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.