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

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regulars: Carla (Carla Aulaulu), Mascha (Mascha Elm-Rabben), and Magdalena Munn (Magdalena Montezuma).^[40] They perform as second-rate cabaret singers during the Nazi era, forced to disband when Carla takes a job with a Viennese theatre and Mascha has a nervous breakdown. Pilot haphazardly (and without much clarity) follows their individual activities; instead of depicting Carla's "show," for instance, we see her singing its main song while apparently working in a Viennese pastry shop. Magdalena attempts to find work for Mascha by posing as her aunt and appealing to a Nazi official; later Mascha rescues Magdalena from drowning herself. The two eventually find jobs as secretaries, after brief stints as "creative artists." Magdalena's voice-over then informs us that all three women meet again after the war at a Bruckner concert. They begin discussions about regrouping to go to the United States, this time as reformers rather than performers, to preach integration (apparently we are now in the late 1960s, the time of the film's production). Carla, nostalgic for their earlier Nazi stage career, is hard to persuade, but eventually they leave for the United States. Their rapid downfall as teachers there results from the publication of a Nazi-era photo of them; added to this is the controversy of Mascha's undepicted liaison with an American bomber pilot. We are told there is a trial (also undepicted), and the three go back to Germany where they perform for American troops. Carla has a miscarriage from the bomber pilot and suffers badly. The final image shows Magdalena supporting Carla as she walks around weakly in front of the same building we saw in the film's opening shot.

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.

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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

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aesthetic pushes melodramatic style to its most extreme, presenting it lavishly but then voiding it of expressive content. Some critics might say that that is what leads to the tired heart of kitsch, where emotions lounge around as so much surface, which they condemn for being formulaic, insincere, or deceptive. Yet there is nothing predictable in the characters' responses in Bomber Pilot, nor in our own. It is impossible to know what the film wants or expects us to do with our feelings—in contrast to modernist strategies intent on specified results, discussed in chapter Two.

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.