MELODRAMA AND WOMEN'S MODALITIES
In the 1980s, scholars considered melodrama a women's genre, due to its historical popularity with female audiences and the spectatorial engagement it was believed to offer. Although these assumptions have been nuanced or overtly challenged since then, it is important to stress their importance in European film culture at the time. Directors like Margarethe von Trotta, Jeanine Meerapfel, and Helma Sanders-Brahms were closely aligned with the genre—as were male counterparts like Reitz who were more centrally positioned in the New German Cinema. Despite this collective interest in exploring the past, however, the women directors' motivations for using melodrama were different, partly due to the genre's historical "feminization." To be sure, some of these directors—von Trotta most vocally—militated against that very feminization:"What does it mean? Every Hollywood film in which
But in light of the various links (historical, scholarly, popular) among women, femininity, and the domestic sphere at the time, melodrama seemed an appropriate form with which to explore historical issues from female-centered perspectives and memory. Critics maintain it provided a way for women's voices and experience to speak; it could also be tied to an autobiographical impulse that their male counterparts left largely unexplored. As Barbara Kosta notes, autobiographical modes gave women directors a way to mediate between the subjective experience of women and women's public construction and positioning in "history."[22] These German melodramas, as Renate Möhrmann, Julia Knight, Susan Linville, and other feminist scholars have stressed, presented history intertwined with subjective and intersubjective connections. Moreover, they argue, the women's melodramas eschewed masculinist norms, assumptions, and perspectives. (As Linville notes, even the Mitscherlichs' theory of a national "inability to mourn" assumed a male German subject with small room for women, gays and lesbians, and people of color, a point to which I will return.) For Möhrmann, women's melodrama achieved something even more radical. Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother, she writes, exposed the "deficiency" of the male system through its critical depiction of the return after the war of the "patriarchal project."[23] In contrast to U. S. melodramas, with their abundant clichés of fallen women, or desexualized virgins and mothers, feminist German melodrama of the time "stages the swan song of patriarchal discourse and the entry of mothers into film history. The absence of fathers, their departure for the Second World War, frees the mothers—as these films show us—from the limitations of their gender roles … for everyone to see."[24]
What Möhrmann observes at textual levels also applies to the economic contexts of the films, since financial, political, and social aspects of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception were different for West German female filmmakers. Directors like Ulrike Ottinger, Jutta Brückner, Helke Sander, and Ula Stöckl (in addition to Meerapfel, Sanders-Brahms, and von Trotta) emerged from progressive, leftist contexts that had been largely impervious to women's issues. They were also responding to a newly established cinematic institution—the New German Cinema, populated by celebrated male Autoren who were having a much easier time getting their films made and distributed than the women were. Another context for their work was the contemporary feminist debates over cinema's relationship to social issues, questions about cinematic realism, and the possibility of a female or feminist aesthetics. How, for instance, to represent
Part of that immediate historical context was established by frauen und film, the journal Helke Sander started in 1974. By the early 1980s, the journal had shifted toward theoretical questions of representation,[26] but in the early years it featured essays on directors like Maya Deren, Leni Riefenstahl, and Yvonne Rainer. The journal's position favored documentary and realism for contemporary female directors. Now given documentary's long-standing association with education and social issues, the preference was justified: pressing women's concerns were at hand, such as Paragraph 218 and the threat to criminalize abortion. Yet, as we shall see in chapter Five, for directors working in more stylized or fictional venues—like Sander, Mikesch, and Ottinger—controversy, disdain, or neglect often awaited the release of their films in the women's community.
Among the films that used melodramatic form to explore the intersection of the past with the present were von Trotta's Schwestern, oder die Balance des Glücks / Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness (1979) which, as the name implies, was told from a sister's perspective, as was Marianne and Juliane. Adult daughters tell the family dramas of Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother and Meerapfel's Malou, and their quests for personal and historical identities are centered around their mothers. Although these directors did not express interest in American melodrama—compare von Trotta's remarks with Fassbinder's boisterous homage to Sirk—their films nonetheless share the "nonstyle or zero-degree style" of American women's films of the 1930s and 1940s.[27] The formal excesses that characterized the work of Sirk, Minnelli, Ray, and others were simply not there in these German women's melodramas. We can see how they thus operated on the periphery of both typical melodramatic form and the documentary modes of women's filmmaking prevalent in Germany at the time. Some of these films focussed their critique on Germany of the 1950s, not a time of "miracles" for them, but, as the original title of Marianne and Juliane makes clear, a "leaden time," when West Germany was returning to conventional gendered and sexed roles and the (re)formation of the German family and state.
Finding a voice was important for these female directors, and its thematic and formal prominence in their films is not incidental. For all its suspicions of language, melodrama seemed able to provide a voice for these women, even if, as Susan Linville has argued, their films usually suggested a differently gendered relationship to stories, their telling, and the ways of "coming to terms" that could be articulated through the genre. Finding a voice often involved telling histories that had been given little public voice before,
By selecting a personal, melodramatic format to approach a recent and volatile political event, von Trotta conveys the extent to which affect and history are linked. She also conveys that repression is at once a political and psychological phenomenon. The latter is established through the use of film form. If vertical excavation is a central trope for the attempts to dig out new histories in Kluge's The Patriot, here the layers of repression are laterally sculpted into the mise-en-scène. The building in which Juliane is jailed reveals the material, institutional dimensions of the process. When Marianne visits, she enters through an initial series of doors, is then escorted by a guard into a room where she is strip-searched, brought out a door through a courtyard into a new building to a waiting room, and finally sees Juliane in the room next to that. At another point a pane of glass separates them when they "meet." Juliane's story could not be more locked away and separated. Marianne—who is strongly ambivalent about her sister, resenting her "abandonment" of her husband and son for life as a political fugitive—becomes obsessed with learning more. She has to rely on material fragments and affective evidence alone to vindicate her sister, just as Malous's Hannah would comb through photographs and memento to try to tell her mother's story.
Marianne takes measurements and then restages her sister's hanging, basically re-presenting it—much like the work that the film itself does. The film also mimics Marianne's efforts to produce history infused with affect and personal subjectivity. Marianne and Juliane is punctuated by flashbacks
Aware of the pressing psychic, sociopolitical need to find meaningful personal histories, these melodramas, even nostalgic efforts like Malou, seem aware of the fantastic, elusive nature of their project. Access to memories, mastering or even uncovering a clarifying, edifying past was always a messy, mediated affair, almost impossibly so. These films suggested that contemporary identity had multiple relationships to events, facts, or figures of the past, and that one might disidentify as much as identify with them. Like many postwar children, Malou's daughter searches for a past she herself never experienced. Even her mother's story is piecemeal and unsettled, associated with so many different national, religious, and linguistic "homes" as to preclude a singular story or identity in the first place. The film's style dramatizes the difficult access to memory and the past; characters constantly play and work around material scraps and quirky shrines. Martin, Hannah's husband, is commissioned to design a cultural center and is told by officials, "You won't solve anything with that ‘old stuff.’" Angry, he turns on Hannah, chiding her for her "useless" obsession with the photographs of her mother (von Trotta's Marianne is similarly criticized by her male partner, a pattern Susan Linville notes in examining the gendered patterns of remembrance in the two films). After her many journeys back, Hannah is nowhere closer to peace, a sense of identity, or an improved relationship with Martin. The film closes with a dramatic aerial shot of her and Martin literally going around in circles, trying to find each other on the roof of a skyscraper.
Malou places great weight on the material scraps of cinema itself (photographed images, music) as the means by which the past can be approached. That Malou (Ingrid Caven) is a singer—and often performs in the style of Marlene Dietrich, or at least this seems to be the historical recollection she encourages—further foregrounds the staged nature of her daughter's recovery. And even if our attention is drawn to the dramatic
In that regard, the scores of the women's German melodramas function like those of Fassbinder. Music retreats rather than reassures, appearing in fragments without resolution, much as the historiographic assumptions of the films operate. The inability to attain closure vis-à-vis the past is formally suggested by Raben's score for Malou, which reproduces the circularity of the plot. It presents a myriad of variations of "Ein kleines Franzeschen."[32] The song's association with Malou is evident before the story even begins, when we see her performing it over the opening credits. Throughout the film, it moves seamlessly from diegetic to nondiegetic situations, whether sung by Malou/Caven, or nondiegetically accompanying Hannah or Malou as each picks through the photographs of her past, or with Hannah as she seems to travel to that temporal past by driving to Malou's home in Alsace. But the circularity doesn't dramatize a lack of direction, just the fictive nature of resolution.
Jürgen Knieper's soundtrack to Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother is similarly sparse and compelling. Nonmusical sounds such as air raids and radio transmissions of political events intrude into key personal moments, such as Lene's birthday party early in the film or, as I have already mentioned, the birth of her child. Some of the sound sources are diegetic, like the radio at Lene's birthday gathering; others are not. Most blur diegetic borders altogether. The intercutting of clearly documentary air raid sirens and footage with the birth scene appears to be nondiegetic, or at least nonsynchronous, but later Lene mentions having given birth during an air raid. Sounds here offer literal examples of public culture, policy, and governance penetrating what would seem to be extremely private, domestic spaces—just as Fassbinder did to ironic effect in the opening of Maria Braun. It is against that invasive backdrop that Knieper's music struggles, as Schneider has observed.
Schneider focuses on the plaintive piano music fragments that recur throughout the film, describing it as a "solo instrument placed on the same level as the commenting voice of the [narrating] author,"[33] a point driven home as the theme fuses with the rhythms of Lene's breath at one point.
As his career developed and budgets grew, Fassbinder's melodramas became more lavishly stylized than his earlier work. They would also concentrate on the experiences of female rather than male characters—Veronika Voss replaced Hans Epp; Lili Marleen, Herr R—and the director would tell interviewers he found women more interesting to work with. But unlike Anna or Hannah, who go in search of history from within the constellation of the family, few domestic frameworks encumber (or abet) the protagonists of Fassbinder films like Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss / Veronika Voss (1982) or Lili Marleen. Their identities, drives, and desires are bound up in other social, economic, and cultural institutions of what Elsaesser calls the enticing machinery of "image-making." Fassbinder's bypassing of the family is significant, even if German cinema had never shared the American tradition of presenting family as a utopian haven: "Both visually and in his narratives, Fassbinder in effect distances himself from the Oedipal time of the family romance and the primal scene of ‘the marriages of our parents’ giving the spectator no illusion of depth, of entering or penetrating the recesses of the fiction: his flat, evenly or underlit images invite no ‘inwardness’ but merely complicate infinitely a visual surface, put ‘en abyme’ by the multiple frames and overlaid action spaces of sound and image."[34]
In exchanging an ostensibly private domain for a public, exhibitionist one in these later melodramas, Fassbinder directs our attention to the politics of re presentation. "What emerges," says Elsaesser in a remark more applicable to film sound than it admits, "is the notion that cinema has a claim on history, where this history is spectacle and make-believe, deception and self-deception."[35] For Raben's scores for the "New German Melodramas" bank on that very deception and inauthenticity, even as they establish an "authentic" historical period and a historicized locus of desire. For example, he describes the song "Capri Fishermen" (Winkler/Siegel), which turns up in films like Lili Marleen, Lola (1981), Maria Braun, and Schmid's Hors Saison, as "epitomizing [German] longing of the 1950s."[36] Such scores seem to recognize the generic obligation to provide some form of emotionalism, which they do, but not without self-consciously tweaking the material, historical, and ideological hardware behind that same function,