A SYMPHONY OF RUINS
An example of this complicity appears in the opening segment. Extreme long shots depict the skyline of Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany's financial center, from the dark of night to just after sunrise. Buildings shimmer like gold monuments reflecting the early morning sun; the sky's mutating clouds and colors are stunning; the camera tracks a plane and a bird flying overhead in the distance. Any reverie evoked by this serene segment, however, is immediately punctured, for it is impossible not be reminded of the opening of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) as Hitler's plane soared over the adoring crowds, a god ready to land.
Further overdetermining the reference, Kluge uses Wagner to underscore the entire sequence. Curiously, he selects the Prelude to act 1 from Parsifal, and not passages from Das Rheingold, the more obvious choice given the shimmering buildings along the Main River that contain so much lucre of their own. But the selection is perfectly logical.[7] The quest
Parsifal's importance to The Power of Emotion is immense, in no small measure because of its investment in innocence, redemption, and faith. Wagner's last opera (1892), Parsifal combines these elements in a heady, transcendent mix that works along and outside of the tragic parameters outlined in Kluge's cinematic study. Based on the story of the Fisher King and early grail legends, the opera opens in the castle of Monsalvat, where the Holy Grail containing Jesus' blood from the cross is kept. The Knights of the Holy Grail are distraught because King Amfortas refuses to conduct Communion: Amfortas suffers from a wound in the thigh that will not heal. His wound is fraught with sexual and religious overtones, having been inflicted by the spear that pierced Christ's side on the cross (in Wagner's version). Stolen by the evil magician Klingsor from the knights' realm, the spear was then used upon Amfortas when he was seduced by Klingsor's enslaved sorceress, Kundry, an act that betrayed the sanctity of the grail. (Klingsor, it should be added, castrated himself earlier when he too had succumbed to Kundry's charms.) Only the touch of the tip of that same sword, when retrieved by a reiner Tor (an innocent fool) can heal Amfortas. Such a fool appears in the form of young Parsifal, brought before the court for having killed a sacred swan in Monsalvat. Parsifal witnesses the ritual of the grail performed by the suffering king, but fails to understand it. Chased away, he encounters Kundry in Klingsor's magic kingdom and rejects her sexual advances beyond a kiss. At this moment Parsifal is able to empathize with—and thus understand the significance of—Amfortas's suffering. The same act establishes Parsifal as being of sufficient innocence to deflect and regain the spear (the moment Parsifal makes a sign of the cross with it, Klingsor's kingdom falls to dust, just like Dracula). After wandering many years, Parsifal returns to Monsalvat, where he sees Amfortas begging his knights to kill him. It is Good Friday. Parsifal is made king and then heals Amfortas with the sword. Kundry receives absolution for her sins and is granted rest from her wandering through death.
Wagner's text is so central to The Power of Emotion that Kluge respects its sequence by having the Prelude to act 1 open the film. The music attracts our attention all the more because Parsifal is not the Wagner we would have expected to accompany the glistening images. In light of Kluge's interest in the story lines of operas, however, Parsifal's presence is not surprising—indeed, it is its plot and themes that seal the connection to the film. Its concern with redemption, "holy relics" and wounds, for instance, easily recall the kinds of resurrections and wounds introduced in The Patriot. We can see that the knee's fate to "wander the earth" is shared not only by Parsifal but by Kundry, condemned to that destiny for having mocked the agonies of Jesus on the cross. Unlike her already "holy" military counterpart from The Patriot, however, Kundry wanders in search of redemption, which she finally receives in the form of death.
The Power of Emotion also draws from Verdi's Aida, as mentioned above. The opera is identified through explicit references: we see the early film adaptation of it as Kluge's voice-over gives details, and we hear its familiar music. Its tale also ends badly (indeed fatally, for its lovers), but Kluge's interest in it is as a text not of redemption, but of physical suffering. Of the many operas quoted, it is the most rigorously submitted to material and materialist readings, as we shall see. Another work central to the film's concerns and which recurs throughout is the lesser-known Lemmikainen Legends / Four Legends from the Kalevala by Sibelius. Like Wagner's Ring Cycle, it takes its stories from legend. Lemmikainen is a sort of Finnish Siegfried who travels across the seas, visiting Maidens on the Island of Saari (a segment of which is heard in the film), and ends up being torn apart in Tuonela, Finnish hell, in yet another fatal consequence for a wandering figure.
In addition to establishing the centrality of Parsifal to the film, the opening scene introduces the importance of natural elements: water (rivers, streams, grottos), air (conveyed through time-lapse photography of the sky and through the sounds of howling wind), and, especially, fire. If ice and the lifeless rigidity associated with it dominated The Patriot (see chapter Three, n. 4), The Power of Emotion is suffused with heat and fire. Given its preoccupations, this is hardly surprising: "One speaks of burning passions," the voiceover states, "never cold ones." In addition to the glistening skyscrapers of downtown Frankfurt, we see footage of an actual high-rise on fire. This is just after Kluge explains the fate of the Tower of Babel, whose inhabitants were "destroyed for building high-rises" and for their "confusion of tongues," like his wild lesson in historical causality on the fate of the Crystal Palace. Red filters and tints appear with regularity; the prostitute Betty sets fire to bills she has just earned working for a pimp;
The state funeral in The Power of Emotion
One story, "The Opera House Fire," which also occurs during an air raid, features a firefighter impelled to enter the prop room in order to find Parsifal's grail. It seems that, like the film, he cannot keep away from that opera or its artifacts. Once there, the camera tracks over various props, like John's outrageously artificial head on a bloody platter. What a surprise for the firefighter when he finally reaches the grail to find it empty! The hollow container, with its chintzy promise of redemption, dramatizes how opera's tragic stories and unhappy conclusions rely on artificial, worn-out cores. Even at the time of Parsifal's initial production, the grail was obviously a dated fantasy object, a throwback to earlier legends. At the same time, to think along Benjamin's lines, the vessel's emptiness enables it to be refilled with new meanings that might go beyond the illusions it used to house. Again it is worth recalling Kluge's remarks about film's productivity being found "in the gaps" between shots, where "nothing" actually happens.
Another central project of The Power of Emotion's opening segment is to interrupt musical reverie, fantasies of transcendence, and glorified sorrow. Following the shots of Frankfurt is a completely silent presentation of what looks like World War I footage. All that is clear is its overwhelming sense of death and chaotic carnage. After this, we cut to a quick, equally bloody shot of the birth of a child. The next shot returns our attention to