3. Queering History Through
Camp and Kitsch
5. Restaging History with Fantasy
Body, Camp, and Sound in the Films
of Treut, Ottinger, and von Praunheim
Camp is a form of historicism viewed histrionically.
—PHILIP CORE
Known for staging socio-historical, political and psychical issues, the New German Cinema used different musical and stylistic techniques to construct bodies as prop-laden figures rather than as psychologically credible beings. But, as we have seen, the history lessons enacted through (or upon) the bodies of Gerta Baethe and others leave certain questions unanswered, even unposed. How are bodies differentiated? What about the identifications, agency, pleasure, and desires of filmgoers? Turning to the work of Monika Treut, Ulrike Ottinger, and Rosa von Praunheim, I want to show how music, sound, and style can counter their often fatalistic depictions in other films of the movement. How, these filmmakers seem to ask, do music and style point to pleasure, fantasy, and subjectivity, and how do they intersect with history? Camp and kitsch (and music, which is not commonly associated with either) respond to these kinds of questions, exploring the differences within postwar identities in Germany and abroad.
CAMP: DENATURALIZATION, EXPOSé, AND TRASH
Critics have spilled considerable ink trying to establish a definition of camp. Despite dissenting interpretations, some consensus exists around the idea that camp denaturalizes objects and ideas through a playful reworking of codes, conventions, and surfaces. Camp deliberately mismatches texts and
Portions of this chapter appeared in two articles, "Camp, Music, and the Production of History: Anita and Rosa von Praunheim," in Queering the Canon: Defying the Sights in German Literatures and Culture, ed. C. Lorey and J. Plews (Columbia: Camden House, 1998), 350–82; and "The Body in the (Virgin) Machine," Arachné 3, no. 2 (Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996): 46–66. Reprinted by permission.
Critics today aver that camp exposes objects, tastes, desires, or ideas that are normally not overtly presented. That invisibility/inaudibility might be due to cultural obsolescence (facial make-up according to old glamour codes), clichéd status (the monocles and scarred visage of Nazi officers), or social proscription (Lord Alfred Douglas's immortal reference to "the love that dare not speak its name"). Reading in codes, using artifice to detour normalizing codes of hegemonic culture, camp rerigs texts and contexts to bring to light unsanctioned meanings, identities, and assumptions that in other contexts might be hidden.[1] It shows that there is always another side, another story, and is thus of importance to historical thought. Understood this way, camp recalls Benjamin's allegorical readings, and it seems significant that both place considerable emphasis on the actual material of signs, be they props, like von Kant's wigs, or historical ruins, like a soldier's knee.
Camp adores cliché, surface, image. With its emphasis on texture and appearance, it presents a challenge to depth models of textuality, going against, for instance, structuralism's maxim that meaning is embedded within the deep structures of a text or psychoanalysis's search for original traumas. In the same vein, it undoes models of identity that have external signs of one's appearance "expressing" inner truths, a stable, "real" self. As Susan Sontag wrote, "Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content."[2] Camp's fascination with signifiers and surface refuses the idea of immanence, which accounts
The understanding of camp as a scavenger or gleaner of surfaces is widespread. In the late 1980s, Andrew Ross influentially maintained that in seizing upon signs of "power … in decline,"[3] camp could articulate lost or neglected desires. He argued that it was the "eclipsed capacity" of artifacts, ideals, and conventions of "a much earlier mode of production" that "become available, in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste."[4] Teasing out the historical implications of Ross's assessment, Pamela Robertson writes, "Whereas postmodern pastiche may privilege heterogeneity and random difference, camp is productively anachronistic and critically renders specific historical norms obsolete."[5]
Camp's recycling centers may recall Kluge's Trümmelarchäologie. These strategies actually treat the question of past and present identities quite differently, however. In camp, trash signifies more than just the remains of yesterday, more than history's spoils or signs of conquest, pace Kluge and Benjamin. To be sure, both the New German Cinema and its queerer, campier subset of films seize upon these kinds of discarded objects. But camp places debris, including human remains, onto enticing, fantastic stages. Moreover, the links it makes to the past are less concerned with putting these objects in the service of mourning work than with melancholic play. Our Hitler, for instance, is a text stuffed with visual and acoustic clutter, as if desperate to fill a vacuum. Obsessed with loss and the perceived damage done to German culture and society by Hitler, it departs from a queer notion of camp in which neither objects nor their lost power is mourned, even if they are acknowledged.
Ross's notion of camp as a scrounger of cultural debris has not met with universal acceptance. Because trash raises the question of whose trash it is and who has to pick it up, queer critics have challenged the implication that camp is supposed to react to heterosexual precepts and artifacts. Why should gay and lesbian cultures be seen as responding second-hand to purportedly original, defining contexts of heterosexuality? Moe Meyer, for instance, not only rejects the understanding of camp as a defensive reaction, but goes so far to argue that it only exists within nonheterosexual spheres.
Another issue Ross's work raises concerns camp's relationship to contemporaneous readings of its various excesses. What to make of the bawdy Wilhelmian and Weimar cabaret cultures, which were campy in their own time? Why must camp "wait" in order to be meaningful? That view presumes that camp cannot be knowing; it must be unintended or naïve, something to be corrected (or even invented) later. Upholding a linear view of history, it gives historical audiences and consumers short shrift, assuming that they only become sophisticated with time. To Wayne Koestenbaum, Ross unintentionally "trashes" gay culture by aligning camp with tossed-out artifacts of past lowbrow cultures. To be sure, Ross's work downplays highbrow camp forms, like opera, the focus of Koestenbaum's study (and opera has been a staple in gay and lesbian camp repertoires for years). But as Koestenbaum's objection to cheapened culture illustrates, camp's delight in surfaces is rather easily conflated with superficiality, its interest in outmoded objects but a sign of its own worthlessness or failure. Still, in contrast to Koestenbaum, most queer critics maintain that camp is supremely aware of this "failure" and requires or even celebrates it. (Kitsch, by contrast, is assumed to be oblivious to its own worthlessness and hence all the more abject, a point I refute in the next chapter.)
Deliberately "trashy" bad taste is an important component of the aesthetic strategies of lesbian, gay, and queer directors who worked alongside and after the New German Cinema. In a sense, it is a contemporary version of modernist shock, both out to affront through distaste and provocation, something that Frank Ripploh's 1981 hit Taxi zum Klo / Taxi to the W.C. conveys just through its title. But garbage involves more than debris, because it establishes that which is expelled from the public body as useless—the abject, nonproductive elements needed to uphold boundaries of the pure and the safe, as Mary Douglas observed. This holds true for more than the social groups Douglas described. Nation, subject, and even film texts are subject to this same sort of border control (the cinema censor, after all, determines and excises unacceptable pieces). Judith Butler puts it even more directly: abjection is a means of making shit out of the other. Small wonder that trash, ruins, and recycling recur in New German films as diverse
HOW QUEER IS IT?
In the Introduction, I argued that feminist, gay, lesbian, and queer directors of the New German Cinema could not be unified under a single term. Their relationship to the movement at large was certainly fractured and varied: Fassbinder was its biggest Autor; Schroeter, despite his considerable influence, remained at the movement's periphery; Treut started working after its demise; and for one scholar at least, Ottinger should not even be included in it.[7] All of these directors have been out for years. Yet as I stated before, except for von Praunheim, all have expressed no interest whatsoever in being identified as gay or lesbian, and have rejected in equal measure the idea that they produce gay or lesbian films. Ottinger compared it to "being put in a little drawer."[8] To take these directors "out of the drawer" and assert that they were among the more lionized of New German Cinema's Autoren is misguided, to say the least. For, despite all the critical acclaim and prizes procured at festivals, gay and lesbian films received poor distribution, particularly outside of Germany. Like that of even the bestknown East German directors, documentarians, and experimental filmmakers, their work was not deemed as commercially viable as that of the more popular Autoren during the movement's heyday.
If the economic and institutional barriers facing emerging queer filmmakers in Germany are not suprising, we should also acknowledge the critical and theoretical ones they faced. Most conspicuous was the Mitscherlichs' thesis of a national "inability to mourn." How sensitive could this model of a mass unconscious be to groups who suffered and mourned for different reasons and in different ways?[9] How contrite should a gay man be for a country that outlawed his sexual activity decades after the end of the war?[10] How is he supposed to identify with this ur-project? What strategies could gay-and lesbian-oriented cinema catalyze? The obstreperous aspects of melancholia (which also inform kitsch and camp) repudiate that account and demonstrate that the prevalent structures of grief and remembrance after the war were not appropriate to all forms of subjectivity. Not every filmmaker subscribed to the New German Cinema's Oedipal rejection of Papaskino, or to the heterosexual presumptions of its attempts to master the past and refortify identity, or to its reliance on familial constellations with which to stage German history. That potential appeal to lesbian, gay, and other minoritarian groups helps distinguish
The antiformalist bias of the Young German Cinema makes it easy to see why aestheticized styles like camp and kitsch would face resistance—recall Christian Thompsen's response to Fassbinder's campier productions. Indeed, that injunction against artifice was an obstacle to the movement's prequeer filmmakers, particularly its female constituency: Ottinger's campy Madame X was released to a notoriously frosty feminist reception. Since the 1980s, however, that same self-consciousness has turned films like Madame X into cult artifacts, thanks to film culture's fascination with excess at the end of the century and to queer film studies, critical frameworks that helped take these films "out" of a strictly New German context.
Queerness is a relation rather than a position. It is inseparable from a heterosexual mainstream, for instance, since it helps constitute it. From a queer perspective, opposing straight/hegemonic/majoritarian to gay/ lesbian/minoritarian does not address the variety of human sexual experiences, identifications, and identities. Similarly, queerness challenges the dualistic opposition of dominant to "sub"culture, or mainstream to alternative or oppositional, since these paired terms are constantly colliding with one another. (Filmmaker Werner Schroeter, for instance, asserts that he doesn't tell different stories, he just tells them differently; Straub and Huillet argue that they produce conventional cinema and refuse the sanctuary of authorship.)[11] As an interpretive strategy of the cinema—as opposed, say, to a taxonomic one—queerness does not follow naturally from the themes of a film, nor from the biographical details of its director. Of course, identity-based labeling of directors and /or films as gay, lesbian, or queer can be strategically crucial, but queerness helps show that there is not a one-to-one correlation between textual content and its producer. Is Fassbinder's Petra von Kant a lesbian film? Is Schroeter a gay director for having made female-centered films that are not overtly about lesbianism, like Willow Springs (1973), Malina, or The Death of Maria Malibran? Ultimately, queerness emerges from the texts' positions in culturally and historically circumscribed reading formations.
My intention is not to argue that camp is absent in the New German Cinema's straighter success stories. Its presence in films like Our Hitler is impossible to deny, and its social and somatic mischief is equally central to the work of Herbert Achternbusch and Helmut Costard, among others, working in and alongside the movement. That said, I believe it is nonetheless important to respect the differences in queer and lesbian-and gaygenerated camp practices in the New German Cinema, partly for the challenge they present to the historical, representational, and identificatory
I use the term "prequeer" to describe this work with some reservation. Since queer cinema emerged after the New German Cinema, I do not want to suggest that these earlier films inevitably or teleologically lead to queerness. Secondly, queer cinema is not a German phenomenon. British and North American directors, like Derek Jarman, Todd Haynes, and Greg Araki, first drew the label, and U.S. critic B. Ruby Rich claims to have been the first to use it. Even with queer cinema's current international status, it cannot shake the fact that it originated beyond German borders. As Alice Kuzniar notes, "queer" is not widely used in contemporary German gay cultures; there, as elsewhere, many nonheterosexuals (von Praunheim, for instance) do not self-identify as queer. "Although ‘queer’ does not deny that there are gays and lesbians," Kuzniar writes, "it recognizes variations within these constituencies and a plethora of identificatory sites. It signals difference, but not the binary difference of masculine men/feminine women, homo/hetero, normal/pathologizing, or even gay/lesbian."[12] While I am more reluctant than Kuzniar to align queerness with a tacit postmodernist project, I find its critical expansiveness both attractive and useful. Because it can critique a variety of heterosexual practices and assumptions, queerness is not restricted to current films, nor just to "gay" or "lesbian" directors. It refuses to place homosexual culture at the margins or give it a separate history. Queerness is not outside, it is just out.
THE QUEER ALLEGORY
Kuzniar compellingly situates allegory at the heart of queer readings. Even traditional allegorical representation, she notes, questions language's ability to signify directly by highlighting disjunctures between sign and referent. Unlike metaphors, which try to form stable relationships between signs and referents, the piecemeal, metonymic process of allegory does not attempt to unify meaning: in fact, it is not really out to produce anything. In this way it challenges notions of productivity that govern not only textual hermeneutics (analysis is supposed to yield something, after all), but the imperatives of capitalism and reproductive heterosexuality. Walter Benjamin's particular elaboration makes allegory even more useful, constructing it as a detached, fragmented connection, of which Kluge's notion
Allegory names in tangential, indirect ways. It can point to hopes, untold histories, or unsanctioned desires that have elided symbolization or recognition. Since it does not lead directly back to a referent or to another interpretative endpoint, and since it hides as much as it discloses, allegory is a crucial piece of nonheterosexual interpretive economies (Kuzniar discusses queerness in general; we will consider camp more particularly). As she points out, because queer desires are often delegitimized, if not altogether censored, allegory becomes significant for standing in for something that has not been articulated. To be sure, this may suggest that allegory is a representational project of the closet, but what Kuzniar really addresses is the limits of representation tout court. The intensity of allegory emerges precisely for its resistance to being fixed or attached to an object or person with any stabilizing harmony. Recall the asynchronous soundtracks and dubbing in Holy Whore and The Death of Maria Malibran, in which vocal representations do not lead back to a particular source, body, or character. It is easy to see how music, the connotative associations of which are notoriously difficult to fix in the first place, can be aligned with allegory. As Adorno once wrote, "Time and again it [music] points to the fact that it signifies something, something definite. Only the intention is always veiled."[14]
Like melancholia and Musik-Shock, allegory works with heightened referentiality, hyperbolized style, and theatricalized performance, as if to acknowledge its own representational inadequacies.[15] Its compensatory impulse recalls Freud's work on melancholia: its exaggerated theatrics exist because adequate structures of mourning simply do not. Absence becomes a psychological, erotic, stylistically charged hot spot. Again, Kuzniar elaborates, "Fragmentariness alone thus becomes eroticized, the allure of the not shown. This [queer experimental] cinema fetishizes the partial object relying on brevity, intensity, and obliqueness. Its disjointedness in turn creates a cult object."[16] By rejecting wholeness and semantic fixity, allegory lands on the side of replaceable, material objects.
There are obviously strong connections between this concept of queer allegory and the hermeneutic practice advocated by Benjamin and Kluge. While these men are not exactly the patron saints of queer theory, their usefulness to these new interpretative modalities is undeniable. Most crucial is the fascination they share with the physical (as opposed to the timeless or
The ghosts of Benjamin and Lacan are not the only ones haunting such arguments. The allegorical process Kuzniar details is, as I have already suggested, vested in melodramatic and melancholic modalities: consider its sense of urgency, surrogacy, exaggeration, vagueness, and the unlikelihood of closure. It is hardly surprising that melancholia has become important to contemporary work in queer subjectivity, and it is worth underscoring at this point that this kind of melancholia eschews the hand-wringing selfdenial of its traditional psychoanalytic elaboration. This is not to say that queer allegory is uninvolved with the abjection to which melancholia points, since, as we shall see with von Praunheim and Schroeter, abjection is a crucial piece of the process. But allegory's presence in camp and kitsch helps show the roles that desire and fantasy play in the production of different histories.
BODY CAMP
At the hands of directors like Fassbinder and Kluge, bodies were utterly deconstructed, often torn apart limb by limb, so as to leave little possibility of recovery. There were exceptions, to be sure (like Kluge's Allewisch), but it is clear that neither director cared to actualize fantasies of cohesion and wholeness, even if they were sensitive to their very power. As if following the dictum that the more pessimistic the outcome, the greater the need for alternatives, these directors passed that task on to filmgoers. Without wanting to minimize the process, I nonetheless find it difficult to shake a sense of overdetermination in some of their (and other directors') choices. In general, history is enacted upon bodies rather than with them, a scenario that not only bereaves figures of agency but places them in an antagonistic, reflective, and passive relationship to historical events.
The films of the New German Cinema would often evacuate characters of any auratic, erotic luster, often with debilitating results. Their bodies became the carriers of so many signs of social, political, and economic injustices (the suicides of Fox, Veronika Voss, and Elwira), injustices that were elaborated through blows to the head (Knife in the Head) or the removal of limbs (Berlin Alexanderplatz), teeth (Germany, Pale Mother), or knees (The Patriot). Heaven help them should they try to act on their own agency: Elwina/Elvira's transsexual surgery in Fassbinder's The Year of Thirteen Moons painfully dramatizes the gap between human desire and its fulfillment. Here, what seems to be the character's "own" decision to undergo sex change surgery was motivated by an offhand remark of a cruel, disinterested lover. Even when bodies were left intact, as when allegorizing nation in films like The Tin Drum, Even Dwarves Start Small, The American Friend, or Lola, they seemed too neat an allegory, passive reflections of a cohesive, if troubled, Germany.
In queer German films like Dorian Gray and Taxi zum Klo, bodies tend to outstrip the one-to-one correspondence of conventional allegories in films like Germany, Pale Mother. More prop than character, these camped-up bodies intensify the sense of role-playing critics associate with the New German Cinema at large. In contrast to some of their more mainstream depictions, these bodies are not first and foremost sites of ruination. Thomas Elsaesser elaborates these differences: "Rather than internalise the latent conflicts which German postwar history and the legacy of a particular culture had programmed into them, feminist and gay filmmakers in particular tried to restage the traumas in their films, often making the body itself the site of division, transgression and the transformation of sexual identity. … New German films escaped into ‘perversion’ the pleasurable side of neurosis."[18] The "pleasurable side of neurosis" and "perversion" is precisely what Kurt Raab achieves in his prop-laden masquerade as Stefan George in Satan's Brew or as the "Butcher of Hanover" in Lommel's The Tenderness of Wolves.[19] Hyperbolic, sexually unmoored bodies inhabit Verführung: Die grausame Frau / Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985), Freak Orlando (1981), Horror Vacui (1984), and The Death of Maria Malibran. Bodies are positioned differently in relation to German historical circumstances than they are in films by Kluge, Reitz, and Syberberg, for whom Nazism, postwar recovery, and questions of German identity always provided the grounding point. Unanswered fantasies of lost national or somatic unity were perhaps best emblematized by The Patriot's knee, which opines, "I'd still be a part of something bigger, if Corporal Wieland, my former master … part of something bigger, part of our beautiful Germany."
The campier films offer a wider variety of cultural touchstones and reference points, such as to "lowbrow" cultural production, to lesbian and gay icons, and to smaller cultural communities. In general, they are less overtly historical than films like The Patriot or Fassbinder's West German trilogy, and are not set in the past or against the backdrop of war and postwar Germany. For example, the primary historical context of Ottinger's early films was arguably derived from contemporary debates in German feminist film circles and lesbian cultures and not the more widely broadcast debates on national identity. Although her films made references to specific German events, they, like those of other lesbian, gay, and queer directors, did not generate a sense of a debt to the past or to questions surrounding Germany's war and postwar periods that the New German Cinema had raised with such fanfare. Treut, for instance (who slightly preceded the movement), has more in common with American gender theorists Judith Butler, Sandy Stone, and Donna Haraway than with the Mitscherlichs and their notion of Trauerarbeit.
Campy cinema, like musicals, operas, and performance art, will often enrapture its viewers. They give pleasure in a way that the adversarial asceticism of modernism (or of feminist and apparatus film theory of the 1970s and 1980s) could not, and through texts that might have been unthinkable or objectionable at the time. They flirt with aspects of what German culture would suppress, including not just its past, but unwanted expressions of emotions and pleasure. These characteristics of camp, I believe, can help us to move forward with the idea of role-playing, props, and absence, rather than lamenting lost imagined integrities of body, psyche, or nation.
IDENTITY, NATION, AND BORDERS
Given the movement's obsession with identity and boundaries, it is scarcely surprising that films of the New German Cinema frequently addressed trespassing and border-crossings. In Wim Wenders's road movies they are thematic and geographical (Alice in the Cites, Tokyo-ga, Until the End of the World); with Schlöndorff, embedded in their production histories (France would coproduce his first hit, Young Törless, and stay involved in internationally funded films like Un amour de Swann[1983] and Voyager[1992]). There is the cross-pollination of North American and German music in Holy Whore, the fusion of high and low music in Schroeter, and the genderbending of Ottinger, Treut, Fassbinder, and others. Boundaries are especially fraught in Treut, Ottinger, and von Praunheim's work, where there are splits between inside / outside, health / illness, norms / deviance, and other opposing terms.
If the prequeer German cinema suggests new routes for desire and identity, it is also no coincidence that the films of Ottinger and Treut are obsessed with journeys and roads normally not followed. Journeys are prominent throughout Ulrike Ottinger's films: the lead character of Ticket of No Return tours Berlin in order to drink herself to death; Exil Shanghai /Exile Shanghai (1997) follows different generations of German Jewish émigrés who moved there. Since the mid-to late 1980s, Ottinger has used a form of theatricalized ethnography (Taiga[1991/2], Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia[1989], as well as the more straightforward documentary form in Exile Shanghai). These films are as meticulously crafted as her initial features, like Ticket of No Return, Freak Orlando, Portrait of Dorian Gray, and Madame X, but have nevertheless confounded critics eager to reconcile them with these stylized early films. I want only to stress here that both periods foreground the artifice of filmmaking and present "something … made visible again."[20]
The voyages of Monika Treut tend to be literal and geographical (My Father Is Coming[1991]), as well as abstract, trekking into realms of gender, sexuality, and identity (Seduction: A Cruel Woman). That nomadism seems to mimic Treut's movements as a director. Based in Hamburg, she spends considerable time outside of Germany, often in U.S. cities like San Francisco and New York, where she finds many of the sexual outlaws interviewed in films like Female Misbehavior (1992), Didn't Do It for Love (1997), and Gendernauts (1999). Her queer approach treats boundarybending figures with respect and humor, features that also inflect her fiction films, like Virgin Machine and "The Taboo Parlor" in Erotique (Treut/ Borden/Magalhäes/Law, 1994).
One of the boundaries Treut's work undoes is that of "nation." According to Kuzniar, Treut refuses to
map sexual preference onto national differences, an insidious move that would reify gay/straight and native/foreign oppositions. Insofar as their characters cross boundaries, Treut and von Praunheim work against a binary mode of perception that creates otherness, whether it be sexual or ethnic exoticism. This crossing or permeability stands in distinct contrast to earlier German films, such as Werner Herzog's Stroszek (1976) or Wim Wenders's Alice in de Städten / Alice in the Cities (1974) and Der Stand der Dinge / The State of Things (1982),… the effortless crossing of cultural barriers is simultaneously a very natural crossing or obscuring of heterosexual gender boundaries.[21]
To be sure, the project of disturbing national boarders has special urgency today. German unification has helped force the question of differences within the country's boundaries, and Europe faces that same issue as it restructures
Virgin Machine is Treut's first solo feature. It opens with Dorothee (Ina Blum) in Hamburg, where she is researching romantic love and is involved in some unsatisfactory relationships with some unsatisfactory men, among them Heinz, an older man with a sweaty face, and Bruno, her androgynous stepbrother. Dorothee's undepicted mother lives in America; she had been a stripper and was unhappy in her marriage. When Bruno informs Dorothee that their mother wants to see her, the film's maternal melodramatic dimensions are given a chance to develop, but once Dorothee is stateside, characters actively discourage her from tracking down her mother. Quickly immersed in the lesbian and queer cultures of San Francisco, she meets, among others, Susie Sexpert (played with verve by Susie Bright, On Our Backs editor) and the alluring Ramona (Shelly Mars), whose television advertisement promises "a cure for those addicted to romance." In an extraordinary performance, Ramona, dressed as a man, performs a striptease in a lesbian club, jerking off with a beer-bottle penis. Captivated, Dorothee contacts her and the two go on an extended date and have what by all appearances is passionate sex. At the end of the encounter, however, Ramona presents Dorothee a bill, which shatters not her heart so much as the delusions she had had about romantic love, and she laughs out loud. We next see her performing in the same nightclub, and the film concludes with Dorothee riding her bicycle, tossing torn-up photos of herself with German lovers by the Golden Gate Bridge.
Virgin Machine establishes two distinct diegetic spaces: Hamburg and San Francisco. Hamburg is gendered as a world of men and family relations, marked by "serious" research, traditional romantic quests and requirements, and grotesquely conventionalized sex roles. San Francisco, on the other hand, is a space filled with women, lesbian desire and gazes, sexual indeterminacy, playfulness, and erotic role-playing.[22] Whereas in Hamburg Dorothee is intrigued by the "hormonal and electrical aspects of
In a way, both worlds are denaturalized by being depicted so hyperbolically. In Hamburg, sex with Heinz is a frightful affair, with his bald head and lecherous smile dominating the film frame. We see Dorothee sailing with goofy gentility in a dress and wide-brimmed hat, scoping out potential lovers from the boat. Like her mother, whom we are told had the same "sickness," in Germany, Dorothee is "addicted to romance." Once in San Francisco, love assumes very different form, primarily as acts involving female sex workers, foreigners, and a variety of cultural fugitives. Doors left ajar and television and computer screens provide a variety of tableaux (s/m scenarios, love for hire, computer porn) that stage sex almost as conspicuously as Ramona's strip show. Although neither city is depicted "naturally," Hamburg represents a place where romance and sexuality are naturalized through biological and other scientific explanations. San Francisco, by contrast, denaturalizes romance and sexuality by placing them into material and materialist contexts.
It is finally unclear whether Treut wants Hamburg to exist simply as a diegetic region or as a metonymic stand-in for Germany. Clearly, it is an area filled with strange men and even stranger attitudes, the perverse norm against which Virgin Machine rails. In Treut's work more generally, Germany usually functions as the sexually outmoded fatherland left behind for the lesbian and queer communities of other countries. That point is dramatized in My Father Is Coming, whose protagonist, Vicki, a young German lesbian living in New York, receives an unexpected visit from her father to whom she has not come out. Soon after arriving in the States, he undergoes a sexual awakening, invigorated by no less a sex professional than Annie Sprinkle.
Treut's work delights in the uprooting of female desires. But it also tends to relocate them in subcultural spaces such as those of urban America, which are, once again, racked up against the old, heterosexual male traditions of Europe and Germany. Although the question of nation is not at the forefront of the director's mind, Virgin Machine never explores why Germany functions as the-place-that-one-leaves-behind. Even the quickness with which Dorothee dispatches her search for her mother, who symbolizes part of the geographically specific past, is striking. When she tears up the photographs at the end, it seems as if she were abandoning the idea or memory of Germanness as well. Clearly, Dorothee is moving forward—the bicycle leaves no doubt about that. But it is worth considering which aspects of
Marcia Klotz explores this problematic in her compelling analyses of Virgin Machine and My Father Is Coming.[24] In Virgin, she focuses on a brief series of shots taken from Dorothee's balcony that shows a white prostitute and several black men in the street. Dorothee observes in voiceover, "The reason why the sex industry is so desolate is because women have so little say in it." Elsewhere in the film, women have all sorts of things to say about sex work, and most of them are depicted as being very much in charge of their profession, a perception abetted by casting actual sex professionals like Bright and Sprinkle. In the scene Klotz isolates, however, the prostitute is not even given a voice,[25] and the film never returns to her. Thus there is an enormous discrepancy between this outdoor scene and the indoor spaces on which the film concentrates. Protected, these interiors are primarily inhabited by white women, and they are characterized by liberating, indeterminate female sexualities. This, as Klotz states, is painfully at odds with the street scene where coerced sexuality of the woman, poverty, and racial difference are anything but indeterminate.
If Virgin Machine raises the question of race, Father brings ethnicity, Germanness, and the Shoah into earshot. In one scene, Vicki and her father are refused service at a Jewish deli, whose owners ask her father what he did during the Nazi years. Panicked, he dashes to the women's room, where a comforting Annie Sprinkle awaits him in another feminine, white sexual sanctuary. Klotz compares: "Like the Tenderloin prostitute in Virgin Machine, the memory of the Holocaust, marked by Jewish anger and German guilt, is left at the periphery of the films' frame of reference. … It is invoked as a vague source of discomfort for the main [white, predominantly German] characters, who are nevertheless able to escape it."[26]
Virgin Machine thus admits the influences of nation, class, and ethnicity upon identity and desire, only, it would seem, to deflect them. The presence of fluent German-speaking adults from South America in San Francisco, for instance, remains curiously unexplained. Because Treut refused to grant nationhood any real authority, Germany becomes a disintegrated text that recedes, much as it did at the end of The Patriot. And, like that film, political and historical issues potentially recede along with it.
VIRGIN MACHINE AND BODY CAMP
Virgin Machine makes its connection to gender performativity literally in several performances, most overtly the drag scene in which Shelly Mars
Ramona's drag striptease in Treut's Virgin Machine
In contrast to the boisterous club show, the sex scene between Dorothee and Ramona is shot without sound in a private setting with minimal background. It is a very intimate space. Elfi Mikesch's lush, near-expressionistic cinematography suggests the externalization of deep-seated desire (and, indeed, Dorothee has been dying to get Ramona in bed). At first, this love scene appears to rally against the idea of the body as constructed virgin machine. In contrast to the denaturalizing drag sequence, here women's parts—breasts, skin, lips, eyes—seem lovingly and naturally situated on the two figures. (That it is Ramona's character in each sequence only intensifies
Ramona and Dorothee's sex scene in Virgin Machine
Importantly, Virgin Machine does not try to locate resistance in lesbian or transgendered sexualities or in crossdressing, nor does it construct male or heterosexual female bodies as intrinsically flawed or politically repugnant.[27] Regarding the women campily performing womanhood in Virgin Machine, womanhood is not sent up or put down, but simply put on.
Clearly Treut's bodies are less brutalized by the overlayered systems, economies, and technologies of desire than in a film like The Power of Emotion, where "unhappy feelings are worth more." Virgin Machine shows an eroticism and physical pleasure that is more or less missing from Kluge's ironic materialism. Although I hesitate to discuss these issues in terms of character, it is nevertheless instructive to note how often Kluge withholds pleasure from his film figures. And even if his filmgoers might form productive, pleasurable connections, the terms of the connection-making remain pretty much set: Germany's history, its enduring educational and cultural power plants, and the rationalized systems in which human labor, bodies, and emotions operate. Kluge's and Treut's aims and contexts are quite different, to be sure: Kluge was interested in institutional oppression
As Dorothee merrily rides her vehicle in the final scene, we have one of German cinema's few examples of forward-looking endings and active beginnings. It provides a stark contrast to the long, static take of the couple staring blankly in a motionless car at the end of The Power of Emotion. We can also recall the end of The Patriot, as history teacher Gabi Teichert, a figure with even less agency, "looks forward to the new materials" of the upcoming year. Dorothee's future, by contrast, not only looks good, but her past is camped up rather than dug up. Treut's deconstruction absolutely lacks the sense of ruination and loss that pervades Kluge (or Fassbinder's) films. Redemption is not needed here. Yet, at the same time, part of the freedom intimated by Treut's work seems a consequence of unasked questions about race, nation, history, and class—in spite of provocative details like San Francisco's poor white prostitute and its South American Germans.
FANTASY FLOATS
If the last image from Treut's Virgin Machine implies a queer "pushing off" from the New German Cinema, Ulrike Ottinger's Madame X demonstrates that nascent queer issues and aesthetics were well at work during the movement's heyday. Early films like Madame X treat female bodies as icons of resplendent, stylized physicality in an even campier fashion than Treut. Ottinger is at pains to show what might be called the de-idealization behind idealization and the dystopian side of female fantasies and desires. Madame X's references come from a wide array of contexts: feminist literature and theory, the economic problems female filmmakers faced at the time of the New German Cinema, clichéd depictions of women handed down by Hollywood melodrama, the worlds of homosocial pirate movies, Nazi iconography, and lesbian utopias. Like Ottinger's subsequent films Freak Orlando and Dorian Gray, Madame X is obsessed with props, objects, noises, music, and voice.
Like most good fantasies, the plot line of Madame X is minimal. Madame X is the leader of a pirate ship sailing for the "south seas," who
At this point, Madame X's own "adventures" are worth mentioning. When it was released in the late 1970s, established feminist audiences in Germany and abroad preferred socially relevant documentaries and autobiographical filmmaking by female directors. Madame X was very badly received;[28]frauen und film didn't even deign to review it. (Treut was one of the few to step to its defense.) Ottinger seems to have anticipated criticisms that her film traded in fetishism and eroticized power—which is precisely the point. The film is in poor taste, as we hear the voice-over remark while Madame X examines booty acquired from the yacht she raided: "Madame X felt disgust at all this incredible, luxurious bad taste." Whereas, diegetically, the repulsion is a response to the extravagant possessions of the upper-class boaters, the film deliberately produces its own stockpile of "incredible bad taste." Clearly an attack on the realist agenda of women's filmmaking in Germany of the time, Ottinger refers to Madame X as "a comedy about feminism" interlaced with fascist parable and lesbian fantasy. As for her stylistic decisions, she states: "When an elderly woman carries a bucket of coal that is too heavy for her to make it to the top of the stairs, I can help her or not help her. If I don't help her, it's not going to be a film
Role-playing marks Madame X from the start. No attempt is made to disguise the fact that the China seas on which the boat sails is staid old Lake Constance—revealing the film's low budget. (At this point in the history of the New German Cinema, it seems utterly reasonable for a female director to fantasize about pirating the bounty her male colleagues had been reaping.) Female characters are introduced one by one in voice-overs, dashing any coherent diegetic world or verisimilitudinous presentation. Betty Brillo is introduced in freeze frame, recounting her life in terms of her relationship to a generic "him," her solipsistic husband. Frozen in her kitchen, the prolonged shot sends the message that she was locked in a role that was itself stuck. Other figures enjoy more movement (but not more satisfaction): artist Josephine de Collage, played by filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, glides around on roller skates, reading philosophical, aesthetic, and political treatises; flyer Omega Centauri has a star dyed onto the top of her head, a shorthand for her fondness of the heavens. Flora Tannenbaum, clad in hunter's green, is introduced while taking her morning coffee at a small table in the middle of the woods. "Native" Noa Noa—a nod to Gauguin's colonialist erotics[30]—and Miss Blow-Up, Italian glamour queen, come straight from central casting.
It would be hard to refute that these icons appear unfulfilled by their clichéd roles, given their readiness to escape to the high seas. Yet their hyperbolized depiction makes such a point rather moot. Reduced to campy archetypes, these women are simply figures used to stage an exotic escape fantasy. Like many other characters in the New German Cinema, they cannot be psychologized. As Patricia White has argued, "The ‘characters’ are not realistic. Nor are they allegorical. They serve as so many figures in a mise-en-scene of female bodies which work through specific possibilities and scenarios of desire within the background fantasy of the pirate ship, the women's movement, lesbian utopia."[31]
THE SOUNDS OF HYBRIDITY
Good camp that it is, Madame X highlights the material, sensual features of its figures: their makeup, their costumes, their movements. After the crew's pirate raid, the booty is inventoried so as to underscore its lush physicality: "Ninety-seven cushions of crimson damask laid with silver parchments, footstools with cloth tissue, and thirteen yellow satin chairs." As these references to textures, fabrics, and tactility demonstrate, camp is
Not incidentally, homosexuality has been read in much the same way. Diana Fuss writes that "[i]n its popular incarnations … [homosexuality] is ‘gleaned’ from the surface of the body. [H]omosexuals are said to distinguish themselves by their extravagant dress, their exaggerated mannerisms, their hysterical intonations, their insatiable oral sex drives, and their absurd imitations of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ behavior."[32] Putting aside the absurdity of taking such tendencies for ontological truths, Fuss's remarks underscore the extent to which homosexual identity, so aligned with the play of appearance, finds a parallel in camp. Camp's key terms come from visual cultures: "cliché" from photographic reproduction; "mimicry," from mime performance and from colonial and African-American cultures. Rather than simply reconceptualize camp's "surface" as visual image, both Ottinger and Treut use sound and music as components of camp's material surfaces.
Treut's Virgin Machine is filled with sounds that scream out their physicality: traffic, bikes, boats, planes, wind, rain, dripping faucets, typing, telephones, television sets—the sounds are edited in, amplified, goofy in their noticeability. Most of them provide imaginary commentary on what is visually depicted. When Dorothee and her brother stage a puppet drama recounting a story of happiness forfeited for love, we hear the camped-up sounds of a frenzied thunderstorm. When she ponders the socio-sexual aspects of biological love, we hear chimpanzees; elsewhere and throughout the film, we hear children and dogs. The sounds of animals provide a fascinating motif in a film intent on blurring boundaries like German/non-German; lesbian/nonlesbian; organic/mechanical. (Significantly, Treut's production company is named Hyena Films, after the animal that has features of two sexes.) Dorothee's ambiguously sexualized friend, Dominique, states that her "great love" is her scrappy cat, a remark that is just a playful statement of fact. These animal motifs help primordialize the desires that run every which way in Virgin Machine. They also evince a sense of physical embodiedness that endures despite the film's deconstruction of human gender and sexuality. Mixed species, mixed genders: Treut's hybrids reinscribe nature, while simultaneously questioning what is considered natural.
Virgin Machine is just as heterogeneous in its use of music. Queer in its very eclecticism, it includes music that is contemporary and electronic, and some that is vaguely classical. A schmaltzy tune recurs in bits and pieces, an all-female band performs jazz (diegetically), and different contemporary pop music forms appear over the course of the film. The disco-inflected "When Boys Talk" accompanies Ramona's performance at the club. Most other pieces are styled after the grunge rock popular in the United
| I thought I was a snake | |
| Crawling on the ground | |
| I thought I was a dog | |
| Barking like a hound | |
| I thought I was a cat | |
| Howling at the moon. |
Sound is an important prop for fantasy, and Ottinger's film also has no reservation about using it to camp up her proceedings. A heartbeat, for instance, accompanies Karla Freud-Goldmond, revealing the official, quantifying form of scientific inquiry she represents. Although familiar musical pieces like "The Leader of the Pack" and Satie's "La diva de l'empire" appear in the film (accompanying the biker mama and Miss Blow-Up, respectively), music is for the most part treated like so many sound effects and is often indistinguishable from them. We hear nondiegetic roars of lions and other animals, as in Virgin Machine. Human voices, for the most part, fall somewhere between language, song, and rhythmic sound. The film was postdubbed, and most of the soundtrack is nonsynchronous, increasing the distances between image and sound source. When the crew attacks a fish to eat, for instance, we hear seagulls. It is an acoustic cliché that renders the female characters both hunter and prey, birds and fish (the sexual connotations of which are further developed in the lion's roars and the purring of pussycats that accompany characters like X). Like Virgin Machine, Madame X uses animal sounds to stress a raw form of instinctual desire. Beyond that, they evoke specific historical and cultural references, namely the MGM lion. At once corporate and primal, human and not, that hybrid sound turns acoustic fidelity into a joke, borrowing clichés from outside the diegesis, along with their cultural baggage. Cinematic sound does not provide a stabilizing source as it might in the form of character dialogue; instead it becomes as decorative and campy as the film's visual clichés.
Dialogue is no exception. The meaningful aspects of language deteriorate quickly in the film. At the beginning, Rainer's voice reads X's invitation in English. But Madame X quickly moves on to a Babel-like mixture of German, English, Russian, and other languages, steering clear of any anchoring language (say, German) and moving towards groans, roars, and other nonlinguistic sounds. Jungle noises join the abundant cackles, whoopees, and applause on the soundtrack, sounds that grow increasingly primordial as the tyrant's control of ship and crew intensifies. The fractured
In Ottinger's subsequent film, Ticket of No Return, language deteriorates just as quickly, at least as a meaningful form of communication. Few of the film's figures actually speak. One who does, Lutze, the "bag lady" (Betty Brillo from Madame X), babbles constantly, and her fragmented speech races from one unfinished thought to another. The trio of "Houndstooth Women" tonelessly recite social rules and regulations at various points in the film. The glamorous protagonist (again performed with sartorial splendor by Tabea Blumenschein), out to drink herself to death, is silent through almost the entire film. As the drinker's outfits grow increasingly cumbersome, sounds become more abstract and noticeable—literally obstreperous, signs of the glamour that becomes too much for her to support. At the end of the film, the character appears in a crinkly, metallic dress reminiscent of Lili Marleen's, as she moves away from the camera in a hallway full of mirrors. As she walks, we hear what sounds like crushed shards of glass: the sound, perhaps, of an "image" breaking.
In a 1981 interview, Ottinger said:
In my opinion film should not be based on dialogue. It makes the film lack a certain sensuality which I find very important. … The relation of image to objects is quite different than that of words to objects. This is not to say that I consider words or sound to be superfluous. To the contrary, I am making very conscious use of sound. I am working with twelve tracks to achieve the kind of sound rhythm I want. But again, this sound rhythm does not rely on language alone but equally as much on music and noises, also on fragments of various things.[33]
This emphasis on the physical aspect of sounds, music, and noise is very much in keeping with camp's interest in surface, effect, and facade and the feel and texture of objects. It is as if Ottinger detached sounds from their standard contexts and cut them into pieces. Sounds retain their cultural and historical associations, but are sent up for fun—and possible critique. Consider the pecking birds and the hungry women, Madame X and the MGM lion, jungle music and Noa Noa.
MADAME AND MELODRAMA
It is not for nothing that Ottinger's film—and its dictatorial lead—are named Madame X, for X is a generic marker that denotes an empty space
By splitting the character of X into two figures, Ottinger acknowledges the number of women who have already inhabited the position of the "universally exchangeable" Woman, whether as "absolute ruler" of the German seas or the fallen mother of Hollywood's oft-told story of "Madame X."[36] In this repeatedly, if not compulsively, remade melodrama, a husband discovers his wife's extramarital affair (actual or presumed, according to the version) and casts her out of his well-to-do family. Stripped of her name and access to her beloved son, Madame X ends up on skid row, destitute, mortally ill, and on trial for murder. Her son has grown up to be a public defender and is given her case, and he remains oblivious to her identity even as she discovers his.[37]"Madame X" was an exotic, sexualized cipher, in addition to playing melodrama's clichéd scorned and/or fallen woman and sacrificial mother.
On the one hand, Ottinger shifts that self-deprecating melodramatic function onto other characters, who are completely subservient to X. On the other hand, she casts that function out of the film entirely: whereas the Madame X that Hollywood fetishized was barred from the world of family and childrearing, Ottinger's character profits precisely from this renegade status, reveling in her illegitimacy and lawlessness. But the director retains X's status as a fetish object, to the apparent consternation of feminists at frauen und film. Significantly, as Patricia White's comments made clear, Ottinger's X is the fetish object of women's desires, not of the male producers and consumers enthralled by her repeated undoing in the American melodramas. Hers is clearly a very different rendering of women's melodrama than we saw at work in Malou, Marianne and Juliane, and Germany, Pale Mother.
Ottinger simultaneously overpresents and underworks melodramatic codes. If the past partly defines Madame X's present world, for instance, it does not fully determine it. A character comments that Orlando is an odd name for a boat and is told, "It goes back to a past event … an old love of
In contrast to other films of New German Cinema discussed here, Madame X is reluctant to let its female characters "stay dead." Orlando lives on in the name of X's boat. Its crew returns at the end of the film, reincarnated as wild new stereotypes. Ottinger does not treat death as a sacred act or a redemptive ritual, as it had been for some of the movement's male characters. Nor is death punitive of feminine characters, as it was in Wagner's Parsifal or Kluge's The Patriot:
Death in [Madame X] is a metaphor for change. If we really want to change, something within us must die in order to let the new arise on the emotional level. It means that old seemingly immutable structures are being taken seriously. For even if we know in our head how we should act, we fall back on our feelings, again and again. But feelings can be reeducated, only this is a terribly long process, it is almost an organic event, it is a kind of death.[39]
Ottinger's cameo depicts her reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando, a novel that, like her film, reworked the past through a gendered lens. The book was a crucial part of feminist history for women in the 1970s and 1980s. As Ottinger says (as much about the boat as the book), "Orlando stands for a utopia, the utopia of a total love everyone knows doesn't exist—and Orlando is the ideal of the past, which sets up another utopia."[40] The director states that she was drawn to Woolf's Orlando, "this character who was able to change sex and who lived over centuries. Some things remained constant while others changed—and I really liked that."[41] If the reincarnations at the end of her film simply restock female fantasies with new object-forms with which to repeat the fantasy, so be it. That is how fantasy operates.
Ottinger not only refuses to victimize her "X," but turns the figure into a victimizer. Governing in the most absurd, "absolute" fashion, she kills off most of her crew by the end of the film. Her decisions and desires remain unexplained—the flashback only explains the name of her ship, her lost lover, and her lost forearm. No warm, fuzzy womyn's utopia here. The film throws lesbian desires into a hokey and deliberately politically incorrect fantasy. Outfitting Madame X's double in a tight black leather outfit offended
Madame X's double strikes a pose in Ottinger's Madame X. Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin-Deutsche Kinemathek.
Both Madame X and her double, the figurehead of the boat, move with the jerkiness of automatons and ocnophiliac military officials. German history is inscribed through the campy Sieg Heils of X's prosthetic hand, something that Patricia White refers to as a "joke on castration."[42] But be this a joke on Nazi ritual or its homoerotic cult of male authority, a joke is always more than a joke. The "absolute power" of the robotic Madame X's Sieg Heil, for instance, cannot be dismissed as reckless Nazi kitsch (for one thing, associating it with a queer/lesbian body complicates such a reading).
To be sure, the reference of Madame X's saluting blade could hardly be lost on anyone. Yet the "universe of ready-made feelings" may not be as expansive as Bourdieu maintains, since reception contexts will always cause that universality to fluctuate. The initial audience of Ottinger's film offers a case in point. Fractured, it included young Germans exploring their country's recent history and feminists interested in representing women's social issues. The feminist filmmaking community was heavily biased towards realist documentary. With such a complex, contradictory initial reception context (not to mention the film's subsequent interpretation as hyperbolic camp or as a "joke on castration"), it seems that the "universe of ready-made feelings" to which Bourdieu refers is not so much universal as particularly relevant here to women (lesbians in particular) and queers.
FEMINIST CAMP AND FANTASY
Fantasy is a critical part of camp, and its mechanisms undergird Madame X's outrageous gestures, characters, and objects. Laplanche and Pontalis famously defined "phantasies [as] still scripts of organised scenes which are capable of dramatization—usually in visual form."[44] Add sound and you've got cinema. Fantasy uses artifacts that are not usually the stuff of exotic or erotic play. Banal objects can become psychically charged, and their historical references awakened, when placed into these self-conscious scenarios. In that sense, fantasy shares camp's (and allegory's) reworking of familiar objects and ideas, loading extra representational and libidinal weight upon them.
An important definitional component of fantasy is that it is not the object of desire, but rather its support, a structure in which it is performed. As Lacan argued, the "subject participates in and restages a scenario [in fantasy] in which crucial questions about desire, knowledge, and identity can be posed and in which the subject can hold a number of identificatory positions." Fantasy, in this regard, " is not the object of desire but its setting." Objects are tools, not the things themselves, a point Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit make when they write that "the objects of our desires are always substitutes for the objects of our desires."[45] And, as Teresa de Lauretis and
Madame X establishes that, although fantasies affect us personally, they are not so much individually produced or willed as they are derived from existing social, cultural, and historical material. They make stories, to be sure, but in unusual ways and with denaturalized figures like Ottinger's dwarves, robotic figureheads, and impossibly glamorous suicides. She describes Madame X, for instance, as "not a person, but a powerful double character. As the figurehead, it's clear that she's a mechanical doll, an apparatus of power. As the real Madame X, queen of the pirates, she gets around no less mechanically—a double presence of power."[47]
In the 1960s, Jean Baudrillard explained the West's reliance on surfaces in terms of fetishism. He wanted to wrest that word from psychoanalysis (the only place, he argued, where it was associated with lack) and return it to its etymological roots: to imitate by signs, to feign, fake. The lie of fetishism explains the object's fascinating hold over the subject, whose passion is generated not for the fetish-object itself, he argues, but for the code, the abstract system to which both subject and object are subordinated. Baudrillard turns to the body as the supreme example of a fetish-object built upon artifice, "Signs perfect the body into an object in which none of its real work (the work of the unconscious or psychic and social labor) can show through."[48]
Baudrillard warns that signs can psychically take over a referent, a process with real risks in historical representation. But along with the threat of replacing experiences or objects, fetishes also dramatize the irretrievability of the object or condition they designate. (And, of course, our desires and identities are intricately bound up in these "stand-ins.") The fetish is really a psychically heightened form of allegory, an enhanced object that disguises absences or deficiencies. In Marxism, the commodityfetish is granted apparent magical powers (e.g., a fancy new car will improve your life), while the labor that went into its production is effaced. In psychoanalysis, the fetish is loaded with greater erotic allure since it veils the lacks and fissures that help constitute subjectivity, tempting us into believing that we have fuller access to power or to fulfilling our desires than we actually do. And since no discussion of the fetish is replete without reference to the phallus, the ultimate prop upon which conventional male power depends, we note that because the penis can imitate but never fully equal the phallus, it is a prop that can be detached from the male body. Its power as a prop for fantasy is infinitely displaceable onto any number of scenarios, bodies, or objects, as we saw in Virgin Machine. That mobility is important enough for Bersani and Dutoit to label the fetishist a "hero of
FANTASY, CAMP, AND HISTORY
Both camp and fantasy showcase their objects and artifacts, and both prioritize exploration over aim. Camp-driven films like Madame X and Virgin Machine are not goal-driven, especially when compared to the strict mourning work of Syberberg and others. To say that camp lacks a goal, however, is not to say that camp and kitsch are historically unmotivated or meaningless—quite the contrary—but that their function in these queer German films goes beyond guilt and atonement by exploring fantasy and desire. As Elsaesser notes, films like The Producers (Brooks, 1967) and Cabaret (Fosse, 1972) were early camp responses to the German past precisely for having used history as a setting, establishing an open rapport "with history, sexuality, and the body."[51]
As "staged setting," fantasy is closely enmeshed not only with history but with cinema, one of fantasy's biggest social and representational technologies. Its screens are sites for fantasies to be projected onto and repeatedly replayed, what Cowie calls "public forms of fantasy."[52] This further contravenes the idea that fantasy is a private or volitional affair. And if neither fantasy nor history can attain its object, the impact of earlier events leaves remnants of ideas, desires, people, and objects in their wake. Those leftovers can signal their earlier presence and meanings, as well as point to new ones. Thus choosing which objects to use for staging and approaching history is crucial, for selection permits certain stories and desires to be articulated and others to be left behind.
Camp denaturalizes. Similarly, Anton Kaes has observed how history is not naturalized, particularly in Germany: "Hitler has become today, literally, Hitler, a Film from Germany,"[53] a figure so reproducible as to be political history's equivalent of the Mona Lisa. In Syberberg's film, he appears in a toga and rises from Wagner's tomb, Sieg Heil ing as if in imitation of Chaplin's imitation of him in The Great Dictator (1940); Ottinger's depiction of Madame X clearly borrows from Germany's "absolute tyrant." If it is impossible to naturalize Germany's past—whose horrific unrepresentability has been the source of so many debates—why not, as some argue, stage it at its most extreme and take it to campy limits?[54] Most critics, however, sweep camp's historical dimensions to the side, even if they have been happy to produce a variety of histories of camp. They tend
Hitler's campy return in Our Hitler
For others writing more recently, camp is so "lost" to history that it no longer exists: its furtive quest for scraps, its impassioned ambivalence (for instance, to mainstream heterosexual culture), its unspoken ambiguities, and its reliance on hidden codes are practices many critics would rather consign to the realm of the closet.[56] For some, its purported frivolousness makes it simply inappropriate for gay communities coping with AIDS and HIV. In 1994, David Roman wrote that contemporary camp was a fleeting retreat into a "pre-AIDS moment."[57] For Philthee Ritz / Martin Worman,
Ironically, such arguments are themselves beholden to a certain nostalgia, lamenting the passing of a purportedly authentic camp form. What "ruined" camp? Pamela Robertson argues that, given how widely camp is understood as a gay, male phenomenon, critics often blame some vaguely feminized force for pulling it from its edgy gay margins into the tainted (and again, feminized) spheres of consumer culture, postmodern play, or political fraudulence. Clearly, constructing camp as only a gay male phenomenon galvanizes these antinomies, which feminize popular consumer practices and masculinize the edgier, critical ones. It also feeds on the clichéd belief that only gay male culture is visible, or "out." Lesbianism is somehow tucked away in hard-to-find interior spaces of all-female clubs or feline-occupied homes.
Traditions that yoke femininity with theatricality, performance, decorative surface, adornment, and emotional intensity, while interesting, do not provide an adequate explanation to the gendering of camp. What are women's relationships to camp like? Camp to femininity? Why do female icons in male camp outnumber male ones in women's camp? Why are so many shared? Robertson argues that to ignore these questions implies not only a "one-way traffic" but one in which "women are camp but do not knowingly produce themselves as camp and, furthermore, do not even have access to a camp sensibility. Women, by this logic, are objects of camp and subject to it but are not camp subjects."[59] That idea takes form in the misogynist elements of some gay camp and its theoretical elaborations, among which the most astonishing remains Bersani's assertion that camp "lovingly assassinates" a certain form of femininity.[60]
Feminist scholars in the 1980s and early 1990s debated the "place" of camp in feminist practice, wondering whether gay male practices had erased either the term or its use-value to women. Since the mid-1990s, anticamp feminist positions have been nuanced or overturned by lesbian and feminist critics like Robertson, Carole Ann Tyler, and others, who explore women's place in camp as producers and consumers as well as its objects. Today, "women's camp" remains a contested term, but critics are finally exploring a wider variety of practices, like those that eschew misguided "assassinations"
FEMINIST CAMPS
Ever the good pirate, Ottinger raids heterosexual male cultures for her fetishes. Taking clichéd heroines like the housewife, the screen star, the half-clad native, Ottinger literally casts them into scenarios of female desires whose complicity with traditional male power Sabine Hake likens to "a central scene within Orientalism, a scene characterized by a similar excess of femininity and claustrophobic mise-en-scène: the harem."[62](Robertson, for her part, describes Belcanto as an "inverted fag hag"; Hansen considers him a dandy.) Given that the fetishistic allure of the film's power-mad figures and clichés remains intact, it is not surprising that Madame X made its initial critics uncomfortable. For Ottinger's "perverse pleasures," to recall Elsaesser, involve domination as well as being dominated—one certainly risky to post-Nazi audiences, particularly in Germany. What made Madame X such a controversial film for 1970s feminists is that, instead of using fantasy to temper unpleasant political situations, it drew out these undesirable attributes and refused to de-eroticize them.
That refusal to indict unsanctioned objects is part of the process of disidentification already raised in this study. José Esteban Muñoz argues that disidentification involves appropriating the tacky, offensive mainstream depictions of lesbians, queer Latinos, and other minoritarian groups. As he puts it, disidentification is an "anti-normative option" that neither identifies with / assimilates these images nor rejects or counteridentifies against them. Instead, it is a third option that acknowledges both the allure and the undesirability of those representations to disenfranchised groups in a kind of collision of minoritarian identities and mainstream agendas. Muñoz writes that the "actual performativity" of B-grade icons and other over-the-top mainstream representations (such as B-actress Maria Montez, gaudy harem fantasies) "surpasses simple fetishization." Tacky oriental fantasies can become "rich anti-normative treasure troves of queer possibility," where pleasure, desire, anger, and political alternatives coexist. What is interesting is that Muñoz describes the negative representations that trigger disidentifactory practices as "toxic" or "oncetoxic"
What do the rituals of Nazism and the conventions of the pirate movie have in common with camp? Generally, all are perceived as the domain of men. Ottinger's film—and queer minoritarian criticism like Muñoz's, twenty-five years later—thumbs that perspective. As Pamela Robertson argues, female-centered camp like Madame X offers a "parodic play between subject and object in which the female spectator laughs at and plays with her own image … distancing herself from her own image by making fun of, and out of, that image—without losing sight of the real power that image has over her."[64]
Once Madame X has summoned her icons and gathers them on board, she (and the film) fragments everything, reducing figures to abstract fetish parts and pieces. We see the materials, the props of which women's fantasy and adventures are made. Even the boat seems headed for a self-contained female community, not unlike the "queer havens" of Monika Treut's work. Orlando's aimless, drifting ride highlights the indeterminacy of its movement and the floating desires and identities of its multigendered riders. Its voyage is rather different from Dorothee's. Dorothee's trajectory from Germany to San Francisco is clear: she moves from male heterosexual understandings of sex to queer, female-directed ones. That linear momentum is highlighted when Dorothee leaves image-fragments of her homeland behind as she bicycles forward. By contrast, Ottinger's Ticket of No Return and Madame X withhold a sense of progression or resolution. Like their adventurers, the films just wander about. In Madame X, not only are characters reincarnated at the film's end, but its narrative structure intimates the "relaunching" of another version, another boat ride, establishing that fantasy is transportable and not terminable. Could this be a comment on spectators' likely nomadic entries and reentries into the film's fantasy worlds? It certainly shows that fantasy cannot arrive at a conclusion, but can only be repeated with variations, just as desire ceases to exist if fulfilled—its aim simply is to reproduce itself. We may liken this to the nonlinear economy and serial structures of melancholia. Here, though, there is less an overt appeal to a listening or observing outsider than a comment on the allure of going to the cinema for its enticing sights and sounds, over and over again.
MOVING INTO HISTORY
The critics who consider camp to be marked by fads with no "serious" relation to history may be trying to strengthen their claims for the difficulty of defining it in the first place. Or perhaps they are trying to ward off the notions of immanence or authenticity that can be unwittingly (and ironically) invoked, as with the contention that "true" camp only existed before AIDS. Whatever their motivation, if camp were not a historical phenomenon, I believe that critics wouldn't be able to pronounce it dead or obsolete in the first place. Still, in spite of the many histories of camp, far less attention has been paid to camp as a form of historical representation, or to its historiographic assumptions. Critics like Kuzniar, Robertson, White, Timothy Corrigan, Richard Dyer, Gary Indiana, Johannes von Moltke, Bruce Williams, and others have begun to do this.
Significantly, all of these writers have turned to German film and to the New German Cinema for examples. In the Introduction, I mentioned von Moltke's essay on Hannah Schygulla.[65] He argues that her image and acting style fit comfortably within contemporary understandings of camp, an understanding inflected by Butler's contention that gender is established through a series of performative acts, and not as an inherent phenomenon. The instability of Schygulla's image corroborates his point. Is she a hack actress from the hinterland? Dietrich reincarnate? Decadent Hollywood glamour? Unattractive? Gorgeous? (That Schygulla posed some of these questions herself indicates the presence of camp's vaunted self-consciousness.) Schygulla's image, moreover, is closely bound to questions of national identity. She performs "Germanness," be it through characters like Maria Braun or Lili Marleen (national allegories themselves), through her relationship to Fassbinder (again, recalling von Sternberg and Dietrich), or as a result of her public reception (recall that a fan tells her, "You were wonderful as Eva Braun").[66] With films and reception doubly nationalizing Schygulla, one detects, as von Moltke does, how she might "represent the nation and its history as a drag performance put on by a particular body."[67]
Von Moltke goes on to develop Andrew Ross's claim that camp produces "surplus value from forgotten forms of labor" (Ross's example was Hollywood glamour). For the New German Cinema, however, one such "forgotten form" was the "labor of remembering and forgetting" Germany's war and postwar past.[68] Camp thus becomes a strategy of remembrance that differs appreciably from the "inability to mourn" asserted by the Mitscherlichs. Rather than commemorating the past through lamentation, camp's "mnemonics put not only the ‘cult of Hollywoodiana’ (Ross), but an abiding sense of spectacle and of performativity back into
Curiously, von Moltke minimizes camp's activity beyond American shores and comes close to saying that camp is a specifically American phenomenon.[70] This is partly a consequence of his choice of examples: Ross's work and his reference to "‘Hollywoodiana’"; filtering Fassbinder's cinema through Hollywood melodrama or through director John Waters's confession to secretly adoring the late German art director. Once touched by American reception, it would seem, as in the instance of Fassbinder by Waters, German films can return home as camp. Von Moltke characterizes domestic audiences of the New German Cinema as having stuck more or less to the films' literal, immediate referents, an observation that we saw made by historians like Eric Rentschler. "Von Praunheim's admiration for Tally Gown," von Moltke states, "provides a good example of a kind of German camp which picks up on figures and icons that have already been made over into camp in the United States."[71] Significantly, this is one of his few remarks on von Praunheim, one of the movement's campiest Autoren. And while there is no question about von Praunheim's savvy regarding U.S. camp figures,[72] von Moltke seriously underestimates the extent to which German and other non-U.S. artists have utilized their own cultures for camp purposes. In fact, some of his own observations demonstrate the fundamentally German nature of Fassbinder's campiness, such as the overthe-top spectacle of Nazi machinery in Lili Marleen, Schygulla's reincarnations of Dietrich, or the use of Wagner in Syberberg and Herzog. Von Moltke presents an interesting afterimage of the oft-cited fact that the New German Cinema itself was "created" on foreign shores, named by New York critics, and more welcomed abroad than at home. But it should be noted that even German-on-German camp generates no more sense of national cultural unity or interpretive truths than German-American-German camp processes might.
Rosa von Praunheim's Anita: Dances of Vice offers a prime example of how a queer, camp aesthetic operates within and outside of a German context. Important for our purposes is its soundtrack, which demonstrates in no uncertain terms that music can operate as a form of historically sensitive camp.
GERMAN FILM, GERMAN MUSIC, AND GERMAN QUEERS
As one of gay cinema's most outspoken participants, von Praunheim is about as out of the closet as you can be. Producing "home movies for the gay movement"[73] for over thirty years, von Praunheim is a key, and controversial, figure in gay German cinema and in German culture more generally. On German television, he has outed public figures in government and show business communities; his films have been denounced and boycotted by gays; he and Fassbinder openly aired their mutual dislike; his flare-ups with colleagues are as renowned as his flair for parties.
Von Praunheim's long reign as queen of gay German cinema makes evident how queer that cinema is, but I want to stress that German film history has never been un queer, historical limitations of the term "queer" notwithstanding. To be sure, queer authors, producers, and texts have shaped cinema cultures around the world, even if much of that influence was through censorship or displacement. In other words, whether as structuring absences or presences, same-sex "deviancies" have been played out even in the most repressive film histories, and in the most tediously straight systems. Again, this is true most anywhere, but with Germany, conventional histories and pedagogies have taken homoerotic films into account,[74] even if the films were not always apprehended as such. Texts such as Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagen, 1931) and Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends hold significant places in German film history at large, as well as within lesbian and gay cultures, and in the formation of a queer German cinema, a point that signals the existence of concurrent histories, readings, and reception contexts. These films were not met with stable consensus or interpretative homogeneity as "gay," "not gay," "about" other things, and so forth. For years, Mädchen was primarily read as a treatise against authoritarianism or lambent fascism, until B. Ruby Rich's groundbreaking piece in 1981 helped pull its lesbianism center court.[75] Consider also the debate precipitated by Fox and His Friends among Bob Cant, Andrew Britton, and Richard Dyer, who objected to the film's use of homosexual lifestyle as a metaphor for economic exploitation. At the time, Fassbinder retorted that a film with gay characters should not have to be principally "about" gay themes.
Queer criticism has reshaped musicology as well. As I mentioned briefly in chapter Four, some scholars maintain that insofar as tonality requires a stabilizing tonal center, and insofar that, as a system, it provides western culture with the sense of a musical "norm," it functions as a sort of heterosexual ground to homosexuality's "formal" deviances—excessive chromaticism, flourishes, weaknesses—which carry the threat to
I will return below to the idea of sexuality taking residence in musical forms. What I like about Scherzinger and Hoad's work is that they find alternatives, otherness, and the "unwanted" within dominant form, and do that within a solid historical framework. I want now to look at how two other concepts, nation and national identity, have been used to produce gendered norms in music and film studies.
Let's start by way of the cinema. American-centeredness is structured into a great deal of introductory courses on film studies. Early on, students learn the rules of continuity editing, three-point lighting, generic stipulations, and how the studio system operated. Only after the parameters of classical Hollywood film have been established are other filmmaking practices introduced: documentary, independent, and experimental cinema; new media; filmmaking in Africa and Asia; film movements like the New German Cinema. Of course, cinema is not always taught this way, and teachers turn increasingly to global, cross-cultural perspectives. Nevertheless,
In musicology, Germany has enjoyed a parallel kind of center and privilege, although there too, postcolonial, transnational, third world, and queer scholars have been eroding it. As Philip Brett noted some time ago in a piece on Franz Schubert, western art music was the "serious," worthy object of academic scrutiny.[79] Outlining a traditional undergraduate plan of study, Brett wrote that students first follow courses in "musicianship and harmony" with material likely drawn from "the canon of German music (Bach to Brahms) towards which the syllabus generally leans. The acquisition of skill is dependent on the tacit understanding of the superiority of this repertory: it is here that the ‘masterwork’ ideology is first and most effectively instilled."[80] What Brett identifies as "Teutonic abstraction" is further emphasized, he argues, in the harmony course, "in which the chief ingredient is likely to be the four-part chorale settings of J. S. Bach." These compositional techniques are taught as standard, and not as the series of elaborations that they are (most of the hymns Bach adapted were based on folk tunes). "The stage is set," Brett continues, "for the enormities of the Schenker system, in which masterworks are, as it were, Bach chorales writ large.’ "[81]
How does this involve gender? If German art music is the purported norm against which other music is measured, Teutonic culture can likewise be fictionalized as "straight," with only "other" musical cultures available for outing. That polarity might account for the openly recognized—read nonthreatening—homosexuality of a "decadent, effeminate" Russian composer like Tchaikovsky by western musicologists over the ages. Attempts to "out" Schubert, by contrast, have been treated as treasonous scandals. (The sexual aspects of composers' lives and music are usually relegated to quirky, inconsequential corners of individual biographies.) The ensuing binary model would have German musical culture occupying the space not only of aesthetic rigor and excellence, but of regulatory heterosexuality at its most virile and pure. "The central German canon," Brett explained, "must at all costs be preserved in its purity. The closeting of Schubert is of a similar order as the papering over of Wagner's anti-Semitism."[82](A character in Dr. Faustus makes an interesting remark that both confirms and refutes Brett's observations about the Germanness of art music: "In Germany music enjoys that respect among the people which in France is given to literature; among us nobody is put off or embarrassed, uncomfortably impressed, or moved to disrespect or mockery by the fact that a man is a musician.")[83]
The case Brett made in 1994 may appear overstated today, since musicology has been redefining its objects of study within newer critical frameworks, especially in Britain and North America. Brett's binarist understandings of sexuality may appear outmoded as well. Yet, given the residual effects of what he identifies, it is worth interrogating the gendered, sexual, and national attributes of musicological norms he identifies. For this, we return to von Praunheim.
Anita: Dances with Vice is an exuberant repudiation of a "pure" national culture at musical and all sorts of other levels. Though specifically German in its choice of subject, it is a fundamentally impure text, boasting a compendium of references to international cultural productions: Reefer Madness (Louis Gasnier, 1936), the Ballet Russe, Marat/Sade (Peter Brook, 1966), Ingrid Meyser, Christopher Isherwood, Rosa Luxemburg, and 1980s AIDS activism. Like many of von Praunheim's films, Anita takes a documentary topic as its starting point and quickly veers off into spectacular play and fantasy. The documentary component centers on the historical figure Anita Berber (1899–1928), a nude dancer popular in Weimar-era Berlin. She was an important fixture on the cultural scene, sitting for a stunning portrait by Otto Dix, performing small roles in Different from the Others and Dr. Mabuse (Lang, 1922). For von Praunheim, Berber was "a symbol of the decadence, the perversity, and the bisexuality, and the drugs of her time. I like these exaggerated figures."[84] Like her character in the film, Berber, who died of tuberculosis at twenty-nine, would dedicate her dances to "vice, horror, and ecstasy."
Scenes depicting Berber's story manifest anything but typical documentary restraint. Portrayed in heavily expressionistic, vibrantly colored, and wildly choreographed sequences, they are conjured from the mind of an elderly woman (the late Lotte Huber) who was picked up in contemporary Berlin for exposing herself in public, claiming to be Berber. (She is identified as a Frau Kutowski near the film's end.) Institutionalized, this woman waltzes into doctors' appointments she takes for adoring media interviews, and chides fellow patient "Rosa Luxemburg": "My revolution is to smash all restraints!" The psychiatric institution of present-day Germany—the less documentary, more invented portion of the film—is shot in drab black and white, occupying a much less stylized space than the scenes of the character's "past." Anita's life is presented as a series of delirious stagings that highlight artifice and impression over depth or historical objectivity. Von Praunheim uses the same actors to portray characters in the film's two different time periods, and sometimes, as in the case of Anita Berber, uses two actors to portray a single character. The young Anita of the 1920s is performed chiefly by Ina Blum (of Virgin Machine), but
The two Anita Berbers in von Praunheim's Anita: Dances of Vice. Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin-Deutsche Kinemathek.
The fragmentation of the film's performances and cultural references is matched by its equally diversified, collage-like use of music. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman aptly described the score as "honkeytonk Schoenberg," with popular American jazz, Igor Stravinsky, and Kurt Weill helping to form its acoustic contours.[87]Anita is as brash musically as it is visually, as
In its chaotic layers, the soundtrack militates against silence, suggesting that "Silence = Death," the slogan of AIDS activism, and the title of another film by von Praunheim. Early in Anita, Anita anguishes about "silence so loud that the eardrum explodes" in the hospital that by the end will be unable to "shut her up." In a way, the film's refusal of silence and acoustic decorum is a melancholic assertion. It is also a performance waged against the closet and other institutions that would try to regulate, medicalize, or remove disobedient desires.
This is not to say that Anita's score works beyond any sense of norm or constraint. Indeed, much of its strength and originality derives precisely from working within (and upon) styles, movements, and compositional techniques associated with Germany, such as serial music, cabaret and music hall jazz, even 1950s and 1960s avant-garde work of composers like Krzysztof Penderecki. Rarely soothing or harmonious, music is pushed into the foreground as it accompanies otherwise silent scenes from Anita's "memory," an indicator of its importance in this stylized history. Coupled with the film's other self-conscious formal elements—most of which work to recall Berlin culture and Weimar-era cinema—the music participates in the text's larger camp strategies which, through their attention to surface, sound, and matter, establish a peculiarly German text as quite queer and impure, formally and morally speaking. Within such a framework, the score need not be read against the grain, as has often been the case in queer hermeneutics, in search of hidden traces: it is, in a real sense, already "out." Moreover, the film's aesthetic strategies show a sensitivity to history not usually associated with camp. This is important for contemporary viewers and listeners wanting to challenge the moral, physical, or mental "defectiveness" still associated, nearly a century after the Weimar era, with AIDS.
Once the elderly Anita is taken away for exposing her rear to a small crowd on Berlin's Kurfürstendamm, we see her strapped to a hospital bed under a circular neon light bestowing a strangely poignant halo over her. After a brief, synthetically produced sound, which is less like music than dripping water, piano music enters in the form of a clear quotation (Rachmaninoff, Prelude in C-sharp, op. 3, no. 2), just as a color "flashback" of the young Anita (Blum) is briefly intercut. After an injection of Thorazine and her complaints of whispering voices and silence, the older woman finally screams "Music!" and shots of her performance as the young Anita begin.
There is still only a solo piano playing at this point, but the Rachmaninoff quotation has been replaced by desultory, atonal attacks. The piano here seems as isolated as the older woman first appears, and the unstable chords seem to provide a fitting acoustic accompaniment to the character's disjointed condition. Here Anita's score seems to adhere to the classical Hollywood convention of providing parallelism by whatever means possible. It does this thematically, by appearing in the alienating hospital setting; formally, by having no clear organizing tonal center; graphically, with piano solo accompanying a lone character; and lastly, as a way to telescope the interior state of that character. Yet, when we consider music along with other formal elements, it becomes clear that the music functions on the edges of that scoring tradition, a tradition that, as Raben stressed, never had a German equivalent. For Anita's evocation of possible insanity is quite different from Hollywood's depictions of the same. Before the 1950s, Hollywood scores tended to depict mental unsteadiness in isolated moments of anguish, yoking it to individualized characters, and not as part of an aesthetics of fragmentation sustained throughout an entire film.[89] Clichéd instrumentation, such as the theremin (The Lost Weekend[Wilder, 1945] and Spellbound[Hitchcock, 1945]), were used to convey characters' unstable episodes. Anita, by contrast, does not restrict that use of music to the hospital scene; it further violates classical precepts by making frequent, unexpected changes in the music over the course of the film. At the beginning of a sequence entitled "Nights at the El Dorado" (a famous gay bar in Berlin), the music moves from the soft violin solo of the preceding scene to a harsh, syncopated variation of a theme that had previously accompanied one of Anita's experimental dance performance-pieces. This cabaret-styled passage is in turn interrupted by a tango.
Anita's fractured memories, such as they are, are constituted largely by the dances she and her partner Droste perform. With little linearity, they follow the story of their careers, drug addiction, relationship, and deaths. The soundtrack is composed mainly in the style of popular music and art music of the time of Anita's story; particularly evident is the influence of Kurt Weill and the atonal experiments of art composers of the time. Importantly, the film does not use tone rows per se, even though Schoenberg had begun to develop his dodecaphonic system by the 1920s. Instead, it deploys
With its glut of cultural references, Anita is a veritable grab bag of icons from World War I and the Weimar era: a man with a scarred face and a onelegged prostitute are right out of George Grosz or Alfred Döblin, and Ina Blum's large-eyed Anita matches Isherwood's descriptions of Sally Bowles. As Anita and Droste's story unspools, the film offers its own visual impersonations of Expressionist cinema. Cragged hand-lettered intertitles appear during the "silent" scenes-within-the-film, and even the opening credit sequence that is intercut with Anita's butt-baring scene is rendered that way. The film uses unexpected camera angles, distorted lines, violations of Renaissance perspective, stark contrasts in color intensity, painted sets, and unconventional light sources from above and below the figures. Characters are heavily made up, particularly with kohl around the eyes—causing one reviewer to call Mikael Honosseau (Droste) "a Cesare lookalike"[91] and another to refer to the "skull-headed" Honosseau as "a Conrad Veidt for the ‘80s."[92] In some ways, the film's performance/flashback sequences are reminiscent of Max Reinhardt's antinaturalist theatre, in which "poetic space" (perhaps the space of Anita's fanciful reminiscences) springs to life not through realistic portrayals but through gesture, lighting, and set design.
The tropes of German Expressionism accomplish several things. Most obviously, they set the stage for a story lifted from interwar and Weimar Republic Berlin and placed upon the figure of Anita Berber. At the same time, the authenticity of the past is gently mocked and camped up. Since these scenes are staged from the elder Anita's mind—whether as a consequence of the Thorazine injections she receives, psychotic dementia, or actual memory is left significantly unclear—the film's Expressionist packaging intensifies the subjectivity of the history it tells. This, of course, was exactly the aim of Expressionist aesthetics: to represent an idea from "inside" a character's head, a notion used to delirious effect in the infamous narrational frame of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Expressionism's focus on subjectivity, though, should not be taken to indicate that an overesteemed, powerful individuality was at work. One need only consider the work of
For twenty-first-century viewers familiar with such dramatic Expressionistic flourishes, the effect is one of cliché rather than destabilization, a fact von Praunheim fully exploits through his campy aesthetic. At the same time, these cloying, familiar clichés abound with historical significance. For most of the film's camp effects are derived from icons of special importance to lesbian and gay subcultures, such as Berlin's queer cabarets and bisexual figures. Representation of gays, as Richard Dyer notes, "was part of the ambience of decadence in Weimar films" even at the time.[93]
Although Anita's score helps establish that historical and temporal setting, it does not produce a coherent diegetic world, as it might in classical Hollywood practice. Here too it refuses that function, less by contradictory, contrapuntal relationships between music and image—as Eisler might advocate—than by sheer overload, with no dialogue in the past sequences and no overbearing narrative direction or aim to guide them. Anita takes great pains to present a disorderly compendium of aesthetic references. Certainly no authority is conferred upon the musical bits that are scattered throughout the film, pieces that are at best approximations of earlier styles, and rarely direct quotes per se.[94] In fact, the film is best described as a repository of the acoustic and visual detritus of post-World War I Berlin, an irreverent use and abuse of its clichés and codes. Not unlike the soundtracks of Kluge, von Praunheim obliges the musical meanings of his film be "filled in" through engaged listening.
Anita's evocation of war and entre-guerre cultures, while mostly national in focus, includes references to other national cultures, like the Ballet Russe. Closely tied to the Parisian art scene, the troupe appeared in Berlin in 1910 with their new ballet (Schumann's Carnaval), which featured dazzling sets by Leon Bakst. Anita's set design is quite reminiscent of the tent-like curtains and the intense blues, reds, and golds favored by Bakst. Berber and Droste's dances move in seemingly indifference to the music, not unlike the dance-music relationship of the Ballet's 1912 production of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. In the only black-andwhite sequence definitively set in the past, "O, Wonderful Land of Dreams … the Incredible Power of Opium," Droste actually plays a satyrlike
Despite its now-secure place in the canon of European modernism, critics panned the Ballet Russe's production of Prélude for its purported moral and sexual degeneracy. This was a consequence less of the music than of Nijinsky's choreography and his performance as the faun, which included a scandalizing hand-to-crotch movement as he lay on a scarf at the conclusion of the ballet. Paris's Le Figaro ran a scalding front-page review, written by the editor himself: "This is neither a pretty pastoral nor a work of profound meaning. We are shown a lecherous faun, whose movements are filthy and bestial in their eroticism, and whose gestures are as crude as they are indecent. That is all. [It] was greeted with the booing it deserved."[97]
As if to court the invective initially hurled at the piece, Anita features a brief passage from the Prélude during a sexual encounter between Anita and another woman. (Significantly, this is one of its few overt musical quotations.) Anita and Droste's diegetic spectators seem quite happy to respond exactly as historical audiences had done to the piece. In a progression reminiscent of Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin stories, Germans become less and less offended by what they see being performed and increasingly offensive and aggressive towards it. By the end, audience members are demanding Aryan purity in one form or another: one scene portrays several beer-swilling proto-Nazis—replete with German shepherd—pounding a table, demanding, "Folk dance, not nude dance"; dialogue titles appear: "Forbidden dances! Homosexual! Off with their heads! Exterminate them!" At this point, the film seems to adapt this perspective, projecting the purported decadence of Berber and Droste onto exotic, non-German sources. Berber's final—and apparently fatal—dance is "in the Orient," as an intertitle tells us, in front of Arab men unaccustomed to women dancing nude.[98]
What von Praunheim's film actually does is show the impossibility of the fantasy of national, sexual, or aesthetic purity. The German body, for instance, is given no integrity (the aging one-legged prostitute is the hit of Berlin's streets) and, as with Ottinger's and Treut's films, sexuality is remarkably free-floating—the cheeks of the heterosexual businessmen are every bit as rouged as Droste's. And while Droste and Berber perform
A DELIRIOUS SPREAD OF SURFACES
However particular to early twentieth-century modernism Anita's score might be, it constructs—in tandem with the film more generally—less a picture of historical authenticity than a delirious spread of surfaces, textures, and materials, something apparent in its treatment of body and movement. Here it is not so much the exact quotes and cultural citations that have relevance (is this Schoenberg or Webern? Sally Bowles or Lulu?) as the pieces, bodies, and fabrics out of which such references are built. The film luxuriates in the sheer physicality of this matter, with its rinky-dink pianos, crashing cymbals, drapes, kimonos, military uniforms, and cigarette holders all demonstrating the importance of form and surface to the film's erotics. In the sense that it emphasizes appearance over immanence and melds the trappings of different historical epochs, von Praunheim's project is quite postmodern. But his interest in camp and the gay and lesbian cultures from which it emerged proves to be the more significant ground for his exalted play of surfaces.
Camp's rich sense of display is exactly what von Praunheim is after. Just as Ottinger grids clichés of the pirate genre onto Germany's "fascinating fascism," Anita acknowledges the campiness of its historical artifacts, appropriating Weimar Republic icons of special interest to lesbian and gay cultures. The film is rife with androgynous and cross-dressed cabaret acts, the homoeroticism of the Ballet Russe, and hysterical heterosexuals. It deploys these references in a much more historically focused manner than the collection of "cast-offs and rejects" that Thomas Elsaesser identifies in Syberberg's Our Hitler, which appears to put the whole of modern German culture up for grabs.[99]
As opposed to the melancholic reverence with which Syberberg's Hitler surrounds the historical signifiers of German culture, von Praunheim treats them with affectionate disrespect. As the older Anita says—in a line repeated in reviews and promotion material for the film—"Berlin is the capital of sin and I am her queen" out to "shock" her world. It seems no accident that the most stylized moments of von Praunheim's film occur in
AGAINST PRODUCTION
Anita refuses to tie its materiality of signs and icons to standard notions of production. Camp operates in much the same way—a practice of consumption or a form of (re)reading made possible only in consumer cultures: even its enthusiasm for bad "taste" raises the question of exaggerated consumption. By extension, critics put considerable emphasis on the place of failed or outmoded production when discussing how camp effects are produced. Consider the camp treatment of stars deemed past their prime, such as Marlene Dietrich's cameo in Just a Gigolo (Hemmings, 1979) or Davis in Baby Jane. What happens here is that the material facts of aging are inscribed on the once sexually (re?)productive body, whose age is made hideously overpresent, aggressively consuming.[100] Any number of critical discourses, both feminist and nonfeminist, continue to masculinize production (active, useful) and feminize consumption (passive, wasteful). The latter category would include "effeminate" men, those who "consume too much," minority cultures, and so forth. Western religious and economic structures sustain this duality, keeping production away from consumption, privileging the former ("work") over the latter ("waste"). This same opposition grounds homophobic understandings of homosexual and nongenital sex as always already perverse, since it fails to lead to "proper" reproductive output, a point Fuss underscores by describing homosexuality's function in classical psychoanalysis as an "essential waste ingredient."[101] Von Praunheim is keenly aware of the perversity of that bias—one need only recall the title of his earlier film: Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt / It Is Not the Homosexual That Is Perverse but the Society in Which He Lives (1971).
"Lilli," the postwar goldigger
Other films of the New German Cinema both uphold and satirize this gendering of consumption and production. The greed for goods in Adenaurian Germany is allegorized through excessively heterosexual female consumers like Fassbinder's Maria Braun, Kluge's Lola, or even Anita G in Yesterday Girl, whose rare moments of economic security occur in the company of men. To be sure, those ironic, self-conscious "performances" of consumerism were cast some fifteen to thirty years after the postwar period. But it is striking that, immediately after the war, the sexualized gold digger became conflated with nation and capital in Germany's popular imagination. In the 1950s, for instance, a full-figured adult doll named "Lilli" hit the market. Initially taking the form of an animated figure in a cartoon in the Bild Zeitung in July 1952, Lilli—the doll—was made of hard plastic, with raised feet (for high heels), ice blond hair, harsh make-up, and stern facial features—save for strangely puckered lips that complemented her erotic wardrobe. A prototype for Mattel's Barbie (her domesticated, child-friendly American cousin), Lilli's role for Germans was clear: She
So Lilli joins Hanna Schygulla (whom the doll's hair and make-up vaguely resemble) as Maria Braun, the postwar killer/capitalist, or as Lili Marleen, whose wartime allure staged Germanness at its most ambitious and erotic.[102] Thus, thanks to the reproductive erotics of capitalism, Germany could be allegorized as both eager consumer and slutty gold digger. But for all of the masculinization of production and feminization of consumption that Lilli evokes, it must be remembered that the doll was designed for the consumption and leisure of men.
Von Praunheim pushes the connection between female bodies and excessive consumption to its limits, and Anita boasts a dizzying array of nonproductive activities. Numerous items point to failed production or reproduction, such as newspaper ads for "suitable women wanted for experiments with male hormones." Images show consumption of all types: eating, sucking, drinking, and drug taking. The lines between production and consumption are so blurred that in the end, it seems that all that the young Anita can actually "produce" is her nudity. It is certainly not accidental that she dies of consumption. The older, self-appointed Anita is deemed similarly counterproductive with her useless fantasies. The sheer size of her body, with her self-proclaimed "big, beautiful ass," and her huge, made-up eyes (which can also be said to "take in" too much), align the character with an ostensibly out-of-control consumption.
The film inscribes disease, contagion, and addiction onto its campy, consuming bodies. Droste, for instance, is represented in one scene as a skeleton and Anita performs a blood-soaked dance in another. In the (just as stagy) offstage sequences of them at home, the two consume drugs and arrange for Anita to prostitute herself in order to acquire more. The elder, institutionalized Anita chants, "I live in ecstasy that gushes like a wave of blood," and blood does indeed gush from the young tubercular Anita during her last dance in the "Orient." Disease is equally present in the older Berber, although her illness is not in her body but "in her head" (and the institutional obsession with impure interiors is replicated by Anita's interest in assholes).[103]
Anita's character happily performs in the street as the "great nude star Anita Berber" and reveals the "most beautiful ass in all of Berlin" to the jeering crowd. The moment she begins to sing, "Whoever says ass / Has got to say hole," the police arrive to escort her away. Clearly it is not just her diegetic stripping that offends the law, but the hole upon which she insists and takes pride. For that is a body part that makes it difficult to demarcate (or police) interior from exterior, waste from production; it also
This would appear to just be part of Anita's desire to shock the philistines, were the anus not such a crucial "part" of contemporary gay male criticism.[104] For our purposes here, Lee Edelman's rereading of the primal scene (Freud's Wolf Man case) is especially relevant. After noting the importance of retrospective, reconstructed memory in Freudian theory, in what he provocatively calls the "view from behind," Edelman explores Freud's ambivalence towards the primal scene, which
as Freud [first] reconstructs the perspective of the infant at the moment he observes it, activates the pre-genital supposition "that sexual intercourse takes place at the anus." Thus in the first instance the primal scene is always perceived as sodomitical, and it specifically takes shape as a sodomitical scene between sexually undifferentiated partners, both of whom, phantasmatically at least, are believed to possess the phallus.[105]
Only later, in his "revisionary rearticulation," does Freud transform the Wolf Man's story into a heterosexual fantasy.[106] Edelman stresses how much this initial anal economy is "written over" in Freud's theoretical work. It is, of course, not only male homosexuality that psychoanalysis was interested in censoring, but the inability of the anus to confirm gender identity as well. Von Praunheim takes a more radical leap, locating the gay "asshole" on a campy female body,[107] rendering that anatomical part all the queerer.
Significantly, Anita's play with various dualisms of identity—sane/insane, young/aged, heterosexual/lesbian/bisexual, male/female, even dead/alive—is never "straightened out" for certain. In a sense, the film's parade of indeterminate identities implies the dissolution of identity itself. As Diana Fuss argues, identification "invokes phantoms" and is "open to a death encounter,"[108] as the conclusions of Madame X and Ticket of No Return dramatize. In Anita, death and decay are everywhere. As the institutionalized Anita states, "From every corner springs a hanged man … corpses embrace." It is not incidental that the Expressionist sets give no precise settings and frame their images in darkness, or that the characters dedicate their dances to "death and sexlessness," conduct mock hangings, and so forth. Accentuating this morbidity is an early dance of Droste and
As soon as Droste's wound appears in close-up, the film cuts to Anita's performance. She stands against a plain geometric backdrop, covering her white dress with blood, then smearing it over the rest of her body. Does this suggest she is the most perverse of all? The filthiest? Does she "embody" Germany like Maria Braun, and if so, which Germany and whose? Both of these performance scenes hyperbolize gendered, abject bodies, and wounds figure prominently in both. Yet no sex is obliged to bear the marks of abjection more than the other. In the move from wound to woman, for example, we hear incredibly gentle, soothing music—a theme used elsewhere in the film (as in the El Dorado nightclub scene), featuring trumpet over piano arabesques. While traditional film music scholars (and cinema's suture theorists) might argue that the music provides the illusion of cover and protection, I think the compassion it generates is even more significant here.
The film's exploration of death and vice is as attuned to audiences in the 1980s and 1990s as it is to 1920s Weimar culture, given the punitive discourses surrounding homosexuality and AIDS. A panel at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival, for instance, enabled critics (along with the director) to voice their criticism of mainstream cultures' inability to celebrate death. As Canadian Jay Scott wrote, ours is "a culture-wide abhorrence of sex on the one hand and a denial of the inevitability of death on the other."[110] When all is said and done, death represents alterity at its most challenging, a real "unwanted within the wanted," and so resonates in queer and other minoritarian cultures without any specific referencing of AIDS. Von Praunheim's refusal to shirk from death and negativity is apparent in a remark he made to an interviewer several years before: Death's "stiffness and immobility excite me."[111] Between Droste's skeleton, young Anita's deathbed, or the "corpse" of the older Anita, its depictions of death are physical and devoid of transcendence. Clearly, von Praunheim makes no
The film's emphasis on annihilation, negativism, and delirious consumption, along with its use of the historical past, is critical, and the selection of Weimar Berlin raises important, if conflicting, cultural and sexual issues. This is a period often constructed as a lesbian/gay utopia, given its relative—but by no means uncontested—social tolerance. From the actual clubs to the fictional Sally Bowles, its iconography has proved important to queer cultures. Yet Anita mediates this ephemeral utopia by the negativity on which it insists. Weimar Germany was, of course, marked by as many failures of leftist, alternative, and progressive activities as it was by successes. Even the considerable support for homosexual rights lent by Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the Institute for Sexual Science (1919), was not unproblematic, particularly in his belief that homosexuality could be detected through concrete, measurable signs. Ultimately, the historical contexts of von Praunheim's film include not just that of Berlin between the wars, but less known histories, such as those of gay and lesbian cultures, neither "othering" them as separate, oppositional cultures nor assimilating them into one big melting pot of History.
QUEER SOUNDS
According to some critical musicologists, queerness may be reflected in forms of music that challenge tonality or its precepts. For others, it may be found in musicality tout court. On this point, Brett identifies the riddles and codes with which gay men are identified, like "[d]oes he sing in the choir?"[113](In this light, the remark in Dr. Faustus about the naturalness with which German men are "musical" has delightfully queer resonance.) Lesbianism's connection to musicality converged with special force in the 1970s under the influence of French feminism, which hypothesized an écriture feminine of corporeal, nonlinear, musical qualities as opposed to linear, masculinist ones. More recently, Suzanne Cusick has written, "For some of us, it might be that the most intense and important way we express or enact identity through the circulation of physical pleasure is in musical activity, and that our ‘sexual identity’ might be ‘musician’ more than it is ‘lesbian’ ‘gay’ or ‘straight.’ "[114]
These kinds of claims usually focus on specific musical forms and, to a lesser extent, historical listening contexts in order to queer auditors' identities. In his monograph on Broadway musicals, for instance, D. A. Miller
Most of these queer articulations bank on music's abstractness and semiotic pliability (or, its in abilities). Clearly, if music "only points indirectly, if at all," it would perform an important role in the kind of queer allegory Kuzniar outlined. Adorno offers an unintentional example in a discussion of Schoenberg: "The dissonant chord, by comparison with consonance, is not only the more differentiated and progressive. … [I]t sounds as if it had not been completely subdued by the ordering principle of civilization."[115] Of course, queering Adorno's remarks does not get us past the binarist equivalencies drawn between tonality and heterosexuality, and atonality with queerness, that I want to put into question. It is finally the camp aesthetic in music that works to queer a text like Anita, and not "music" or "musicality" per se. Consider how the familiar signs of campy Berlin cabaret cultures are acoustic as well as visual, with their drinking songs, performed folksongs, experimental pieces, and so on. Its nondiegetic music is also clichéd: discordant pitches, loud, brief attacks, and weird instrumentation accompany moments of "shock," such as when Anita first exposes her breasts or when Droste proclaims himself "the most perverse of all." It is significant that these loud, brief attacks (Raben's Musik-Shocks?) occur in the absence of any diegetic audience, raising the question of where and upon whom to locate the "outrage" the music supposedly provokes. Here Anita outstrips its diegetic settings, as if to perform for us—whoever we might be.
SOUNDING OFF CAMP
Critics have always given musical examples of camp, although it has usually been the style or context of the performance that established its campiness rather than the music per se: a Busby Berkeley musical, ABBA, Swan Lake. Sontag acknowledged this in her few musical examples of camp: classical ballet, opera, pop music. But she makes a significant exception: "[C]oncert music, though, because it is contentless, is rarely Camp. It offers no opportunity, say, for a contrast between silly or extravagant content and rich form."[116] The observation is easy to refute: Vivaldi's Four Seasons (particularly the fetishized "Spring"); the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; the opening of his Fifth; Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra, to name just a few.[117] Sontag uncharacteristically bypasses the opportunity to explore the assumptions around such questionable notions as musical "contentlessness," and autonomy. Anita, by contrast, demonstrates that even the most abstract, absolute, "contentless" music is not immune to—and the metaphor is deliberate—cultural infection. The film's cliché-ridden campiness dilutes the myth of aesthetic purity and autonomy so prevalent in Western, and especially German, art music culture.
At the same time, the German "concert music" with which Anita tinkers is quite different than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in The Patriot, Maria Braun, or even Our Hitler. Unlike these films, the musical traditions with which von Praunheim works are not primarily those of an official, German culture. Without understating the canonical status of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and other (Austrian) modernists in Germany, it is important to note that, unlike titans like Brahms, Beethoven, or Wagner, these composers never tapped the national imaginary with the intensity of their predecessors. In other words, atonal music, be it the dodecaphonic system or not, has never symbolized German nationhood in the way that Beethoven's or Wagner's has—although Schoenberg maintained that his own work did.[118] Popular judgment and official Nazi decree deemed it too abstract, too difficult (too undisciplined, too decadent, or too Jewish …) to achieve such iconic status.
German modernist music thus asks us to modify Philip Brett's observations on the German-centeredness of traditional musicology, for the excesses of this music have been overdetermined. It is at once too intellectual and too self-indulgent to be part of the musical norm Brett describes. Von Praunheim deliberately plays with this, placing German and Austrian "high" art music like Berg alongside non-German art composers like Debussy and Rachmaninoff. He proceeds to mix them with more popular, "lowbrow" forms like the music of beer taverns and Weimar cabarets,
It is worth returning briefly to the film's interest in disease and its institutionalization, since here too discourses of normalcy are played out with a certain fervor. (Moreover, because homophobic cultures have used AIDS as a go-ahead to pathologize homosexual bodies, the film's representations of disease and the body are timely.) Purportedly sick at a number of levels, Anita leads a literally colorful alternate life compared to the blackand-white setting of the hospital, whose repressive atmosphere is entirely devoid of energy—recall Anita's observation that "from every corner springs a hanged man" in her hospital room. Its uncampy lifelessness is conspicuously unhealthy (patients complain of shit, shitty food, shitty drugs, etc.), although this is the institution that defines the "mentally ill" and, ironically, exists to improve or stabilize their condition.
Divas, like gay people, fall under the sign of the sick, the maimed, the deranged. The diva is associated with disease and with injuries that prevent adequate voice production … the produced voice is perceived to be a sort of sickness … because it is an exception to natural law. … Diva iconography casts the successful, prominent woman (the [large] woman who makes a large fee and a large sound) as a diseased anomaly. … Diva voice production is a scene of sickness, an occasion for the body to appear nonconforming, internal, festering, underground, and interrupted.[119]
Wayne Koestenbaum inadvertently describes the way women's bodies are treated in certain camp practices and discourse. One might say that camp relies on the iconography of disease as much as nineteenth-century
Singing, the diva interrupts our ideas of health, because what she produces is unnatural but also eerily beautiful. The diva … exposes interiority, the inside of a body and the inside of a self; we may feel that the world of the interior that the diva exposes is a diseased place [as the hospital and police do], but we learn from the diva's beautiful voice to treasure and solicit those operatic moments when suddenly interiority upstages exteriority, when an inner and oblique vision supplants external verity.[121]
Throughout von Praunheim's film, Anita offers precisely this kind of operatic, "oblique vision," staging fantasies that are and are not really her own. A crucial scene near the end reveals how what may be called an "inner vision" upstages the hospital reality, even if the latter shapes its parameters. Filmed in black-and-white, the body of the elderly Anita has been laid out on a chiffon-draped bed in an unclinical, private room. The scene quickly becomes a seduction fantasy involving Anita's nurse (Blum), who strips off her uniform to reveal a skin-tight evening dress. Vampire-like, the nurse attacks Anita. There can be no doubt about Nurse Blum's sadism here, yet Anita's desires are far too indeterminate to establish the sequence as a persecution fantasy—indeed, as the "corpse," how can we ascertain whose fantasy it is in the first place? Unlike the film's other fantasy sequences, this one is situated in the hospital, where there is a much stronger sense that Anita is reworking the reality around her. This particular fantasy seems to stage less a refuge from reality than an altered way of seeing, hearing, or doing business with it. Can this be how audiences use film to engage with history?
By casting Anita Berber's doctor and nurse in the two lead roles of her past, Anita blurs the distinction between what is deemed institutionally or ideologically healthy and what is decadent and ill. Anita's historical phantasms,
Anita concerns the 1920s and the 1980s, both "period[s] of conservatism, following liberalism," as Jay Scott wrote.[122] Von Praunheim describes the periods: "After World War I it was a wonderful time of the Avant-Garde. But they went too far. It's very similar to now [the late 1980s]. … People have swung to the right and they think we have to go back to the status quo and security. I feel out of style. My whole existence feels out of place at the moment, because people aren't interested in politics and revolutionary ideas."[123] Von Praunheim shares genuine affinities with the out-of-sync older Anita (and his admiration for performer Lotte Huber was equally clear, suggesting her role as his place-holder, not unlike that of Ottinger in Madame X). He knows the political importance of desire, and so in spite of his post 1970s disillusionment, adds, "I need to remind people now that we can keep on fighting even if the odds seem hopeless."[124] Given current obsessions with "improperly" sexed bodies, deviance, and disease, "it's very important to remember people [like Anita Berber] who had this kind of burning desire to try things out, to go to their very limits."[125]
Von Praunheim is obviously sensitive to the importance of his fictional Anita's versions of the past, with their open inquiry into desire and sexualities, in relation to theorists and activists working today. Like AIDS activism since the 1980s, the film exposes the hypocrisy of those who try to link physical disease with moral "impurities," or who lay proprietary claim to sexual and moral norms, projecting decadence onto others. Thus, even though the Third Reich is not overtly represented in the film, its phantoms reside in the hospital's "every corner" where "corpses embrace." Nazism took the fear of contagion as a medical and biological pretext with which to murder Jewish people, in order to control the Judenpest. In a cynical tautology, contagious diseases like typhoid and tuberculosis of course did break out as Jewish communities were forced into small ghettoes and deprived of sanitary living conditions, food, and medical supplies—a horrific example of "the unwanted within the wanted" when the unwanted were forcibly expelled, quarantined, and systematically killed. Quite by contrast, Anita's diseased bodies and their supposed "lives not worth living" (as Nazi eugenicists put it) invite filmgoers to take them in, to embrace alterity
The camp strategies of the film thus weave together historical concerns and sexual, moral, and musical norms. Where are they? How stable—or how German—are they? The film does not, nor could it, offer a full escape from these regulatory ideas or their cultural and institutional supports. The hospital, police, and the tuberculosis of Anita Berber, along with the psychosis of the elderly Anita, are all still there. But their ability to impose punishing, incarcerative subjectivities onto Anita is shown to be partial and perverse.
Von Praunheim literalizes the "rhetoric of hyperbolized negativity" associated with Weimar expression, forcing impurity and disease to their utmost conclusions through the interplay of medical, psychiatric, and camp discourses.[126] In its irreverent explorations of diseased negativity, Anita blurs the boundaries between present and past, documentary and fantasy, sane and ludic, objective and subjective, queer and nonqueer; it also shows how arbitrary these oppositions are. Its patchwork of aesthetic and cultural references, while wholly different from the elaborate compilation strategies of New German directors like Kluge, is no less historically sensitive. It simply proceeds from a queerer perspective, using camp as a means of signaling relationships among its elements. Queer filmmaking in Germany explores the messiness of borders, which perfectly describes Anita's project. More than Virgin Machine, Anita raises national and historical issues as it theatricalizes gay and queer cultures, fantasies, and identities, blending different music together in ways that, while historically situated, strip it of any attendant myths of national or aesthetic purity. In its place, it extends that campy "messiness" and indeterminate "contamination." What this colorful, boisterous play finally offers is the more serious suggestion of bringing music and camp into the fold of queer culture, and into the realm of historical meaningfulness and pleasure.
6. Introjecting Kitsch
Werner Schroeter, Music,
and Alterity
Sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Aestheticism is the product of times without hope, of states that kill hope.
—HEINRICH MANN
Kitsch is the element of evil in the value system of art.
—HERMANN BROCH
What Nietzsche attempts to resurrect in the remark above is precisely the "killed-off hope" that Heinrich Mann militates against. In this chapter, I turn to an especially demeaned form of aestheticism—kitsch—which can offer not just a sense of "hope," but new ways for viewers of the New German Cinema to approach the past, particularly its less pleasant (and perhaps most removed) aspects. As the above quotes demonstrate, kitsch, as a form of aestheticism, is usually associated with unproductive decadence. We've already seen how queer German directors openly challenge that condemnation of decadence in their use of camp. For all of its excesses and breaches of taste, kitsch can effect an even more direct confrontation with and embrace of alterity and difference, especially in the hands of director Werner Schroeter. Schroeter's kitschy aesthetic has remained a constant throughout his film career, which began in the late 1960s, and in his theatre and opera work, where he has been especially active in recent years. His films include Eike Katappa (1969), The Death of Maria Malibran, Willow Springs (1973), Flocons d'or / Golden Flakes (1976), Weisse Reisse / White Journey
An abbreviated form of this chapter was published as "Embracing Kitsch: Werner Schroeter, Music and The Bomber Pilot," in Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. K. J. Donnelly (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 129–51. Reprinted by permission.
Schroeter's films receive accolades around the world. A recent Locarno film festival mounted a retrospective of his work; among his fans was Michel Foucault, with whom he had a published dialogue/interview. Yet Schroeter's films remain largely unavailable and often unknown, especially to contemporary audiences outside Germany. Even during the New German Cinema, he was never center court. As Timothy Corrigan notes, "Schroeter and his films have remained barely on the visible fringes of the cinematic family and historical movement which he, in many ways, helped to deliver."[1] In North America, the most widely known thing about him may well be Fassbinder's 1979 "Homage to Werner Schroeter," an essay in which the late director found Schroeter's influence everywhere, most infamously in Syberberg, whom Fassbinder attacked as a "merchant of plagiarism." In contrast to the internationally recognized Syberberg, he argued, the market had consigned Schroeter to the "underground," rendering his films "in a flash beautiful, but nonetheless exotic plants, ones blooming so far away [and] so strangely that in the end, one does not really have to deal with them at all."[2] It is a fitting kitschy description.
Schroeter has had difficulty even getting his films shown, especially before The Death of Maria Malibran, his most acclaimed work. Yet despite perpetual financing troubles and an infamous campaign mounted against him by conservative Bavarian politician Jozeph Straus, he has never been concerned about his marginality, moving nomadically from country to country for different projects and with different entourages. Schroeter is lackadaisical about marketing, and his films are notoriously hard to find. He shrugs off status as well as success. When asked about Syberberg in light of Fassbinder's attack, he simply laughed, "No, no comment. Really, there is no comment."[3] More pointedly, in 1972, when the New German Cinema was basking in its early success, he stated: "I have no intention whatsoever of playing a leading part [in the New German Cinema], and submit to the expectations of producing Kulturscheisse[literally, Cultureshit], even if it may be true that I carry around with me and into my films the past of this Kulturscheisse. I neither depend on it, nor do I admire it. The elements of this Kultur are the materials I play with."[4]
Schroeter's interest in playing with the dregs of the national body-culture is reminiscent of Kluge, although his scatological aspersions on the movement decidedly are not. The director's disinterest and detachment are more than just
Music, especially opera, is key to his alchemic project. Although many of the New German directors use opera in sophisticated ways (Straub/ Huillet, Syberberg, Herzog, Kluge), nowhere is its connection more elaborate than with Schroeter. He differs from his colleagues in seizing its overthe-top, extreme elements. As Gary Indiana, one of the director's keenest observers, notes:
Schroeter's use of opera is metaphoric and comically grandiose. He extracts scenes from overworked masterpieces as media for a richly allusive mental theater, runs bits and pieces together, jumbles the sublime with the ridiculous to the point of indissolubility, with the result that classical opera regains a bizarre vitality in this shredded, irreverent form. As it appears in Schroeter's first feature films, opera evokes not only a canon of musical works but also the modern perception of the operatic mentality as a species of camp.[6]
Not for nothing does Indiana use camp in describing the director's "radiant spectacles," to borrow Corrigan's formulation.[7] For Schroeter's films are filled with the sort of heavy-handed artifice, staginess, uprooted objects and quotes typical of camp. But again, Schroeter's style goes farther, producing "shredded, irreverent" work by appropriating particularly abject Kulturscheisse and historical debris. Significantly, that waste is taken not from minoritarian or "othered" arenas but from the kernel of high German culture. It is not a typical kind of kitsch.
This chapter, then, pursues the means by which Schroeter's embrace of kitsch, in all its abjection, is engaged. I look closely at an experimental film
Carla, Magdalena, and Mascha: Liszt kitsch at the beginning of Schroeter's Bomber Pilot
THE OUTSIDER: TRASH, NINETEENTH-CENTURY
ROMANTICISM, AND KITSCH
With its Yiddish etymology, "kitsch" immediately suggests ethnic difference and alterity to white Germanic norms.[8] Ludwig Giesz attributes it to verkitschen (to cheapen), and takes it from den Strassenschlamm zusammenscharren, literally "to collect rubbish from the street," a point confirmed by other critics, who locate its origins in a form of street-sweeping or pilfering.[9] According to Peter Ward, established art critics first used it in turn-of-the-century Vienna (a book called Der Kitsch was published by an Austrian art critic in 1925); to verkitschen etwas meant to cheapen an object or knock it off quickly.[10] Trash, debris, and expelled matter are indispensable not just to the definition of kitsch, but to its status as a concept and aesthetic category. Since it trades in rubbish, kitsch has been more or less removed from the domain of "pure" aesthetics, just as its ethnic etymological associations might be said to taint it. Needless to say, such presumed purity is highly suspect, especially when considered as a stable, fixed category. Kitsch's tainted qualities are, in fact, surprisingly mobile. Its current association with—among other things—bad taste, exalted taste, the lower class, the upper class, urban cultures, rural cultures, gays, lesbians, queers, and straights demonstrates how historically variable the construction of abject "otherness" actually is.
Still, this has not stopped critics and scholars from debasing kitsch. One often hears that kitsch occupies a hyperbolized position of art for art's sake, for instance, leading some to argue for its purported obliviousness to and disengagement from historical and cultural context. Of course, that aesthetic autonomy has nothing to do with the treasured functionlessness of Kantian art, nor the critical, counterhegemonic potential in Adorno's aesthetics, even though it remains stubbornly suggestive of both. For most commentators, kitsch nearly constitutes a category unto itself, so beyond the pale of aesthetic value and moral and ethical respectability is it. For instance, in Kitsch and Art, Tomas Kulka argues that kitsch cannot even be considered bad art, since the latter reflects poor ability rather than an out-and-out breach of aesthetic value.[11] Kulka's position is heavily influenced by the work of novelist Hermann Broch, who wrote, using a provocative somatic metaphor: "Kitsch is certainly not ‘bad art’; it forms its own closed system, which is lodged like
One thing that critics agree on: kitsch, like its only slightly more esteemed cousin, camp, came into being in mid-to late nineteenth-century European culture, when mass-produced production, commodity accumulation, and display were skyrocketing (recall Kluge's searing presentation of the Crystal Palace). The period's expanding trade venues and general consumerism found their match in the increasingly elaborate style of its artifacts, its penchant for ornate, gratuitous objects, and movements like Art Nouveau. Functions, purpose, conclusions, and totalities mattered less, it seemed, than the beautiful detail. Kitsch is remarkably well suited to this context, and not just for its orientation towards the flourish. A form of production gone amok, kitsch is either too much (commodity clutter) or too little, too remote, or too out-of-touch (as with rural crafts or bad souvenirs). A form of counterproduction, it generates horribly useless objects, and is unsuitable to standard capitalist or heterosexual notions of production or reproduction. In this way kitsch may challenge our need to assign objects specified functions, or to have them participate as part of a whole, lead to a conclusion, or have, in short, any purpose or meaning.
Perceiving kitsch as a refuge from social, economic, and ideological contexts is just that—a perception, not a material reality. "Functionlessness" is a function critics ascribe to aesthetics, and it is sustained by a variety of philosophical, aesthetic, and economic institutions. Pierre Bourdieu described this brand of aesthetics as one that "presupposes [its own] distance from the world … which is the basis of the bourgeois experience of the world."[13] Kitsch takes that dominant, middle-class function and runs with it, something Clement Greenberg famously observed when calling kitsch "the culture of the masses,"[14] appealing to the lowest common denominator, which Greenberg tied to realism. Given its resemblance to conventional notions of art, it is hardly surprising that commentators work overtime to assert kitsch's lack of taste and productivity so as to resituate those qualities elsewhere, for instance, in "high," heterosexualized, white, wealthy art. In
Although Strauss's waltzes offer an obvious example of kitsch, we might turn to serial music, which flourished at about the same time in Europe. At this historical moment, serial and atonal music, kitsch, and decadent aesthetics held a number of shared assumptions about textual production, structure, and representation. All relied on metonymic over metaphoric organization; all rejected linear or progressive structure; and all valued fragmentation and accumulation over the sense of organic gestalt or completion. This is evident outside of music in novels like Huysmans's A rebours / Against Nature and in the essays of Oscar Wilde.[16] Rational but not rationalized, serial music and kitsch emblematize a mode of production that differs from a hierarchical assembly line of meaning. Denouement does not really matter; goallessness prevails. That goallessness, in fact, helps distinguish kitsch and camp from parody, whose intent is clear-cut, its meanings comparatively fixed. Similarly, desire in these late nineteenth-century aesthetic systems became overtly, unabashedly unfulfillable. For the Decadents, it was not even legally expressible, projected instead onto sets of objects that would never end, much less satisfy.[17] Importantly, this prompted cultural producers not to feel alienated from these objects so much as eroticize or enhance their value. As Wilde writes, "Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it."[18]
The minutely detailed bourgeois homes of the mid-to late nineteenth century revealed a certain fear of the void. Benjamin noted the period's obsession with wrappings, linings, casings, facades, and ornamentalism, observing that "‘kitsch’ [functioned as] the cluttered, aesthetic style of this mass marketing, as bourgeois class guilt: ‘the overproduction of commodities; the bad conscience of the producers.’ "[19] As I noted in relation to Kluge, this European period was also fully in thrall to ethnic alterity in the mutually entangled realms of politics (colonization), economics (trade, tourism), and aesthetic and leisure forms (opera). Viewed this way, kitsch may have functioned at the time as a way of managing alterity through domesticated exoticism.[20] As Arthur Koestler argues, Victorian kitsch was both a false cover of and an ironic response to the bald facts of industrialization and colonialism; the irony, he maintains, was in denying "modern man's" relationships to his others, be they Darwin's primates, colonized peoples, or the "law of the jungle." He asks "how it was possible that in the
Understanding nineteenth-century European culture as a garish meeting ground of capital and colonial expansionism, and as a dress rehearsal for the cinema, gives kitsch very precise historical origins. At the same time, the denial of kitsch's historicity is pivotal to its very historicization and is asserted in most definitions and understandings of the term. It is evident in Koestler's remark that art more generally could be "completely separated from reality." Kitsch takes that disinterested, detached function and goes further, mangling historical perspective so that advertisements can show Michelangelo's David hawking cheap wristwatches on his raised arm.
Yet critics keep returning to the late nineteenth century, correctly connecting kitsch to the aesthetic ideology of Romanticism, in whose twilight it ascended. Matei Calinescu influentially called it a "hackneyed form of romanticism";[22] for Saul Friedlander, "Kitsch emotion represents a certain kind of simplified, degraded, insipid, but all the more insinuating Romanticism."[23] Commentators are generally careful to avoid claiming that Romanticism is kitsch, preferring more delicate phrases, such as having given birth to kitsch—but the link is nonetheless solid. For all the historical roots Romanticism gives kitsch, though, it is important to acknowledge Romanticism's own investment in universalism and timelessness—in short, in ahistoricity.
KITSCH AND CAMP
If a central concern of camp is the construction of psychic and socio-sexual identities (as in its send-ups of white heterosexuality), kitsch, by contrast, functions more as a consequence of economic and social structures, without which the categories of taste and tastelessness would be impossible in the first place. Camp may be "failed seriousness," to invoke Sontag, but kitsch is failed judgment. Where camp is childish, kitsch is an irresponsible adult. It should "know better" and so is tied to a sense of inappropriateness that exceeds taste or decorum, trespassing moral and ethical terrain (this is especially clear in debates surrounding representation and the Shoah). Even Brecht stated, "There are effective films that have an impact on people who see them as kitsch, but there are no effective films made by people who see
Indeed, kitsch is rarely valued in anyone's scheme. Even queer commentators keep it at a distance, as if its proximity endangered the precarious status of camp or gay and lesbian cultures tout court. That is frequently achieved by constructing it as the antagonist to camp's more playful, "affectionate" send-ups. Sontag, for instance, referred to camp as "a kind of love," the absence of which is "why such kitsch items as Peyton Place … aren't Camp."[25] More recently, a reader of Esquire wrote, "Straight people don't have camp, they have kitsch,"[26] relegating it to the trash bin of heterosexuals. One term of opprobrium that critics constantly evoke is kitsch's investment in sentimentality—a feeling, of course, but not one of love. For them, sentimentality can be automatically rigged and triggered; it engages exaggerated, scripted reactions to things that are vicariously experienced. It is unearned emotion, in short. This leads to the claim that kitsch evinces predictable "stock emotions."[27] One can only deduce that sentimentality in this scheme is somehow mass-produced, whereas "authentic" feelings are the mark of (pre-industrial?) individualization. Others tie kitsch's sentimentality to nostalgia, which in turn suggests a problematic, emotional reaction to history. Whether a surfeit of emotionalism and lack of control, sentimentality has been roundly feminized, a point I develop below. And even though sentimentality has proven enormously lucrative for Hollywood and other industries trading in the "marketplace of emotions," it is still considered a very cheap feeling indeed.
Examining its etymology, Eve Sedgwick draws connections between sentimentality and the French verb ressentir, to feel (usually negative) emotions intensely; the standard English translation of the noun form is resentment. There is also sentir,"to smell," and se sentir,"to feel" in the physical sense ("I feel sick today"). All of these words chart a clear course between body, emotion, and disgust, a physicality that intimates anxiety over alterity and contagion. As Sedgwick notes, ressentir has been linked to "[t]he prurient; the morbid; the wishful; the snobbish … nauseating."[28] Sentimentality seems to be dangerously counterproductive; its historical associations have been "located in the private or domestic realm, [where it] has only a tacit or indirect connection with the economic facts of industrial marketplace production … and is intensively occupied with relational and emotional labor and expression."[29] Such perceptions only deepen the inscription of femininity on sentimentality, recalling Kluge, for whom feminine production was largely a matter of familial, biological reproduction. How to appropriate these terms? As Sedgwick observed, feminists began
When Sedgwick goes on to distinguish kitsch from camp, however, familiar antinomies and judgments emerge. Kitsch becomes a matter of "attribution," judgment, ridicule, and projection, turning its consumers into either victims or victimizers. There are the manipulated and "unenlightened" on the one hand, and the cynical and "transcendent" on the other.[30] She argues that camp, by contrast, is friendly and "more spacious": "Unlike kitsch-attribution, the sensibility of camp-recognition always sees that it is dealing in reader relations and in projective fantasy … about the spaces and practices of cultural production. Generous because it acknowledges (unlike kitsch) that its perceptions are necessarily also creations, it's little wonder that camp can encompass effects of great delicacy and power in our highly sentimental-attributive culture."[31]
My objection to Sedgwick's analysis is that the process of "recognition" she describes shuts out difference and reproduces sameness, sustaining the very culture of attribution she criticizes. Recognition runs the risk of closing down relational possibilities and in the long run may in fact be less"spacious" than kitsch—although not kitsch as defined in her terms, to be sure. How to undo a tradition that imposes pejorative unawareness (or, at the other extreme, cynical abuse) onto "kitsch" and, on the other hand, savvy appreciation of artifice onto "camp"?
Schroeter eschews this duality by finding undesirable alterity and difference within. In the sense in which the term is usually used, his is a queerer approach. This is not to say that kitsch, or even Schroeter's brand of it, is queer. Rather, it is to argue that kitsch may be every bit as "knowing" as camp and in this way can be useful to queer, lesbian, and gay constituencies. Given that empowered, majoritarian groups and institutions project negative features onto others whom they would like to degrade, the outsider status of camp, and especially kitsch, needs to be taken into account. Schroeter, for his part, explicitly refuses to buy into kitsch's averred "lovelessness." Instead, the overwrought performative, visual, and acoustic presentations in his films captures what Elsaesser calls an authenticity of feeling. This is not the feeling of sentimentality, but rather a feeling that can only be specified through its intensity, or perhaps as intensity itself. It is emotion without source and without goal.
KITSCH THROUGH THE CLASSES
Given that kitsch is usually aligned with a lack of awareness, education, urbanity, or sophistication, "low-end" examples are easy to name: the range extends from velvet Elvis paintings to plastic cuckoo clocks. One of its interesting complexities, however, is how kitsch incorporates these sorts of objects as well as those of purportedly refined, upscale "tastes" and socioeconomic prestige, like opera, baroque architecture, and big fountains. Kitsch is an affectation of extremes, upsetting bourgeois tastes by being either too pedestrian or too aristocratic.
Its connection to opera is especially deep, important here since Schroeter's kitsch is unfathomable without it. Of course, opera has lost much of its elite pedigree and prestige, even in Europe. Its insular, protected status is gone—it may still attract the fur coats in Berlin or London, but activists are there to throw blood on them. And as I have shown, critics like Kluge, Clément, and Potter have grown more aware of the blood letting of this particular leisure form.
In contrast to these critics, Schroeter is relatively unconcerned with the deadliness of opera's stories (although only relatively). He gravitates to the materials that convey these stories, opera's exquisite sounds and styles. His soundtracks repeatedly come back to the nineteenth-century world of haut bourgeois Europe, the twilight of late German Romanticism and the beginning of kitsch culture. Critics (most influentially, Corrigan) frequently refer to his film aesthetic as operatic[32] for its stylistic and emotional excesses. Schroeter's use of operas, opera cultures, and especially, diva cultures has led some to argue for "an obvious example of a gay encoding." Ulrike Sieglohr maintains that in his work, "male homosexuality remains a subtext within an aesthetic sensibility and thematic encoding." She quotes Karsten Witte's reference to Schroeter's "homosexual aesthetic," which is achieved through "hidden signs and signals—allusions and secret figures … insisting it is from a gay perspective that one understands [his] encoding as an aesthetic counter-strategy."[33] While I do not agree that these inscriptions codify "gayness," I agree that his work produces a "counterstrategy" that suggests the queer allegory Kuzniar theorized, a disidentificatory appropriation of operatic culture.
In The Death of Maria Malibran, for instance, the opera singer is such a pivotal force that she spills over onto several figures at once. All of the central actors (Magdalena Montezuma, Christine Kaufmann, and Candy Darling) portray the early nineteenth-century diva, who is voiced through recordings or impersonations of twentieth-century divas like Maria Callas and Janis
Schroeter's The Death of Maria Malibran. Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives.
Critics have been understandably drawn to comment on Schroeter's high-end kitsch. Gary Indiana contrasts the purported "elitism" of his cultural references with the working-class milieux of Fassbinder films, writing that, "Schroeter's [films] move through the decors of high culture like omnivorous tourists."[34] What Indiana intimates here is that Schroeter's films—and their viewers and listeners—are less of that elite world than visitors, familiar but not identified with it. They are thereby separate from its privilege and power, even if they are still entranced by it. It is another example of disidentification in his work, as opposed to the simpler, resemblance-based forms of identification Sedgwick aligns with camp. This suggests that kitsch can be more generous and "spacious" than Sedgwick maintains, and that Schroeter's "elitism" might have a potentially critical edge.
KITSCH AND FASCISM
It goes without saying that kitsch is not always historically instructive, nor is it of constant significance to queer and gay cultures. With a variety of consumption contexts and audiences, it fulfills any number of different functions, as two film examples dramatize. One of mainstream cinema's more delightful kitsch sequences is Charlie Chaplin's balletic dance with the balloon globe in The Great Dictator. The sequence is famous for its total absence of dialogue; we hear nothing but Wagner's Lohengrin.[35] Chaplin's music, props, and performance give the "blood and soil" nobility Wagner exemplified for Hitler a ridiculous levity, while also pointing to its diabolical nature. The scene succeeds not out of any postwar, retrospective camping of the composer, but for demonstrating the vicious kitsch of Nazism's Wagner fetish in the first place.
A couple of years ago on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," the recent American talk show, O'Donnell gave her guest, Roberto Benigni, a hat once worn by Chaplin—she knew Benigni was "a big fan." Moved, he said he "didn't deserve it." He was probably right, particularly if one compares Chaplin's depiction of fascism with Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, the Oscargilded film that, as the title impresses upon us, is a "beautiful" film (as opposed, say, to a historical one), a squishy celebration of the human spirit. In his insightful critique, Jim Hoberman discusses Beautiful's self-proclaimed status as "fable."[36] With the precedent set by Schindler's List (Spielberg, 1993), Hoberman notes that the "Holocaust is now ancient history—the stuff of myth. Imagine a ‘simple fable’ of paternal self-sacrifice set in a Serbian concentration camp or in the killing fields of Rwanda. Had Benigni done so, he would have had a more difficult time calling his comedy Life Is Beautiful—let alone getting audiences to sit for it."[37]
Years earlier, Saul Friedlander had even more vigorously challenged the transformation of modernity's most brutal era into myth. His 1982 Reflections on Nazism was a crucial intervention in debates surrounding Naziretro films popular at the time, among them German films like Our Hitler and Lili Marleen, which, together with literary examples, constituted what he called the "new discourse" of Nazism. In them Friedlander located strategies of disavowal that masked atrocities of the Nazi past precisely as they were depicting and, ostensibly, exposing that past. He maintained that they achieved this by encouraging a "fascinating fascism," either through eroticism (The Night Porter[Cavani, 1973]) or banality (sequences of Our Hitler painstakingly detailing Hitler's daily life, which stress the ordinariness of the monster).
Even with well-intentioned films that insisted on the ongoing legacy of fascism in contemporary Europe, like The Spider's Stratagem (Bertolucci, 1970), Friedlander finds that their spectacularization—or, inversely, their banalization—of fascism mirrors fascism's particular brand of kitsch, a kitsch Friedlander ultimately links to death. Thus, in contrast to critics who regard kitsch as functionless or cheap failure, Friedlander stresses its very costly dangers in representing something as murderous as Nazism. For him, its tastelessness and inappropriateness reside in being unable to distinguish the regime's atrocities or the material horrors of death from their banalization, sentimentalization, or glorification. This kitsch process eroticizes, spectacularizes, honors, and mythologizes. For him, Nazism's relationship to death was both an aesthetic and anestheticizing one, similar to Benjamin's warning about the aestheticization of politics at the end of his essay, "The Work of Art." Friedlander is not alone in discovering kitsch in political contexts. Gillo Dorfles associates it with modern, right-wing regimes that devote themselves to ritual and pageantry and retreat into the past for models. Their glorification of death, battle, and sacrifice all establish that kitsch, like camp, is not necessarily constituted after the fact by outsiders. The scary allure of the SS's leather coats, for instance, was certainly evident at the time, not emerging all at once in postwar s/m dungeons around the world. Nazism's fascination with ritual and formulaic repetition was also evident in its award ceremonies for mothers who produced multiple sons, in its pseudospirituality and "debased myths," in its fetishism of beauty and purity, and in its fantasy of an endless, thousandyear Reich.[38] Nazism's fascination with death and destruction is clear in its nostalgia for classical and national myths, the warriors of old, the "glory" of previous military victories, and other past and present sacrifices or genocides that buttress the idea of nation. Noting the historical implications of these obsessions, Friedlander writes, "Kitsch death is a means to digest the past."[39] Yet in Schroeter's work, kitsch introjects the past not to destroy it, but to begin to process it as it is moved forward.
SCHROETER'S KITSCHY BOMBER PILOT
Initially, Schroeter's ZDF-funded Bomber Pilot appears to be a risky, flagrant inversion of Friedlander's and Benjamin's admonitions against the aestheticization of politics. But it is too tacky, and Schroeter too aware of its silliness, its hokey cultural references, and the characters' inflated anguish over of the tension of art versus politics to be the kind of mindless, bombastic kitsch that critics deride. Three women are performed by Schroeter
Pilot's cinematic kitsch is easy to identify. It reprises the well-worn story of a group of undertalented women trying to make a go of "artistic" (read "showbiz") careers in difficult times (with the presence of a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead, it gives a kitschy nod to Les Girls[Cukor, 1957]) in particular).[41] Disregarding verisimilitude at every turn, we have very few spatial and temporal features to work with, leaving only metonymic markers of history and place—swastika banners here, 1960s miniskirts there (and this in one of Schroeter's few films with a historically explicit backdrop). Bomber Pilot merges the pounding familiarity of Viennese icons (pastries, waltzes) with the ritual of Sieg Heil ing; its soundtrack is predigested and stagy (bad recordings of Liszt; Elvis Presley singing traditional Neapolitan songs); props, sets, and situations are conspicuously low-budget (straps and clothes slide off characters' shoulders; the scenes in America were obviously shot at a U.S. military base in Germany). Clearly one cannot take the characters' good intentions or lofty aspirations seriously. Yet juxtaposing their emotional earnestness with the film's emphatically tawdry presentation creates something more compelling than cheap send-up.
Carla's pastry shop performance in Bomber Pilot
The film's three women are so far removed from the realm of individualized characters that their names are taken from the actresses who portray them, blurring the boundaries between fiction and production even more than Herr R or Holy Whore. Their actions are often intertwined to the point of interchangeability: Carla and Mascha share the same lover and wear some of the same clothing; Mascha and Magdalena each mother the other during their respective breakdowns, and so on. The film makes no attempt to convey authenticity or a credible, coherent diegetic world; the performance style is histrionic and over-the-top. Scenes ostensibly depicting their stage performances are shot no differently than those that follow their story more generally; we do not learn what causes Mascha's breakdown, and the eponymous bomber pilot who sleeps with Mascha and Carla is never shown for certain.
As is typical of Schroeter's early work, cameras are placed close to the figures, diminishing spatial context or continuity. Obviously this draws our attention to their facial and bodily expressions, another characteristic of his film work. The expressions of the women work to convey a series of intense emotional experiences, but it is important to stress that they produce only the signs of intensity. Emotions, in other words, are produced through the signs, rather than being the force that generates them: feelings are less of the characters than they are signaled by them. In that regard, Schroeter's
Thus the emotions and desires at work in Schroeter's film are not disingenuous; it's just that we can't understand or explain them. They are not, for instance, the provenance of a singular source or body. But neither are they abstracted, rarefied, or transcendent, despite their detachment from explicit human, psychological, and somatic sources. Indeed, the film's emotions are intense ones—grief, emotional breakdown, frustration, physical pain, longing. The materiality of the signs conveying them are too overwhelming to trivialize. Asynchronous screams and whimpers overtake characters who may look like they're singing; conversely, we hear them sing when they're not even moving their mouths. Familiar songs are performed out of tune, with absurd new lyrics; characters wear costumes of overdetermined fantasy scenarios, from sailor's suit to bustier and garters.
VOICE AND IMAGE
Given his cinematic separation of expression from source, it is perhaps not surprising that Schroeter has repeatedly attacked psychoanalysis and psychological readings and renderings throughout his career. Regarding Der Tag der Idioten, whose lead character, without much provocation, checks into a psychiatric hospital, he said,
The audience can use its own imagination to interpret the significance of her behaviour in the few scenes prior to her admission in the clinic. Psychoanalysis doesn't interest me. I don't believe in it—this system of psychological terror. Cinema is almost entirely made up of psychological dramas, of films, with this psychological terror that plays with archetypes.[42]
It should be equally unsurprising that Schroeter is no fan of Expressionism, derived as it is from the outward expression of psychologically constructed interiority. The asynchronous soundtracks of Pilot and most of his other early films reject the surface-depth model of both Expressionism and psychoanalysis, refuting their ability to unlock inner turmoil or explain emotional behavior. Disinterested in the source of emotions, Schroeter
It would be absurd to assert that the desire for beauty and truth is merely an illusion of our romantic-capitalist society. Undoubtedly, the desire for exalted, larger-than-life wish-fulfilment, as we find it in all traditional art, to which we can certainly add the modern "trivial" media of cinema and television, corresponds to a very general human need. In my films I want to live out the very few basic human moments of expressivity to the point of musical and gestural excess—those few completely authentic feelings: life, love, joy, hatred, jealousy and the fear of death, without psychologizing them.[43]
Because emotions are loaded with social and political resonance, the opposition that Schroeter intimates here between politics and aesthetics does not hold up. Nearly all of Schroeter's appreciators—from Fassbinder to Cahiers du Cinéma, Gary Courant to Gary Indiana—stress the intensely political nature of his "decadent aesthetics" to show "the death, the lies, the selfishness and self-destructiveness" of "consumer culture."[44] Thus, without announcing a specific political or even critical agenda (as he would indeed be loathe to do), Schroeter uses style and emotionalism to convey what is in effect the political need for its expression, rather than its solution.
If, as Kaja Silverman has argued, "the voice is the site of perhaps the most radical of all subjective divisions—the division between meaning and materiality,"[45] the singing voice accentuates that divide even further. Irrevocably tied to the body, it nudges the voice toward the realm of materiality. Barthes's notion of the "grain" of the voice comes to life in Bomber Pilot, where Carla's off-pitch voice seems to physically damage Strauss's work. The Native American chanting during Magdalena's "Snake Dance" obliges western ears to focus on sounds and rhythms without benefit of verifiable meaning. To use the masculinist/erotic vocabulary of Barthes, the singing voice pierces, cuts, soothes, soars, and climaxes. With Schroeter, listening also becomes physicalized: audiences may respond with tears, rapture, passion, and terror. Singing voices seem to be able to move people—perhaps not to an identifiable place—but to an uncharted, unoccupiable space where desires roam. Pilot accentuates that several times when, for example, we hear brief instrumental passages preceding operatic arias. It goes on then to withhold the arias, leaving us only with spaces we want to be filled in.
Some of the film's voices are used for their specific significance and references, as in the radio broadcast announcing Hitler's death or an English commentator describing an appearance of Winston Churchill. These, however, are the exceptions. Usually, the soundtrack seems detached from an
Schroeter claimed that with Pilot he wanted the words to be absurd and the images sincere. The remarks are misleading, since the film does anything but assure the sincerity of its images. One scene elaborates this inconsistency well. While working as an adult educator, Magdalena gives a desultory analysis of a book of photographs of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the German soprano of the 1950s and 1960s—who was not famous enough at the time in the film's diegesis to have had an album devoted to her.[47] As if to comment on the stagy presentation of the characters in Bomber Pilot, Magdalena approvingly refers to a photograph of the soprano after a performance: "An expression of great tension is visible in her face, it is a document of humanity. The composition itself shows the expression of enormous fatigue and happiness after a show." Yet the idea that expressivity (sincerity?) as producible though performance or posing is undercut by her next set of comments:
Here we have, on the other hand, a terrible photo, a portrait. Everything is posed. The lighting accentuates the completely artificial manner of holding her head, her heavenward gaze is clearly affected, an artificiality of her expression. This shows us a complete lack of sincerity. [And then, in complete contrast to Schroeter's claims:] This example shows us that as a means of expression, photography can only give us artifice and falseness of expression and artificial character.
The last snapshot depicts Schwarzkopf on a "beautiful day," "unposed," with her family and dog. For Magdalena, "the photography proves its full humanity." It is striking that Schroeter, whose stagy aesthetic articulates precisely this kind of ineffable human expression, would suggest that emotional "sincerity" resides with the unposed and the natural. (At the same
No matter how you approach it, the connection between artifice and something broaching "sincerity" remains significant in Schroeter's form of kitsch. Elsewhere in the film, as Carla adjusts her corset, she remarks in a strangely epiphanous voice-over: "I carefully watched my straps. I was surprised to see how I was standing straighter and how the expression on my face had changed. I felt as if I were experiencing my life, and I felt completely satisfied with myself." Carla makes this statement while facing a mirror that faces us, revealing another split, between self as actant and observer, which seems to acknowledge the other divisions cinematic representation imposes on us. It is no accident that this occurs just as Carla is asked to join the theatre, and that, while the soundtrack remains continuous, a dissolve links the first image, where Carla speaks in front of some tacky red Victorian wallpaper, to the second, where she is dressed in an evening gown and made up, supposedly in the theatre, but in front of the same garish wallpaper.
BOMBER PILOT: MUSIC AND KULTURSCHEISSE
The music in Bomber Pilot is a provocative grab bag of selections from Verdi, Strauss, Carmen Jones, West Side Story, Sibelius, Elvis, Wagner, and a number of U.S. and German pop tunes. Its simultaneously kitschy and critical functions are in evidence from the film's opening shot, in which the women Sieg Heil in undergarments as we hear the final, triumphant section of Liszt's Wagnerian-like Symphonic Poem No. 1, "Les Préludes." For as Wagnerian and full-blooded as the opening music is—and for the Nazi kitsch it immediately calls forth—its irony is already fierce, since Wagner's belief in opera as a means of unifying diverse aesthetic forms is utterly inapplicable to Schroeter's film, which is structured around fragments and so many border crossings. Like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the beginning of Maria Braun, the quality of the brief Liszt selection played is deliberately awful. Immediately following it is a traditional (and again, damaged) version of Johann Strauss Jr.'s "On the Beautiful Blue Danube," a waltz whose imagery of glittery rivers and fin-de-siècle Vienna, with its chipper soprano delivery, is fully inappropriate to the style and wartime story of Bomber Pilot. These pieces of musical kitsch are worked upon so vigorously that they no longer "work" except as shimmery acoustic relics.
These examples show the extent to which Schroeter uses and abuses German and Austrian musical heritage, and comparisons to Syberberg or even Kluge's Patriot might seem inevitable. But unlike them, Pilot makes clear that German identity cannot be stitched together from the wreckage of German culture. This is established in a crucial scene after the war, when we are told that the three women happen to meet "at a Bruckner concert in the Municipal Theatre." One by one, each enters the foyer after the performance has begun. Obviously, we expect to hear something by Anton Bruckner, whose favored status under the Reich is well known. (His work was even reorchestrated and conducted differently during the war.) Will Schroeter provide the Nazi-sanctioned version, or another? Neither. Instead, we get the final section of the overture of Nabucco, the early political opera by Verdi.
By selecting music that is not Bruckner, Schroeter again dramatizes the unreliable relationship between film image and sound. Yet, instead of pitting the two against the other (with the image showing "sincerity" and the soundtrack "deception," for instance), the soundtrack that announces Bruckner and gives us Verdi splits from within, exposing its own deceptiveness. Moreover, given the political weight of the reference to Bruckner, the acoustic sleight of hand raises other questions: What of the question of nation? Does the presence of Verdi mock Germany's postwar banning of Bruckner performances, a "refusal of coming to terms"? Or could Schroeter be commenting on the nearly transnational exchangeability of music that has been put to nationalist uses? (It must be noted that, despite his appropriation by the Nazis, Bruckner was not a nationalist composer.)
Verdi, by contrast, was a national (and nationalist) treasure in Italy, a key cultural figure during the Risorgimento. Significantly to Schroeter's film, his opera Nabucco tells the ancient story of a captive Jewish people wanting to form their own state—for obvious reasons it was enormously successful in nineteenth-century nationalist Italy. Documents show that massive crowds spontaneously started singing one of its famous and more patriotic choruses at Verdi's funeral. Yet for all of his nationalist fervor, the Italian composer does not so much escape or oppose "Germanness" as to help constitute it. Bypassing Verdi's place with Europe's history of modern nationalism, bypassing even Nabucco's plot, his Italianness gives the film more material for its examination of Germanness. Germans have been preoccupied with Latin cultures like Italy and Spain in a fascination that is as economically real (tourism) as it is phantasmatically potent, and the binarisms sustaining such ethnic othering are both obvious and obnoxious.[48] This kind of other nationwithin-nation formation is nearly as significant as Nabucco's story line. For by occupying the acoustic space that was to have been Bruckner's in
The Germanness that Verdi's work both censors and constitutes is influenced by other music as well, which establishes Germanness through various geographical and cultural twists and hybrids emerging from "outside" of Germany. We hear a short bridge from West Side Story, a text that blurred the musical's popular status with higher, purportedly artistic forms (partly through the teaming of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein) and whose own story of interethnic romance dramatized the consequences of other kinds of border crossings. Elsewhere in Bomber Pilot, Elvis sings the Neapolitan "Santa Lucia" in a particularly bizarre cross-pollination. Elvis's and Bernstein's "American" music may be said to infiltrate Schroeter's film just as the American bomber pilot infiltrates the German bodies of Mascha and especially Carla. An especially interesting example is "Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum," taken from Carmen Jones (1954), the film adaptation of Bizet's Carmen ("Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum" is based on a portion of what was originally the "Gypsy Dance"). As we have already seen, Carmen epitomizes nineteenth-century Europe's colonialist impulses: fetishizing, eroticizing, yet degrading the ethnic/national/ regional/sexual other. Otto Preminger's 1954 film adaptation is well known as being one of the few all-black Hollywood productions of the classical era (more accurately, its cast was black). It was released about the time when Bomber Pilot's fictional women are considering bringing their integrationist message to America. Director Preminger was another German (actually, Viennese) who came to the United States with a special interest in the racial "other." Preminger maintained a relatively long-term affair with Dorothy Dandridge, the actress who portrayed Carmen Jones. He kept the relationship under wraps, eventually ending it out of concern for his career (clearly, the fear of "Carmen"‘s alterity had not diminished over the years). In the film, moreover, Dandridge was dubbed by a white singer, Marilyn—not Lena—Horne.
"Rhythm on a Drum" appears in Bomber Pilot several times, usually in stagy, repeated scenes of Mascha, Magdalena, and Carla "smoking a marijuana cigarette at the breakfast table," a probable reference to Carmen's job in the cigar factory in the opera. In these scenes, we are told that the women are preparing their integrationist message to take to the United States. They are motionless, except for the collective, kitschy jump from their seats a few seconds after the first-person voice-over, influenced by the song's lyrics, that states, "Our hearts took a leap." This detail, however
Magdalena: deadly beauty at the river's edge in Bomber Pilot
A different scene recalls Peer Raben's remarks on irony and beauty's ability to coexist. At the end of the war, a despairing Magdalena is "looking for an issue, an issue towards humanity" and goes to a river to drown herself. The long shot is depicted in black-and-white in diffuse focus and lowintensity light. Compositionally, the image is devoted to the exquisitely beautiful landscape rather than character. Magdalena's voice-over tells us about her problems with productivity ("My problem was never being able to complete a project"); then we hear the German broadcast announcing Hitler's death, and then a British transmission of an appearance by Churchill. If image, sound, and psychologized character motivation were working in tandem, one might assume that Magdalena's desire to die was a result of the Führer's death. The film's stylistic strategies do not facilitate such a reading, however, even with other diegetic details, like the success of her wartime cabaret act and her problems finding self-worth or employment
The "Vienna Blood Waltz" that Carla sings shows how a clichéd cultural icon functions as an acoustic builder of national and subjective identities. To most listeners in the West, Johann Strauss Jr.'s tune would already be familiar to the point of kitsch, and Carla's frequent and deliberately awful renderings do nothing to dispel that. "Vienna Blood Waltz" was initially written without lyrics, as an orchestral piece. Strauss later incorporated his waltz into an 1899 operetta of the same title, and a subsequent rendering by Willi Forst in 1942 would prove very popular within the Nazi regime. The following are the transcribed lyrics from the original operetta. Although they are not what Carla sings (more on that in a moment), they show how music plays easily to regionalist, nationalist ends. Of particular interest is the focus on the body as a carrier of regional identity:
| Wiener Blut! | |
| Wiener Blut! | |
| Eig'ner Saft, | |
| Voller Kraft, | |
| Voller Glut! | |
| Wiener Blut, | |
| Selt'nes Gut! | |
| Du erhebst | |
| Und belebst | |
| Unsern Mut! | |
| Wiener Blut! | |
| Wiener Blut! | |
| Was die Stadt | |
| Schoenes hat, | |
| In dir ruht! | |
| Wiener Blut! | |
| Heisse Flut! | |
| Allerort | |
| Gilt das Wort: | |
| Wiener Blut![49] | |
| Vienna blood | |
| Vienna blood, | |
| Makes you fly | |
| Like a song | |
| To the sky. | |
| Makes your heart | |
| Ever gleam, | |
| Gives a wing | |
| To your dream! | |
| Vienna blood, | |
| Vienna blood! | |
| Makes you see | |
| Paradise | |
| In the smile | |
| Of two eyes. | |
| Makes you laugh, | |
| Makes you cry, | |
| Really live | |
| Till you die![50] |
With this piece in mind, it is worth returning to Friedlander's criticism of the song "Lili Marleen" in Fassbinder's film. Kitsch, he maintains, is produced through deliberate, predictable, and formulaic repetition, just as it is supposed to produce predictable, formulaic emotions. Norbert Schultz's sentimental song functions that way for Friedlander, who, not without irony,
HOMEOPATHIC INTROJECTION
Not despite the kitsch to which it is drawn is Mahler's music great, but because its construction unties the tongue of kitsch, unfetters the longing that is merely exploited by the commerce that the kitsch serves.
—THEODOR ADORNO
I want to reformulate what I initially presented as Schroeter's embrace of kitsch in terms of homeopathy, whose relevance to postwar Germany was made evident in Santner's Stranded Objects. Since science is unable explain how homeopathy works, it functions as a stubborn, indigestible "other" to the medical establishment—exactly as kitsch functions in regard to aesthetics.[52] To be sure, homeopathic principles organize Schroeter's brand of kitsch, taking in (introjecting) elements that in other circumstances (or for other people) would be harmful or unwanted.
In psychoanalytic terms, homeopathy describes the encrypted losses and attachments Abraham and Torok discuss in their work on the formation of the body-ego, as I discussed in chapter One. Santner notes how human psychic development is itself a homeopathic process, beginning with Freud's famous game of fort/da, in which the child stages and controls the disappearance of its mother through transitional objects (toys, etc.) that substitute for her. "[T]hanks to this procedure, he [sic] is able to administer in controlled doses the absence he is mourning."[53] Although the fort/da game, with its dosing out of negative elements, may give the child a sense of "mastering" its initial traumas, the sense of control and mastery is illusory, since with them the child "integrate[s] the loss of its narcissistic fantasies of centrality and omnipotence."[54] As Santner notes, negativity,
Critics always take a methodological leap when moving from medical or psychoanalytic accounts of subjective processes to film texts or, indeed, to entire national "bodies." Yet Santner compellingly argues that homeopathic principles are relevant to the New German Cinema, which emerged from a "wound culture," and whose films are filled with fragments, reworked icons, music, and histories in its attempts to come to terms with the past. Of all the directors discussed thus far, Schroeter best exemplifies the acceptance of the past that Santner describes and that I am developing here. Schroeter accepts the abject side of German Kulturscheisse, and, with Bomber Pilot,"takes in" controlled doses of unwanted aesthetics, political ideology, desire, and history. Spectators and auditors can disidentify with what is both depicted and undepicted (the latter point leading to the argument that Schroeter "encodes" his film with a clandestine gay aesthetic). Schroeter's materialized kitsch hyperbolically—if indirectly—depicts things that audiences are not supposed to talk about, desire, or lament. It helps us engage off-limit memories and desires, even though they seem to be at considerable remove from our current positions. What happens is less a control over undesirable aspects of the past than a momentary embrace, a way of bringing them into relationship with our present identity.
Lest I overstate my claims about "successful" homeopathic outcomes in Schroeter's film, let us return to the acoustic haunting of Carla by Strauss's "Vienna Blood Waltz." This piece gives the most concrete example of potential homeopathic introjection in Bomber Pilot and haunts the body of the film as a whole, so obsessively is it played. Frozen into acoustic iconicity, the tune is a kitschy relic of fin-de-siècle Viennese culture, with its waltzes, twinkling rivers, lavish pastry, and coffee shops, all interwoven and idealized. As the original libretto reveals, that fantasy extended to human bodies as well, intertwining geographic and somatic elements in an impossible fiction: Vienna literally runs through your veins. So fully at one with their surroundings are Viennese subjects that they are physically indistinguishable from them—blood, rivers, all flow together, the naturalized sources of this propped-up identity. From a post-Shoah perspective, the notion is hardly reassuring, to be sure, and is resonant with Nazi ideology (and decree) that established national and racial identity through bloodlines.
Schroeter exaggerates the pernicious element of the original "Wienerblut" through Carla's modified lyrics, roughly translated below:
| Vienna blood | |
| Vienna blood, | |
| Full of rot | |
| Full of force, | |
| Full of life. | |
| Vienna blood | |
| Vienna blood, | |
| You have conquered | |
| Our hearts and our souls | |
| Our weapon resides therein | |
| With the bouquets of Strauss melodies. | |
| Only Vienna blood understands us, | |
| The real Viennese. | |
| Still there are people who transgress | |
| Always fight, always agitate | |
| They make out to be Evil | |
| Leave goodness in limbo | |
| And who does it shame? Only us | |
| Viennese Blood. | |
| When our hearts are nearly broken | |
| We never complain. Shame is abused | |
| What's done is done | |
| The past is past | |
| One doesn't discuss it | |
| And holds out one's hand |
With his new lyrics, Schroeter illuminates the antihomeopathic choices available for Carla and postwar subjects to make: "What's done is done / The past is past / One doesn't discuss it." Rather than integrate the Nazi past into the present, it is cast out like so much bad blood. Its negative aspects are projected elsewhere to avoid contaminating the lively Viennese strain, which alone is believed to veil irritability, fights, or, presumably, an unpleasant little experience like Nazism.
Carla holds on to the poisonous song, unable to release the past pleasures it represents for her—namely, the sense of fulfillment she experienced in the Nazi era. Singing it over and over again, her character is oblivious to its potential as an object to help her move forward. She is equally unaware of its deadliness: importantly, she learns about the death of her real or theatrical lover (played by Schroeter) after she first performs the song. Nor is it incidental that she is actively harmed by the "angry," "spiteful"
The other two women seem unconcerned about the approval of their Viennese, Nazi, or U.S. military audiences—although I hesitate to psychologize the characters in this way (more on this below). The choice of musical pieces they perform for American troops toward the end of the film shows a Schroeter-like disinterest in what might please their listeners. Mascha gives an off-key rendition of "Schmerzen / The Bliss of Sorrow," from a Wagner song cycle, to virulent hisses; Magdalena performs her intense, Galas-like "Snake Dance." Carla, by contrast, is perfectly at home and sings an upbeat and well-received habañera (kitsch and exoticism again), "Abschied am Meer," still clinging to the water imagery of the Strauss waltzes. Mascha and Magdalena's performances know no such gaiety; theirs are intense expressions of vague, undefined emotion. It is kitsch, to be sure, but without the formulaic saccharine feelings routinely linked to it.
Mascha's lied incorporates a spoiled element of "Germanness" (Wagner off-key) into the postwar identity of which she is a figure, othering her own culture while dramatizing the "unwanted within the wanted." Magdalena's impassioned dance literalizes an attempt to embrace difference: her arms are actually outstretched as if to get that embrace. Her abject object is less defined than the Wagner in Mascha's performance. It may seem closer on the one hand to the realm of "pure" expressivity, but on the other, the Hopi rhythms chanted in voice-over concretize the performance's historical and cultural roots, which lie elsewhere. To be sure, presenting indigenous music as incomprehensible is problematic and provides a crucial instance of the film positioning nonwhite culture always outside of Germany. In contrast to Mascha, then, who finds abject kitsch within German culture, Magdalena brings it in from beyond its borders, importing its signs in her make-up and dress.
Magdalena and Mascha's embrace of alterity is connected to their desire to express "what they experienced under Hitler to the Americans" in an
When they return to Germany, the trio "finally decided to take responsibility for [their] past" in their strongest collective attempt at remembrance. They return to their cabaret act and, following the three solo numbers described above, collectively perform an aria they had performed for Hitler, Franz Lehár's "Meine Lippen sie kussen." Donning their garter and corset costumes once again, they move like the mannequins behind them on their makeshift stage. The dark backdrop and clearly defined edges of the stage ensure that we recognize this as staged performance, although there is no theatrical audience. Choreographically, there is nothing more than moving stills or poses, and in some ways the performance is as detached and mechanistic as their Sieg Heil s on all fours at the film's outset. The scene is immediately followed by Carla's final collapse, and then Bomber Pilot appears to perform some homeopathic administration of its own by repeating previous scenes. The first two are accompanied by Elvis's version of "Santa Lucia" and then Sibelius's "Valse triste"; they are emotionally intense, and the slow tempo of the music brushes the images with a vague sadness.
Why do homeopathic administrations of the past fail to help the characters of Bomber Pilot? Diegetically, it can be accounted for by the Adenauerian context in which they find themselves. With its forward-driven, amnesiac ambitions and preoccupation with the German miracle, the period could hardly have offered the supportive context necessary for it to work. Nor would the American occupiers, equally eager to purge all traces
Caruso gesturing towards the audience in Schroeter's sequence of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo
Schroeter's use of close-ups, abstracted space, and direct address elaborate the film's appeals to externalized others. The importance of that emotional invitation is repeatedly illustrated throughout his work, including
"He looked right at me!" Fitzcarraldo's jubilant identification with Caruso
Listeners of Bomber Pilot may be like Fitzcarraldo, wanting to respond to the performance of its characters, but here they are prevented from perceiving them as actual divas or as psychologically credible figures. Take Mascha's nervous breakdown, for instance. We have no way to know why she has it or how to identify with her in any standard sense of the term. The kind of distance that this creates between audience and character is not the unemotional one 1980s critics thought they had found in Brecht, nor is it ironic or mocking. It isn't really camp, either. Instead, it is charged with signs of emotional expressivity, however unfixed and unclear. Without knowing how to situate ourselves in terms of understanding, sharing, or identifying the nature of Mascha's pain and collapse, for instance, we
The musical choices Schroeter makes help extend that openness to the film listener. Although the Liszt at the beginning and the Verdi at the concert hall make specific points, it is more common for the sheer beauty of the piece (or its ugliness, its anachronistic inappropriateness, whatever) to overwhelm, giving us little more than undirected, aimless sound. This is not to champion their abstraction, and, indeed, objections might be raised that the object in Schroeter's text is too ill-defined, his homeopathic ghosts too unspecified, to be worked through. But I believe that this openness is what enables a range of emotional positions and responses on our part, as so many "pieces" of Germany's past are introjected and presented to us. That he is able to do so out of pieces of "culture shit" renders his kitschy project even more compelling. As Schroeter describes his Love's Debris,"The title of this film is based on a very deep conviction that what we express vocally is the ‘product’ of our quest for a closer approach to the Other, for Love and all possible romantic aptitudes."[57] In this way, Bomber Pilot widens the space for empathetic listening that Fassbinder's melodramas and Kluge's "antiopera" had initially begun to clear.
HISTORY
Like the performance of history itself [Schroeter's] cinema inscribes the historical subject in both its beauty and its pain as a single moment, where an external history and a perceiving subject become momentarily and ecstatically lost in each other.
—TIMOTHY CORRIGANM
More than most directors affiliated with the New German Cinema, Schroeter deals in the raw "power of emotion" and desire. He does this by bringing objects into emotions, and then these objects into the self. And just as his notion of self becomes flexible and multifaceted, so Schroeter transforms the concept of Germany into a site of competing forces. It is German and un-German, full of beautiful music, full of tainted music; it
Schroeter's nonjudgmental attitude towards intense emotional expression is central to his treatment of kitsch. This is not to say that he is unaware of kitsch's dangers (Carla's story would have been impossible otherwise), but he is unafraid of the judgment projected onto it—its purported decadence, lies, cheapness, or Kulturscheisse. In short, he does not try to keep the negative alterity associated with it at bay by taking kitsch into his own work. He even finds beauty in kitsch, as Peer Raben could. That lack of fear of beauty is not trivial, given Broch's remarks about kitsch doing something beautifully, not well (and Bomber Pilot certainly could not be accused of doing anything well). In contrast to modernist and Marxist aesthetics, beauty here is not always already narcotizing or ahistorically transcendent, although Schroeter is aware that music has been put to precisely those ends, as in Nazism or Romantic aesthetics. By interweaving concepts like "authentic feeling" and "beauty" and so many kitschy props and artifacts into his text, Schroeter does not put them in the position of alterity, of abandoned, "othered" objects, or products of the realm of "non-art," to recall Kulka. In fact, he says as much in a discussion on Shakespeare: "[For me] there's no great divide between kitsch and art. It's just stupid to look for traditional values in art and culture—one should only try to find a vitality in them."[58]
It is worth returning to Hermann Broch. The full quote from which his earlier remarks were taken reveals how the attempt to ostracize kitsch, which he certainly wants to do, is actually impossible. Kitsch ends up like an unwanted body part that the body cannot reject:
Kitsch is certainly not "bad art"; it forms its own closed system, which is lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art, or which, if you prefer, appears alongside it. Its relationship to art can be compared—and this is more than a mere metaphor—to the relationship between the system of the Anti-Christ and the system of Christ. Every system of values, if
Below, Nietzsche elaborates the "second glance" that Broch implies but does not elaborate. Secularizing the diseased, "foreign" body of kitsch, Germany, and himself, Nietzsche writes:
What is strangest is this: after [a long illness] one has a different taste—a second taste. Out of such abysses, also out of the abyss of great suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin, more ticklish and sarcastic, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things with gayer senses [!], with a second dangerous interest in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times more subtle than one has ever been before. How repulsive pleasure is now, that crude, musty, brown pleasure as it is understood by those who like pleasure, our "educated" people, our rich people, and our rulers![60]
Nietzsche's diatribe against pleasure has little to do with Schroeter's agenda, yet associating its fecal "brown" characteristics with highbrow culture does. Nietzsche takes aim at a nineteenth-century German Kulturscheisse that the director subsequently adopts and brings inward. Especially significant is the renewal, that "second glance" or hearing that Nietzsche raises, which suggests an openness to the lessons of our predecessors as well as an ability to move forward in health. In a sense, Nietzsche offers a nascent theory of kitsch, one whose irony is stronger than Schroeter's and whose "tender tongue for all good things" is considerably more diminished. For texts like Bomber Pilot certainly offer that newly reborn body to us, rejuvenated but not juvenile in its second "tastes," over thirty years after its release and sixty years after World War II.
The words of Julia Kristeva suggestively hint at the productive capacity of kitsch: recall her reference to beauty as "the depressive's other realm." Building on Freud's theory of sublimation and artistic creativity and theories of allegory, she writes:
Sublimation's dynamics, by summoning up primary processes and idealization, weaves a hypersign around and with the depressive void. This is allegory, as lavishness of that which no longer is, but which regains for
Although Kristeva does not address the historical implications of the processes she observes, the absence (of the past) can be made hyperpresent through conspicuously beautiful allegory. Here kitsch, instead of being locked out of history, or called its murderer (pace Friedlander), makes it present, its "ephemerability" displaced as it brings its loss to life.
What does the kitschy aesthetic of films like Bomber Pilot do, in the end? Self-aware, as kitsch is not wont to be, it lacks disdain or judgment and produces critique—from which kitsch is also routinely dissociated. Othered in aesthetic, gay, heterosexual, and even political accounts, kitsch forms part of the national Kulturscheisse with which Schroeter works and in which he is able to find beauty, criticism, and tastelessness all at once. For him, kitsch in general, and music in particular, can create the kind of encounters with undesirable elements of history, self, and national identities important to homeopathic "recovery" and disidentificatory positioning. For Schroeter, Corrigan argues, "history becomes a recurring moment, where time and place are an almost arbitrary stage on which the individual releases emotion, where one chooses to enter history from outside in order to perform oneself as a spectacle of time."[62] Although that choice may not be quite as willed as Corrigan implies, the meeting of listener/viewer/ performer with history nevertheless suggests something more than simply fitting into the "socially supportive space" Santner delineated. It sets the stage for memories in which desire and yearning mesh with historical recollection and memories that audiences are asked to interact with. In contrast to Kulka's formulation, kitsch can articulate decidedly un formulaic emotions. And their overwrought, tacky musical expression is as historiographically compelling as it is generous.
