Kluge, Reitz, and Syberberg

Despite their similarities, one must therefore distinguish the "Brechtianism" of Straub/Huillet and Alexander Kluge. Many of their techniques are similar, to the extent that Kaes's descriptions of them are almost interchangeable.^[56] But the author's relation to the film's materials is quite different. One similarity Kaes notes is the presence of printed texts in both Kluge and Straub/Huillet. But the gesture of inserting title cards to break up the narrative calls attention to the director's subjectivity. Like Kluge's voice-over, the cards are another intrusion of the author's voice, consistent with the "tone that hovers between elegy and irony." Although apparently inviting the spectator to take apart the work as well, the author's position is clearly superior, if not condescending.^[57]

Straub/Huillet make no such pretense at not being in control of what is on the screen—"[the filmmaker] is still an author"^[58] —but the attitude of this author is different in the two methods. When Straub/Huillet include printed or handwritten texts in their films, they may punctuate the narrative as in silent cinema, but they are never title cards authored by the filmmakers. Instead, all the texts revealed in their films have other authors, and the gesture of including them leans the film from narrative in the direction of documentary. This is the effect in both Chronicle and Machorka-Muff . More extreme cases are the less narrative forms of the Schoenberg short and Fortini/Cani . Here Straub/Huillet present printed documents in a series along with other types of documentation and do not call special attention to the author's gesture. They do, however, call

attention to the presence of a cinematic author, as the camera tilts to allow the spectator to read. This does not put emphasis on the author but on the technology; the viewer becomes aware that the duration of reading needs to be coordinated with the impersonal duration of the camera movement and that someone had to do this.

Another partial similarity is the contemporary fictional character in search of history, as found in History Lessons (Kaes cites only the Brecht novel)^[59] and in the person of Gabi Teichert, the history teacher in Kluge's The Patriot . In both cases, a fictional character is placed in a "documentary" setting, creating a tension around the blurring of distinctions. The tension is not the result of blurring the distinction in History Lessons , since it is only in the spectator's memory that the young man driving through Rome is a "character." In the driving shots, on the cinematic level, he is only a person driving through Rome—no more or less fictional than the people on the streets around him. The case of Gabi Teichert is quite different, however. This fictional character actually goes to a Social Democratic Party Congress and poses questions to actual politicians who are expected to answer. Thome, one of Straub/Huillet's Munich colleagues from the 1960s, found this objectionable. "If a filmmaker pokes fun at the people in front of the camera at their expense, that's the worst thing for me," Thome writes of the scene of Teichert and the politicians. "I had to leave, I could not bear to watch it, seeing people filmed like that."^[60] The levels of reality—the camera, the "author," the fictional character, the actor, and the "real world"—are collapsed here, while Straub/Huillet keep them carefully separate.

The ambiguous yet authoritative presence of the author in constructing this confrontation of fiction and reality puts in doubt the Brechtian quality of Kluge's work entirely. As Elsaesser writes, "Kluge's protagonists are invariably the appendages of a discourse that is rarely, if ever, capable of questioning its own authority and, instead, by letting voice-over dominate the image, subjects the characters to the tyranny of the commentary." Kluge's superior attitude to the characters and the audience, Elsaesser notes, has also been criticized by Handke and Wenders. Handke's reaction to Kluge's 1968 film, Artists under the Big Top: Disoriented , might also apply to his more recent collage work for television: "One constantly recognizes things: names, faces, people, personalities, dramaturgical clichés, phrases, but above all attitudes [Einstellungen]; attitudes of the film towards the things and the people it shows. . . . Due to the fact that the words are formulated, formulaic, unambiguous and not playfully quoted . . . they make the pictures into picture-puzzles instead of leaving them as images."^[61]

It is the ambiguity of the author's intervention that is the problem here. Straub/Huillet, partly at Huillet's insistence, have progressively tried to let the materials determine the articulation rather than an author's gesture, calling attention as much to itself as to them. At issue for Straub/Huillet, for instance,

was the inclusion of an expressionist painting by Georges Rouault in Chronicle . It was Straub's attempt at connecting the sufferings of Bach to another artist's work and, by extension, to the filmmaker's hand. Huillet found this self-indulgent, and their work has shown no such interventions since.

When Kluge makes a collage out of the fragments of war and suffering in German history, it is not clear whether the memory and suffering he is evoking is or is not his own: authorship is evident, but it evades responsibility for its position in the construction (as in the fictional interviews). Where Straub/Huillet use memory to refer to an absent German subjectivity, Kluge uses memory to evoke the suffering body. But even when the protagonist is a dead soldier's knee, as in Die Patriotin (The Female Patriot , 1979), the impact of the film's fragmentations is to awaken memories of some unified "German" subjectivity. And as Kaes points out, to speak of German suffering in such a one-sided way reveals "a highly ambivalent political agenda covertly at work in the film."^[62]

A similar problem is even more evident in the films of Edgar Reitz and Hans Jürgen Syberberg. Santner sees a necessary and positive value in their work.

Reitz and Syberberg, in their films Heimat and Our Hitler , respectively, produced the two most ambitious attempts by recent German artists to create works of national elegiac art: works that make use of the procedures and resources of mourning to constitute something like a German self-identity in the wake of the catastrophic turns of recent German history. In each case the task of mourning involves the labor of recollecting the stranded objects of a cultural inheritance fragmented and poisoned by an unspeakable horror.^[63]

Although Brechtian theater has been a major influence on Syberberg's theatricalization of the cinema, both he and Reitz show a good deal more affinity for Wagner in the grand scale of their works and the development of leitmotifs of reminiscence over long periods of film time. Syberberg's Out Hitler (Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland , 1977), spans seven hours, while Reitz's Heimat (1984) consists of eleven parts for a total over fifteen hours. The sequel, Die zweite Heimat , is some twenty-six hours long.

The difference between Straub/Huillet and these filmmakers is their relation to memory, and this is a major one, given the recent past in Germany. Straub/Huillet's Bach film was once criticized for being a sort of family album, composed of Anna Magdalena's memories of her husband. As we shall see, the poignancy of this aspect lies, in Straub/Huillet's work, in the unbridgeable distance the film carefully inscribes between the documents of Bach's life and the memory they might evoke in the living. Heimat , by contrast, literally employs the metaphor of the family album and unselfconsciously invites the viewer to be part of the family remembering the past in a German village.

Syberberg's films differ from those of Straub/Huillet most strikingly in his use of highly artificial studio staging. While Straub/Huillet's cinematic sim-

plicity evokes the early cinema of F. W. Murnau, Stroheim, Griffith, and ultimately the Lumières, Syberberg conjures up the specters of the great artists of the Golden Age of cinema in a magic act more reminiscent of the other early film inventor, Georges Méliès.

Syberberg's collage technique, a veritable séance in the Hitler film, has led critics to link him to postmodernism. His works are at their most effective in juxtaposing anachronistic fragments from all periods of German cultural history and a multitude of genres and media, from the Punch and Judy show to Wehrmacht radio broadcasts. But Syberberg is not a postmodernist because he actually longs for the past he is mourning, as is clearly revealed by the rather consistent authorial voice in his films and his conservative, idiosyncratic (if not outright reactionary) essays.

This elegiac quality in Reitz and Syberberg, which I would call nostalgia, is not to be found in Straub/Huillet. The process of mourning, which supposedly is to overcome melancholia, is a constituent part of the aesthetic of Reitz's and Syberberg's work. In Straub/Huillet's films there is no mourning, no melancholy: they simply show the fragments of the world that is lost. The distance to the past is inviolable.

The result is an apolitical quietism in Heimat and Our Hitler , compared to the resistance to authority found in Bach, Antigone, or even Schoenberg and Brecht and Böll, with all their shortcomings. Certainly there is more of a cultural inheritance to be found in exile than in the soliloquies of Syberberg's narrators about the banality of Americanized German culture or Reitz's accusation that the Americans, with the television film Holocaust , had "stolen our history." Both Reitz's and Syberberg's work reveal the postwar mistrust of returned exiles that is thematized in Not Reconciled . They have such a nostalgia for the past that it obscures their view of Germany "as it is." Straub/Huillet films, however, show the love of country expressed by going into exile, as seen in Not Reconciled and Empedocles and in Antigone's speech on Heimat (by Brecht, the returning exile):

Falsch ist's. Erde ist Mühsal. Heimat ist nicht nur
Erde, noch Haus nur. Nicht, wo einer Schweiß vergoß 
Nicht das Haus, das hilflos dem Feuer entgegensieht
Nicht, wo er den Nacken gebeugt, nicht das heißt er  Heimat.^[64]

The project of recollecting the fragments of a German identity is necessarily asymmetrical, since it is not possible to bring back to life the many human victims of fascism, but it is quite possible to revive the forces that murdered them. Indeed, it is the continuity of some of these political and institutional forces with which the world is still confronted.

In his discussion of the films of Reitz and Syberberg, Santner seeks an alternative in postmodern "playful nomadism" and in the necessary mortifi-

cation of language found in Benjamin and de Man. I argue, however, that the force of the films of Reitz and Syberberg and perhaps even Kluge is not playful and nomadic but deadly serious. It tends toward the ideology of a unified Germany with a history restored to continuity. Straub/Huillet's historical continuity, in contrast, is that of opposition—a history of the victims who happen also to have resisted and survived. These traces are in the physical bodies and landscapes or cultural artifacts they photograph, as well as in the implied historical memory that can understand monuments without legends attached. No one would disagree with Reitz's assertion that we (we Germans) must work on our memories. But he presumes to illustrate in his Heimat films what those memories are to look like and who the rememberers are. The frequent appearance of monuments in Straub/Huillet films merely records an absence that looks outside the film for an explanation.^[65] Far preferable is the erection of monuments that do not "represent" twentieth-century Germany at all yet suggest an audience remember the beauty and destructiveness they commemorate, while being the prisoners of neither.

The confrontations between present and past, between language and film form, are as important in Antigone as they were in Machorka-Muff or Bridegroom . For instance, Martin Walsh has linked the plot of Bridegroom , the film's visual form, and German history with a concept of freedom that may apply in all three contexts.

But Lilith is not the only prostitute to be freed. The other is art, specifically film art, which, in the course of these 23 minutes, has evolved through its principal historical stages, until reaching its liberation in the materialist presentation that is Straub's own. The killing of the pimp is, metaphorically, the killing of Germany's decadent cultural heritage—the specifically German implication being raised in the graffiti that opened the film: "Stupid old Germany, I hate it over here, I hope I can go soon . . ." If Straub has laid "stupid old Germany" to rest, the cinema has been liberated from its stifling conventions, and the film's movement from the sordid opening to the celebratory close cements the significance of this new beginning.^[66]