fire; it shows us illustrations of the Tower of Babel and of Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden. The protracted life of the king's daughter in Janácek's 1926 opera is especially significant in this regard. Because she has lived three hundred years, Kluge calculates, she has "lived through twenty-eight wars." Thus Kluge does not let the connection of temporal manipulation to historical and historiographic processes go unremarked, and he is quick to observe the violence involved therein. Accompanying a time-lapse opera sequence, he states: "There is an important change in Tannhäuser between acts 1 and 2. A Christian castle is built in a pagan landscape in less than twenty minutes. [Pause] Because of the abruptness of the historical process, there is no happy ending." Kluge's twist on historical causality here recalls his intimation that the excessive accumulation of commodities led
Kluge brings to light other murderous demands of narratives and histories governed by inexorability and fate. The Power of Emotion is especially concerned with the Zusammenhänge among opera, emotions, and war. It reflects war's connection to passion by situating a number of love stories in wartime (as did The Patriot) and selecting operas set in periods of military or political conflict, like Aida and Tosca. Stories of love and war are constantly interrupting and interweaving with each other. The film draws equivalencies between the narratives of conventional romance, war, and opera; their tales are the products of the same power plant, the same deadly culture industry: "It begins with being in love and ends in a divorce. It begins in 1933 and ends in ruins. The great operas begin with the promise of intensified feeling and in act 5 we count the dead." The grimness of this recipe for musical and political stories has been noted by Hansen, who writes of Kluge's work in the late 1970s that "romantic love itself appears complicit with the catastrophes of German history, because it nourishes fictions of fate that prevent any alternative course of action and usually lead to murder, suicide, mass psychosis and war."[6]
A SYMPHONY OF RUINS
An example of this complicity appears in the opening segment. Extreme long shots depict the skyline of Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany's financial center, from the dark of night to just after sunrise. Buildings shimmer like gold monuments reflecting the early morning sun; the sky's mutating clouds and colors are stunning; the camera tracks a plane and a bird flying overhead in the distance. Any reverie evoked by this serene segment, however, is immediately punctured, for it is impossible not be reminded of the opening of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) as Hitler's plane soared over the adoring crowds, a god ready to land.
Further overdetermining the reference, Kluge uses Wagner to underscore the entire sequence. Curiously, he selects the Prelude to act 1 from Parsifal, and not passages from Das Rheingold, the more obvious choice given the shimmering buildings along the Main River that contain so much lucre of their own. But the selection is perfectly logical.[7] The quest
Parsifal's importance to The Power of Emotion is immense, in no small measure because of its investment in innocence, redemption, and faith. Wagner's last opera (1892), Parsifal combines these elements in a heady, transcendent mix that works along and outside of the tragic parameters outlined in Kluge's cinematic study. Based on the story of the Fisher King and early grail legends, the opera opens in the castle of Monsalvat, where the Holy Grail containing Jesus' blood from the cross is kept. The Knights of the Holy Grail are distraught because King Amfortas refuses to conduct Communion: Amfortas suffers from a wound in the thigh that will not heal. His wound is fraught with sexual and religious overtones, having been inflicted by the spear that pierced Christ's side on the cross (in Wagner's version). Stolen by the evil magician Klingsor from the knights' realm, the spear was then used upon Amfortas when he was seduced by Klingsor's enslaved sorceress, Kundry, an act that betrayed the sanctity of the grail. (Klingsor, it should be added, castrated himself earlier when he too had succumbed to Kundry's charms.) Only the touch of the tip of that same sword, when retrieved by a reiner Tor (an innocent fool) can heal Amfortas. Such a fool appears in the form of young Parsifal, brought before the court for having killed a sacred swan in Monsalvat. Parsifal witnesses the ritual of the grail performed by the suffering king, but fails to understand it. Chased away, he encounters Kundry in Klingsor's magic kingdom and rejects her sexual advances beyond a kiss. At this moment Parsifal is able to empathize with—and thus understand the significance of—Amfortas's suffering. The same act establishes Parsifal as being of sufficient innocence to deflect and regain the spear (the moment Parsifal makes a sign of the cross with it, Klingsor's kingdom falls to dust, just like Dracula). After wandering many years, Parsifal returns to Monsalvat, where he sees Amfortas begging his knights to kill him. It is Good Friday. Parsifal is made king and then heals Amfortas with the sword. Kundry receives absolution for her sins and is granted rest from her wandering through death.
Wagner's text is so central to The Power of Emotion that Kluge respects its sequence by having the Prelude to act 1 open the film. The music attracts our attention all the more because Parsifal is not the Wagner we would have expected to accompany the glistening images. In light of Kluge's interest in the story lines of operas, however, Parsifal's presence is not surprising—indeed, it is its plot and themes that seal the connection to the film. Its concern with redemption, "holy relics" and wounds, for instance, easily recall the kinds of resurrections and wounds introduced in The Patriot. We can see that the knee's fate to "wander the earth" is shared not only by Parsifal but by Kundry, condemned to that destiny for having mocked the agonies of Jesus on the cross. Unlike her already "holy" military counterpart from The Patriot, however, Kundry wanders in search of redemption, which she finally receives in the form of death.
The Power of Emotion also draws from Verdi's Aida, as mentioned above. The opera is identified through explicit references: we see the early film adaptation of it as Kluge's voice-over gives details, and we hear its familiar music. Its tale also ends badly (indeed fatally, for its lovers), but Kluge's interest in it is as a text not of redemption, but of physical suffering. Of the many operas quoted, it is the most rigorously submitted to material and materialist readings, as we shall see. Another work central to the film's concerns and which recurs throughout is the lesser-known Lemmikainen Legends / Four Legends from the Kalevala by Sibelius. Like Wagner's Ring Cycle, it takes its stories from legend. Lemmikainen is a sort of Finnish Siegfried who travels across the seas, visiting Maidens on the Island of Saari (a segment of which is heard in the film), and ends up being torn apart in Tuonela, Finnish hell, in yet another fatal consequence for a wandering figure.
In addition to establishing the centrality of Parsifal to the film, the opening scene introduces the importance of natural elements: water (rivers, streams, grottos), air (conveyed through time-lapse photography of the sky and through the sounds of howling wind), and, especially, fire. If ice and the lifeless rigidity associated with it dominated The Patriot (see chapter Three, n. 4), The Power of Emotion is suffused with heat and fire. Given its preoccupations, this is hardly surprising: "One speaks of burning passions," the voiceover states, "never cold ones." In addition to the glistening skyscrapers of downtown Frankfurt, we see footage of an actual high-rise on fire. This is just after Kluge explains the fate of the Tower of Babel, whose inhabitants were "destroyed for building high-rises" and for their "confusion of tongues," like his wild lesson in historical causality on the fate of the Crystal Palace. Red filters and tints appear with regularity; the prostitute Betty sets fire to bills she has just earned working for a pimp;
The state funeral in The Power of Emotion
One story, "The Opera House Fire," which also occurs during an air raid, features a firefighter impelled to enter the prop room in order to find Parsifal's grail. It seems that, like the film, he cannot keep away from that opera or its artifacts. Once there, the camera tracks over various props, like John's outrageously artificial head on a bloody platter. What a surprise for the firefighter when he finally reaches the grail to find it empty! The hollow container, with its chintzy promise of redemption, dramatizes how opera's tragic stories and unhappy conclusions rely on artificial, worn-out cores. Even at the time of Parsifal's initial production, the grail was obviously a dated fantasy object, a throwback to earlier legends. At the same time, to think along Benjamin's lines, the vessel's emptiness enables it to be refilled with new meanings that might go beyond the illusions it used to house. Again it is worth recalling Kluge's remarks about film's productivity being found "in the gaps" between shots, where "nothing" actually happens.
Another central project of The Power of Emotion's opening segment is to interrupt musical reverie, fantasies of transcendence, and glorified sorrow. Following the shots of Frankfurt is a completely silent presentation of what looks like World War I footage. All that is clear is its overwhelming sense of death and chaotic carnage. After this, we cut to a quick, equally bloody shot of the birth of a child. The next shot returns our attention to
PIECES OF OPERA / OPERA IN PIECES
According to Kluge's voice-over, our emotions always want a happy end, yet the outcomes that operas crank out (just like war) do not provide it. There is no correlation of supply and demand. As power station or factory, the opera house overproduces emotions so that they become too bombastic—or overcooked, to borrow the film's leitmotif of fire. Yet the section announced by the intertitle "The Power Plant of Emotion" is laughably brief. "Something went wrong in the initial stages," we learn. Then the next title, "The Power Lines," immediately appears, after which a tracking shot of fraying cable reveals the power lines of the opera house "in a catastrophic state."
This particular sequencing of shots, like the one contrasting images of bodies in birth and in death, is deliberate in its effects. Kluge submits the opera house to the same formal fragmentation as the operas themselves. Even the use of intertitled "sequences" divests operatic production of any awe-inspiring authority or seriousness, given their almost comic brevity. Moreover, as I noted earlier, Kluge's fragmented presentational style parallels the disconnected labor tasks, tools, and production modalities within the opera house. They of course produce a unified "product" that rarely acknowledges its constructedness and lack of unity. Opera, like film, tries to divert our attention from the disparity of art forms, genres, and techniques it requires (costumes, libretti, actors, singers, lighting, power lines) in favor of the melting pot Wagner advocates with the Gesamtkunstwerk. Kluge, for his part, ignores that unity at every possible level. After the shot of the "catastrophic" power lines, we cut to a quasi-cameo of Gabi Teichert (Hannelore Hoger again, who plays other roles here too),[10] digging around outside,
The point is made repeatedly by the unusual camera positions and angles Kluge uses to present operatic productions and rehearsals. Ours is not a typical seat at the opera house. It is not the perspective of an audience member facing the stage, but rather is taken from behind the stage, where Kluge maintains the real labor is at work. His character, Ferdinand Reiche, the watchman of Strongman Ferdinand, is oblivious to that. He fails to be vigilant in the parts of the opera house where he might check for acoustics, for ways to change orchestral sound, or, Kluge argues, for hidden items that had previously escaped him.[12] It is precisely in letting his guard down that the guardsman becomes involved in what proves to be a calamitous confusion of reality and opera, even drawing his gun ("ever the policeman," Kluge quips)[13] as he watches Tosca kill Scarpia in a diegetic performance. Kluge's atypical camera placements here preclude the lethal identification Reiche experiences; our view is constantly being obstructed by ropes, wires, workers wandering in front of the camera—undisturbed viewing is, in a word, impossible. Through these viewing positions—literally getting behind the operatic facade—Kluge enjoins his audience to find the economic and power relations that may have "previously escaped us"; his emphasis on process, as Peter Lutze notes, "is a modernist alternative to the classical attempt to absorb the spectator into the diegetic world."[14] In this way, Kluge's film style presents Benjamin's concept of allegorical readings and his own belief in the forces that conventional public spheres leave untapped. In addition to providing us with unusual seats at the opera, Kluge insures that we arrive late or at the wrong time, denying us access to a stable position from which we might immerse ourselves in the proceedings. The same strategy orchestrates the frequent refusal of his soundtracks to match "correct" opera recordings to their accompanying images. When the fire marshal seeks Parsifal's grail in The Power of Emotion, for instance, we hear not Wagner, but Sibelius's Four Legends.
To further discourage audience members from fetishizing tragedy or romanticizing its deadly outcomes, Kluge's voice-over continually, almost happily, spoils the plot of well-known operas. When he tells us that "this child has just hours to live," he adheres to his own prescription to interrupt Carmen just as Don Jose is about to stab her, and demand "an immediate discussion."[15] Kluge's dry, laconic summaries cast off any auratic luster the operas might have, particularly in the section of The Power of Emotion labeled "The Plot." Here, in the wings of a performance of Rigoletto, a cast member whispers the tragic events that have befallen the dwarf, as if this were newly acquired, shocking gossip of a neighborhood friend. Kluge's use of reductive plot summaries boils operas down to their pseudotragic, violent cores: "Aida presents the story of two great peoples, the Ethiopians and the Egyptians, at war with one another for one hundred years. [Pause] Opera cannot report these bloody events directly. The catastrophe must be transformed into an almost-could-have-had a happy ending. So, the war between two nations is turned into a story of three people. … [But] because the opera is, in reality, about war, there can be no happy ending for the lovers in act 5."
After a brief intervention in which Frau Bärlaam, a fictional marriage broker, is introduced, The Power of Emotion returns to Aida and the fate of Aida and Radames. About this opera which is "really about war," his voice exclaims, "Oh, what opera conceals!" The tinted film version continues, and because it is depicted through iris mattes, we get a visual pun on the imprisonment going on in the narrative. The mattes disguise what Kluge considers the real goings-on behind the story's events and turns. Interestingly, the silent film alters the ending of Verdi's original opera by having the community free Aida and Radames from the tomb—a brief cinematic reprieve from opera's fatal conclusions—and then proceeds to stone them to death for the selfishness they display as lovers: "People don't stand for lovers being buried alive, and so they were freed at the last moment. But when it became clear that the lovers were only interested in themselves, the people were disappointed." Film intertitles of "Stone them!" appear, with added sounds of howling winds, which appear throughout The Power of Emotion."And so, despite the intervention of the masses, act 5 has no happy end. … Operas are cruel by popular demand." That an alternative existed in this brief example—one enabled by collective effort, no less—only to be dashed immediately, shows the stranglehold cruelty has on opera and, as Kluge believes, upon its listeners as well.
In addition to being a story of war and of cruel mobs, Aida is a tale of ethnically and nationally proscribed sexual passion. That proscription exceeds the diegetic hostilities between Ethiopians and Egyptians; indeed it
Where is music in all of this? Benjamin once quipped that operetta was "the ironic utopia of a lasting domination by Capital."[16] In addition to Aida, operas like Samson and Dalila and Thais fed into Europe's Orientalist fantasies at the same time as they "served to distract attention from the realities of Western exploitation of, and geopolitical scramble over, the Middle East," according to Ralph Locke.[17]Aida's history, entwined with nationalist and colonialist imperatives, is instructive in this regard. A pre-Christian story set to music by an Italian Catholic composer, the opera premiered in Cairo on, of all days, Christmas Eve. The Egyptian government would even adopt "Gloria all'Egitto" as a national hymn. Not surprisingly, Verdi was at pains to exoticize his music, most notably with the unseen priestess of Phthà (through the interval of the lowered second and broken chords performed by harps), gridding exoticism with clichéd care even on an invisible female body. Moreover, Verdi instructed his librettist, Antonio Ghislanzoni, not to render Aida's decision to die with Radames as a death wish and to mute any references to their physical anguish in order to support the elegiac, ethereal music he would compose for the opera's end ("O terra, addio"). The Power of Emotion, by contrast, chooses to exacerbate the physically violent nature of their death (rocks, more rocks, entombment), mocking the transcendence with which the tale was produced and, presumably, consumed.
THE VALUE OF EMOTION
Operas are not only "cruel by popular demand," but, according to Kluge, are oblivious to simpler, less tragic feelings. We are told that "our emotions always want a happy ending," yet in the marketplace of emotion, "feelings in unhappy stories weigh more"—the trick is how to combine uplifting endings with unhappy stories. Rather than dealing with the grandiose
In addition to materializing the experiences of human bodies (Radames and Aida should be screaming in pain, not singing to one another), Kluge materializes human emotions. Among The Power of Emotion's many, usually dry, examples is the courtroom scene mentioned earlier, "Das Schuss / The Shot," in which a woman is questioned for shooting her husband. The men assume that because she had just caught her husband and daughter having sex, she must have "blown a fuse," to which she responds, "My fuses were fine." Her questioners are baffled by the emotional impropriety of her response; they are equally intrigued by the gun she fired, inspecting it like fascinated young schoolboys.
This is how Kluge gives feelings objectified form, whether on the body ("my fuses were fine") or in terms of exchange value ("stories with sad endings are worth more"). It is worth stressing that this is not an example of postmodern wordplay, in spite of the director's frequent use of puns and ironies. (In interviews he distances himself from postmodernism, disinterested in what he considers its "disrespect" for materials.)[18] The materiality of bodies and emotions is based on a materialist perspective on history and on social analysis and change (see note 20, below), and Kluge is forever at pains to expose the structures and contradictions of power and economic forces. Thus, presenting bodies and emotions in "materialized" ways does not necessarily put materialism under erasure, as Teresa Ebert argues in her critique of what she calls ludic feminism, whose poststructuralist, postmodernist elaborations of materialized bodies actually occluded material conditions in favor of discourse.[19] So while the concrete presentation of emotions is never in question, Kluge stresses their circulation within systems of exchange governed by use value, labor value, and the vagaries of social and historical trends—a system, in short, regulated by human desires and needs, actual and manufactured. In other words, and so as not to confuse material with materialist,[20] he draws our attention to the fact that subjectivity is determined by human-generated (and thus changeable) systems of exchange. As The Power of Emotion makes clear, the irony of late capitalism is that it ignores human desires at the same time as it manipulates them.
In this vein, the power plant takes on another connotative layer. Unlike factories, which produce goods, power plants process natural elements, like
Whatever authenticity Kluge may implicitly give these "raw materials," he is de-idealizing them as he materializes emotions and the bodies that contain them. He pushes that de-idealization further by associating emotions with destruction, tragedy, death, and even war. To be sure, most of the operas whose plot lines he dryly recounts do not end happily. Thus, for as much as The Power of Emotion examines and even champions the raw "power of emotions" ("suddenly and brutally, they explode"), it shows how their institutionalization and "overprocessing" reduces them to a single tragic group whose power comes from being wielded over us, not derived from us.
Curiously, for all of its interest in emotion, critics have attacked The Power of Emotion for its absence of passion and feeling. The charge, I believe, is really an observation about the absence of sentimentalism in the film, something especially evident in Kluge's acerbic treatment of romantic love. For what films like Power of Emotion do is stress the inadequacy of conventional narrative formats to human emotions. Heterosexual romance cannot end wars, nor even suspend them, and nonheterosexual romances are off the map entirely. Kluge is not interested in passion per se, but he is concerned with how obdurate our emotions can be when pitted against structures that do not account for them. Consequently, he explores their ability to operate outside of these predetermined forms. The feelings to which he turns are not those that find themselves readily sung, marketed, or narrativized, and so in that regard may be difficult to locate in this particular film.
Outside of opera's institutional context, emotions work differently. They don't occur one at a time, for instance, as marriage broker Frau Bärlaam
The characters of The Power of Emotion dramatize how much love, sex, and feelings are determined by use and exchange value: emotions are bound up with all sorts of contracts. Just as emotions are commodified and take their proper place within generic contracts (film, history, opera), love and sex function within strict contracts and prearranged desires, as with the prenuptial agreement popular among wealthy couples today (another contract that banks on an "unhappy outcome"). In a very Fassbinderian detail, an intertitle towards the end of The Power of Emotion asks, "What is stronger than a marriage? A murder, when both know what the other has done."
Kluge portrays the quantifiable nature of love in a two shot of a couple talking (later they will be revealed as the murderers mentioned above):
he:Are you saying you don't love me?
she:
How much do you love me?
she:
How much should I love you?
he:
Exactly as much as I love you. …
she:
Not more?
he:
No more, no less.
she:
And if I loved you less, then what?
he:
Then you would owe me change.
Immediately after this exchange, the film cuts to the marriage broker, who comments that "No one ever has the right change." Betty is introduced with the line "Love for sale," and when she is bought by the pimp Schleich, Kluge tells us she is pleased for "having been purchased for her own sake" for the first time, literalizing the exchange value of emotions in yet another pun. What might be called here the "measurement of emotions" upholds the director's penchant for lists and absurd enumerations, such as the number of times an opera is performed with the same tragic ending, the
THE DIFFERENCE OF EMOTION
"Objects are the opposite of emotions," we are told in a scene that closes on an extreme close-up of a wound near a young woman's eye, clearly the result of abuse. Kluge's voice-over says, "Pain is personal property. Too much suffering turns you into an object." The facial injury of this unnamed woman offers the most direct visual representation of a wound in The Power of Emotion. In contrast to Corporal Wieland's in The Patriot, this bearer remains conspicuously silent.
Elsewhere in the film, the section "The Confusion of Emotions" features extensive discussions on wounds and injury. The most significant takes place between an official and a Teichert-like character, played by Kluge's sister Alexandra Kluge, who wants to learn the fate of a German woman who had tied sheets together as a flag of surrender during a bomb raid in the war. That woman's effort, like Gerta's, proved fruitless. After a short, insensitive discourse on how to "get a good fire going" that will "tear out the guts of a building," the official quotes his brother, an air force doctor, who says the aftermath of a fire is like "treating an extensive wound. You can't get at it by treating the scab. A historically scabbed city works the same way—the wound must be reopened and cleaned before it can heal properly." In typical contradictory fashion, Kluge voices what in the 1970s and early 1980s would have been a sympathetic attitude towards German historical experience through a very unsympathetic character. The woman persists with her questions about the woman with the sheets, a story that clearly does not interest the man, and when he asks her directly if his condolences would help, she answers in the negative. Some stylistic choices literalize the official's highly military view of things. Inserted footage from a U-boat film gives the view from a periscope, the deadliness of which is acknowledged in the next text fragment. Ever concerned with time and the false assurance of statistics, the voice-over tells us: "It is 4 A.M. Most people die at this hour." Then, as if reprising Wieland's knee, "But the dead are not resting in peace. They are restless, uncertain whether things will proceed justly when they arise from their graves." In a surprisingly poignant image (through a green tint and iris matte) we see the face of a woman with a look of extraordinary affection. Is she a lover? A writer? Quickly, we enter the icy grotto of an unidentified opera, then to footage of fires blasting open
THE UNDOING OF ACT 5
We might as well let ourselves have some fun with [this limited opera house repertoire]. If we can't replace it overnight—and don't necessarily want to part from part of it—we can play with it by giving the canonical works various new contexts.
—RALPH LOCKE
The film's final and lengthiest segment, "The Undoing of a Crime through Mutual Cooperation," overturns the fatal undoings of all of these operatic final acts, and does so with enough irony and artifice as to also mock what Sirk called the "emergency exits" of Hollywood's happy endings. A Yugoslav hotel manager, Ante Allewisch, comes to West Germany to exchange some diamonds for money so that he can purchase a washing machine in Brussels. Four locals are involved, all of them from unofficial economic counterspheres: Schleich, a "burglary specialist" with an expertise in furs; Betty, the prostitute he has purchased; Manfred Schmidt, a man who "lives off of his secretary," Mäxchen Bärbel, with whom he is romantically (or at least sexually) involved. Schmidt and Mäxchen go to their arranged rendezvous with Allewisch, where Schmidt suddenly and brutally hits him on the head with a heavy tool. Though shocked, Mäxchen flees to Barcelona with him, leaving the foreigner for dead. Unable to escape or "undo" their crime, they are last shown scrapping in the small, dingy room that is their hideout. Kluge ironically tells us that "Mäxchen's dreams have come true—she and Manfred are living together, in inescapable confines of four square meters."
The real happy ending of Kluge's alternative "drama of inescapable tragedy" pertains to "the undoing of a crime through mutual cooperation." It begins the moment when Betty and Schleich discover that the man their colleagues left for dead has not actually died. Here Kluge begins to swerve away from the near-certain fatality of opera's denouements—a fatality
Allewisch's murder has thus been undone through what the film calls "six weeks of hard work, unpaid." Here is Kluge's clearest cinematic elaboration of the feminine labor force that he and Negt advocate in their social theory, and it is evident how deeply the film esteems this clandestine, nurturing labor.[21] Physically set off from the city in an ill-defined, nonindustrial setting, the couple's work bypasses the profit-seeking circuitry of typical economic contracts. In fact, their labor produces its own surplus value, giving the couple more emotional intimacy. As the voice-over tells us at the end of the film, they two are "closer now," a tentatively happy conclusion stylistically enforced when the film cuts from a kitschy full moon to a shot of the couple embracing in a car. Afterward, they stare with a puzzled look through the windshield directly into the camera in a relatively long take. Their look seems directed at the director, as if to ask, what now? His closing words describe not only their future, but what might be our potential as critical viewers: "Their technique," he says, "will improve over time."
This final sequence certainly offers a way to make your own "undead man," as the voice-over refers to Allewisch at one point. Being transported in a coffin-like trunk—recalling the coffins that had defiantly blazed open earlier in the film—intensifies the vampiristic aspects of his "half-death." Allewisch's return to life, however, is appreciably less flamboyant than that. Kluge uses the modest tale in order to demonstrate that opera's tragic endings are neither inevitable nor inescapable; by extrapolation, change is possible through small acts well beyond the purview of commercial opera and film. Do not content yourself with historical "outcomes," their explanations, their logic, or their goals. Do not believe in fate; you can change act 5.
Given the director's observation that "in all operas that deal with redemption, a woman is sacrificed in act 5," Kluge's decision to resurrect a male black market dealer from Yugoslavia is intriguing, to say the least. Yet the choice is more complex than at first blush. For the terms by which he
Given the historical context in which The Power of Emotion was made, the figure entering capitalist West Germany from Yugoslavia would certainly have been seen as someone from a different economic system. And given Kluge's theoretical perspective at the time, he would probably feminize that economy along with Allewisch's status in the west. For these reasons I find it impossible to conceptualize this redeemed figure as simply or unambiguously male, a criticism that someone like Clément might have made. Even when we compare Allewisch to figures in Wagner's opera, his affinities are surprisingly mobile. He is at once Parsifal, the innocent fool (who is himself ambiguously gendered), and the wounded Amfortas, who is healed, not by the sword (or black marketer) that struck him, but by the hands of collaborators—suggesting an empathetic or even homeopathic recovery. Allewisch is also like Kundry, the ethnic other (Wagner's libretto contains several references to the black-haired woman's Arab background) condemned to wander the earth. Indeed, since the premiere of Parsifal, critics have noted that Kundry is a flagrant representation of the wandering Jew (a racist depiction abetted by the Wagnerian economy behind it): dark and homeless, she is both castrated and castrating, luring productive, Christian men from their responsibilities and their proper symbolic roles.[24]
What makes Parsifal so interesting is how it distributes a variety of problematic tropes of "Jewishness" onto a wide array of figures. Circumcision becomes castration and is carved onto the wounded thigh of King Amfortas, who refuses his office out of guilt but also, as Linda and Michael Hutcheon argue, from the disabling physical pain of syphilis—a disease stereotypically perceived as afflicting sexual "wanderers" and what the Nazis would come to identify as the Judenpest. Clichéd tropes of Semitism also inscribe the body of Klingsor, who also castrates himself after his encounter with Kundry. Associated with Jewishness by dint of anatomical castration as well as sexual contamination, these figures demonstrate how otherness, and the undesirable features projected onto it, can be located on the very same body-egos that would cast it out. Kundry's death in the story is not incidental. Feminine, sexual, and tainted, she, along with Klingsor, is the most conspicuously anti-Christian, wandering outside of the kingdom of the Christian grail, which accepts her only when she has ceased to exist. This is not altogether unlike the Nazi plans for establishing a "Jewish museum" in Prague, after they had exterminated all Jewish people.
Wagner's is not the only Parsifal important to The Power of Emotion. Kluge's film includes a clip from a rehearsal of Syberberg's filmed version of the opera (1982). It appears in a section entitled "The State," where the collusion of musical, religious, and political institutions is explicitly named; the guards are rehearsing the Communion scene. Here Kluge gives an appreciative wink to his colleague's earlier work. He also shares Syberberg's interest in fragmentation. Syberberg's film disunifies bodies by removing Amfortas's wound from its male German body and displaying it, in all its vulvular glory, on a pillow-shrine; he has nonsinging actors lip-synch to prerecorded music; a young man portrays Parsifal until his transformative kiss with Kundry, after which he is portrayed by a woman. At that point in the text, as Syberberg shows, much more than sexual renunciation and gender are at stake. He writes, "Wagner assimilates the problem of woman as a figure of guilt and hostility with that of the Wandering Jew, treating them as stages in a process of seductive temptation and eternal malediction."[25]
Despite Syberberg's interest in splintering and fragmentation, he performs Wagner's opera in its entirety and in sequence. His disruptions are thus thematic and visual, as in the cluttered opening set, the disembodied wound, the sex change, and so on. Were these details less critically trenchant, the uninterrupted music might have assumed the same transcendent reverence as Beethoven's had in Our Hitler. Yet given how much Syberberg draws our attention to Parsifal's anti-Semitism, its skittish depiction of heterosexuality, and Christianity's renunciations, it would be difficult to
I believe that Kluge selected Parsifal as the tutor-text for his film because it operates both within and beyond the transcendent, tragic mode he wants to challenge. He clearly appropriates its thematics of faith, conveying them musically through the opera's Prelude and the Communion scene. "[Wagner's] opera," Nietzsche puts bluntly, "is the opera of redemption."[26] Secularizing Wagner's Easter tale, Kluge shows how opera may be deployed to ironic, critical ends: he exposes contemporary capital's quest for the hollow, glittering grail, the artifice and allure of happy or "redemptive" endings, and so forth. Borrowing Parsifal's structure, The Power of Emotion opens with its Prelude and uses its thematics of faith and redemption in the final redemptive story. Yet it also withholds all dematerializing transcendence from Wagner's text.
I also believe Kluge selects Parsifal for another reason: as a source of beautiful, tainted pleasures. Several ominous details and a moment of exquisite beauty haunt the end of The Power of Emotion. Before the attack on Allewisch, we see a couple of men peacefully painting a building in a rather unextraordinary sequence of shots. It is springtime; there are buds on trees, birds singing—an indisputable gentleness marks this narratively insignificant setting. The nondiegetic music is not meant to jar; indeed, it is beautifully played. But it is Haydn's "Emperor's Hymn," the piece that tracks Kluge's work like a dog. However quietly or beautifully performed, the piece still connotes militarism, war, German nationalism, and Nazism. The piece appears later when Allewisch is deemed sufficiently recovered to be transported, and Betty and her partner place the brain-damaged man in the car trunk, cover him with furs, and drive "across three borders." Border officials stop them at one point, where a guard is oddly fascinated by Betty's tube of blood-colored lipstick, a visual detail in keeping with the fiery emotions and bloody stories that saturate the film. In light of the previous appearance of the Haydn—in which Hitler may be indirectly mocked through the housepainters, banal descendants of the Reich's artiste manqué—the Kaiserhymn assumes extra political reference in this latter scene. Given that an entire World War is gridded onto this musical piece, it is hard not to recall the nationalist assassination in Sarajevo that helped trigger the First World War as the Kaiserhymn accompanies the Yugoslav across borders around Germany. As we had noted with the stunning beauty of the Frankfurt skyline scored with Parsifal at the film's beginning, musical beauty coexists here with trenchant critique, just as Peer Raben had advocated. And Kluge is not one to make beautiful or happy endings naive. They are only beginnings, and beginnings, as the music tells us, can go bad.
POSTLUDE: KLUGE'S ACT OF KINDNESS
Had it not been for interventions like Kluge's in the 1970s and early 1980s, critical music studies of opera would not be where they are today. At the time, cultural critics were beginning to challenge opera's deadly grip on female characters. Feminist studies like Clément's Opera, or the Undoing of Women and Sally Potter's Thriller, a cinematic inquiry into Mimi's death in La Bohème, were both released in 1979, just four years before The Power of Emotion. The Power of Emotion practically quotes Clément's study, which states that women in opera "perpetually sing their eternal undoing."[27] These witheringly dry plot synopses—like Kluge's—also appear in Potter's Thriller, whose narrator streamlines La Bohème's first act while a series of still images and musical passages from the opera appears: "Four male artists … are in an attic studio, fighting the cold, fooling around. Three of them go out to a café, leaving Rodolfo alone. There is a knock at the door. It is Mimi, a seamstress and flower-maker whose candle has gone out on the way up to her room. She comes in. They fall in love. …" Near the end, when an ailing Mimi is brought to the attic of the men, the narrator notes that "they do what they can for her, but she dies." After relating the plot she asks, "Can these be the facts? Is that what really happened?"
All three of these critical exposés of opera's deadly deeds focus almost exclusively on plot. Like her colleagues, Clément reduced the story lines of any number of operas to their barest narrative structures in order to highlight the repetitiveness of the formula. Nonetheless, when it was released, her book drew charges for its exclusive focus on libretti, much as Jutta Brückner criticized The Power of Emotion for failing to consider sensually affirming, non-narrative elements. To be sure, the entirety of Kluge's film acknowledges the power of music and spectacle, but the references are handled in displaced and highly critical ways. As Peter Lutze notes, the film actually demonstrates the force of music through its structure. With its fragmented, elliptical appearances, music is what ties the scattered stories of The Power of Emotion together.
Critics might also question Kluge's selection of operatic texts. By choosing only those with "deadly outcomes" and examining only the deleterious aspects of our responses to them, Kluge stacks the deck considerably. That preoccupation obliges him to find deadliness and inescapable fates everywhere, and so he boils down the range of operatic repertoire and listening experiences into one monolithic phenomenon. It is small wonder, then, that he feels impelled to articulate his "disbelief in the tragic and the melancholic with which our culture today seems infatuated."[28] To be sure,
In response to Clément's claim that nineteenth-century opera reveals a "great masculine scheme … thought up to adore, and also to kill, the feminine character,"[29] Ralph Locke asks, what about comic opera, where social mores may be sent up even if they are reinstated, or "serious works whose heroines strive rather than wilt?" What about the women in Handel's Aleina, and other earlier operas by Handel, he asks, or the Walkyries, or the various Joan of Arcs? What about the female performers who were taking over the roles of the castrati by the late eighteenth century?[30] What, for that matter, about masculinity and death? As Linda and Michael Hutcheon argue, "For every Senta who leaps to her death … there is a Peter Grimes who rows out to sea to die."[31] Kluge's resurrection of Allewisch demonstrates that opera's murders—done or "undone"—are as contingent on political, ethnic, and economic difference as they are on gender. Thus it would be misguided to dismiss Kluge or Clément for focussing so much on plots, or for their dated, binarist views of gender. These ideas established the contours for new lines of inquiry into opera, power, and identity. Perhaps we are only flattering ourselves in believing that "our technique has improved [so much] with time."
Like The Power of Emotion, contemporary opera studies devote considerable energy to the material components of opera, especially the bodies that sing and listen. It is not an unwarranted emphasis. With the intense physicality of its vocal production, along with the emotions and identifications it elicits from listeners, operatic music has strong connections to the human body. That relationship is played out onstage when we see bodies perform what texts "impose" upon them: pulmonary diseases (La Bohème), punishment for intercaste relationships or other sexual "transgressions" (Aida, Carmen, and others). Not incidentally, today's focus on bodies comes from music scholars interested in postcolonial, race, and ethnicity studies and in lesbian, gay, and queer scholarship—areas concerned with the ways in which bodies are differentiated through historically contingent power relations.
It could be argued that a two-sided relationship exists between Kluge and contemporary lesbian, gay, and queer theorists. Both sides are aware of the physical and cultural stakes in operatic representation, yet contemporary queer scholarship presents more alternatives to be considered and explored. And if Kluge materialized opera in order to de-idealize it and extinguish
A self-conscious, performative art, opera does more than what film scholars have called "baring the apparatus": to Kluge opera is the apparatus. Opera unquestionably complicates how cinema scholars have theorized identification, for instance. Its characters are saddled with unendurably intense emotions, and these feelings are depicted in ways that suggest their direct presentation, rather than a credible re presentation. Consequently, and not unlike many films of the New German Cinema, these powerful emotions seem only incidentally tied to character psyches and give rise to a more generalized/generic sense of longing, heartbreak, regret, or joy, one I believe listeners can access or adapt, depending on the historical, cultural, social, and other circumstances of their reception. Because listeners can be gripped with passions that exceed individualized sources, opera allows them/us to appreciate its shifting social and interpretative contexts—recall Kluge's summary of Aida as a love story that "in reality, is about war." Opera thus frustrates the simple emotional attachments often associated with character-dominated narrative forms and one-to-one identifications. Of course, opera has historically been aligned with socio-economically privileged audiences. But that, I believe, can serve to heighten the furtive pleasures that lesbians, gays, and "others" derive from it, especially now, when it enjoys less cultural hegemony than when the "power plant of emotions," according to Kluge, governed feelings in the West.
In his exemplary recent study of Kluge, Peter Lutze comments on the director's passion for tragic operas, noting that while they trouble Kluge, they enrapture him nonetheless. What else explains the multiple viewings of Carmen? As I noted above, that rapture is precisely what opera scholars are mining for new interpretations since the release of The Power of Emotion. Their work in this regard recalls the process Susan Buck-Morss described
At once emotional and intellectual, intense but incomplete, identification in opera is a complex and fascinating beast. It can be engaged by figures, situations, or the "not-yet-heards" of missing scenarios past and present. Its long tradition of blurred performance and vocal categories further complicates any facile one-to-one correspondences of listener and character. Its stories are often based on mistaken identity across class, caste, and gendered lines. Until relatively recently, men performed female roles and women performed male ones, especially as boys. How can stable gender functions be ascribed to these fictional figures, or to performers like the castrati or countertenors? How can we reread tragic operas; what forms might counter-or dis-identifications take? It seems clear in the end that identification is less fixed and fatal than Kluge would have us believe in The Power of Emotion, which somehow presumes audiences buy into the greater worth of sadness over happiness, the belief that selfish lovers must be punished, and so forth. Strongman Ferdinand shows an even more perfunctory response when Reich, the guardsman, identifies with Tosca's Scarpia. Reich is one of Kluge's most exaggerated tragic-comic figures, and audience members are not likely to forge the identifications with him that Kluge takes for granted even while ridiculing them. Do men always identify with Carmen's Don Jose? Is he really such an enviable, powerful, or tragic figure? Does everyone share his murderous/amorous impulses towards Carmen?
In the last chapter, I mentioned Helke Sander's reference to Kluge's "anti-drama" as a "form of kindness." It appears in an essay that recounts how the two became friends after her critique of The Occasional Work of a Female Slave was published. She openly admits being taken in by his "charm, his intelligence … his wit … his ability to correlate unusual
I find myself in a similar position, without the benefit of having met Kluge the personality. His films—and especially The Power of Emotion and The Patriot—have never failed to move me. When I began writing these chapters, the last thing I expected was to be picking through their limitations, since many of my concerns had been raised by critics like Kaes, Rich, and Sander before me. The criticisms raised here stand as byproducts of my own encounters with the films, a form of the "unwanted within the wanted." For ultimately, I believe that Kluge's texts boast the same features Sander attributes to Kluge personally—openness, originality, generosity, and wit. To me, theyconstitute his ultimate "kindness," an intelligent open-heartedness that encourages viewers and listeners to form thoughts, feelings, and conclusions independent of the director's. As the couple in the last sequence of The Power of Emotion shows, murderous endings can be defused; alterity is easy to embrace. Their life-saving act points, moreover, to a lambent psychic and emotional economy in which compassion and empathy may have the power to change the course of events or the telling of history. The stares of the two characters into the camera compel us to do the same kind of work. In the end, The Power of Emotion extends to others a form of critical introjection, a welcome gesture after The Patriot.
Thus what we might initially read as problems, blind spots, or openly provocative contradictions in Kluge's choices might be considered the "gifts" Sander describes, which are left for us to rework. For instance, without declaring it overtly, The Power of Emotion shows that no matter how manipulated they are, emotions—like music—are a source of great pleasure, and that pleasure needn't be divorced from insight or critique. (One can only imagine how Peer Raben would enjoy the film's opening segment.) The porousness of the film creates the potential for listeners to take up the challenge of change. By concretizing "the power of emotions," Kluge's film carves out more space for emotion and desire and assumes a wider, more differentiated sense of audience and nation than did The Patriot.
Thus, if tragic opera theatricalizes the internalized Zusammenhänge western viewers bring to texts, The Power of Emotion shows how easily they can be blasted open. The modest "imaginary opera"[36] that concludes The Power of Emotion offers one such rescripting. As Susan Leonardi and Rebecca Pope have suggested, "[T]he ending that kills the Other, though