A Companion to German Cinema

Terri Ginsberg, Andrea Mensch, Terri Ginsberg, Andrea Mensch

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405194365
• eBook ISBN: 9781444345582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A Companion to German Cinema

A Companion to German Cinema regards the shifting terrain of German filmmaking and film studies against their larger social contexts with twenty-two newly commissioned essays by well-established and younger scholars in the field. While several of these focus on classic topics such as Weimar cinema, Fifties cinema, New German Cinema and its legacy, and Holocaust film, the collection is distinguished by its focus on new developments and the innovative light they may shed on earlier practices.

A Companion to German Cinema includes essays on Berlin Film, Neue Heimat Film, New Comedy, post-Wall documentaries, the post-Wende RAF genre, and Rabenmutter imagery, as well as on the persistently overlooked and under-theorized Indianerfilme, post-AIDS documentaries, sexploitation films, and new multicultural and transnational films produced in Germany under the auspices of the European Union. Organized into three "movements" representing the significance of these developments for their aesthetic theorization, A Companion to German Cinema challenges its readers to address critical gaps in the field with the aim of opening it further onto new terrains of intellectual engagement.

Second Movement: Dislocation

Marked by transnationally inflected historiography for which borders and their transgression are of central concern, contemporary German film scholarship has often repositioned the nation-state within the limits of such border-crossings as persistently necessary to German – and by extension, European – sociocultural vitality. By contrast, the present volume’s second movement offers a series of chapters which challenge that tendency by analyzing films and film movements that stand either to critique or to symptomatize it. They do so from (im)migrant/diasporic, feminist and queer, and critical class perspectives regarding avant-garde/experimental and alternative/independent works or films and genres that instance the exploitation and co-optation of marginalized ethnoracial, religious, and sex-gender positions internationally. The second movement thereby offers a critical dislocation of prevailing theoretical support and advocacy for transnational capital mobility in the Germano-European cinematic sphere and beyond. It points to the often violent displacement of globally subjugated and indigenous populations which is the preeminent result of such mobility.

8

Views across the Rhine

Border Poetics in Straub–Huillet’s Machorka-Muff (1962) and Lothringen! (1994)

Claudia Pummer

1. Border Crossings

Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub met in Paris in November 1954. In the same month, the first severe clashes between Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) troops and the French colonial army broke out in Algeria; the Algerian War had begun. Four years later, a 25-year-old Jean-Marie Straub fled across the French–German border to escape the draft into the war. Huillet joined him shortly after and by the end of 1959, the couple had found a new residence in Munich.

Two years later, in the fall of 1962, Straub–Huillet completed their first film, the German-language production Machorka-Muff. An adaptation of postwar novelist Heinrich Böll’s short story, Bonn Diary (Hauptstadt Journal, 1958), the film dealt with one of the most controversial current political matters at the time: the Federal Republic’s rearmament and military restoration after World War Two. Also the three other German-language films the couple made in the following ten years of their Munich residence (1958–1968) were heavily infused with German culture and subject matter; their second Böll adaptation, Not Reconciled (Nicht Versöhnt, 1964–1965), was one of the first films made in the Federal Republic that addressed explicitly the country’s difficulties to deal with its National Socialist and military past; their first feature-length film, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Die Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach, 1967), was about the life and work of a German cultural icon: the Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach; and The Bridegroom, the Comedienne, and the Pimp (Der Bräutigam, Die Komödiantin, und der Zuhälter, 1968), Straub’s collaboration with the young Rainer Werner Fassbinder, dealt with contemporary class conflicts in postwar West German society.

Filmed on location in Bonn and Munich, the making of Machorka-Muff coincided, in addition,with the emergence of the Young German Film (whose official outbreak had been declared a few months earlier in the Oberhausen Manifesto). Although they were not signatories of the manifesto, the film is often considered “an early milestone of the Young German Cinema (Byg, 1995: 35).” In his attempt “to demonstrate the significance of Straub–Huillet’s work as a cinematic confrontation of German history and culture,” Barton Byg inevitably undermines the transnational characteristics in Straub–Huillet’s work. And, he is not alone. Even though Straub–Huillet are less present in more recent surveys on postwar German cinema (following the general disciplinary shift away from modernist and new German filmmaking practices toward previously neglected phenomena, like popular cinema, reception studies, or culturally specific genre films), the couple was for a long time primarily known and discussed for their contributions to New German Film culture of the 1960s and 1970s, especially within Anglo-American scholarship (Turim, 1984, 1986; Byg, 1995; Magisos, 1996; Rentschler, 1996).

This German orientation appears even greater in light of Straub–Huillet’s conspicuous absence in national or modernist surveys on either French or Italian postwar cinema, despite of the fact that the two filmmakers lived and worked primarily in Italy since 1968. And until Huillet’s passing in 2006, they filmed most of their work on locations in Italy, including a substantial and growing number of French- and Italian-language films.

In this chapter, I address Straub–Huillet’s contributions to German cinema from a transnational angle. I draw attention first to the influence that French New Wave film culture and criticism had on Straub–Huillet’s work, especially during the early years. I do not argue for historicizing their work as an intrinsic part of French New Wave Cinema; I propose to understand it rather as deriving from the position of the border, thus belonging neither fully to one nor the other national film culture. Straub–Huillet’s involuntary border-crossing in late 1958 placed the two filmmakers squarely in-between two national film cultures: while producing their first films in the geographical, cultural, linguistic, and partially institutional context of the Young German Film, their artistic approach remained indebted to a critical and aesthetic model that was central to the formative years of French New Wave Cinema. Following a brief overview of Straub–Huillet’s affiliations and occupations during their Parisian residence (1954–1958), I read their debut film, Machorka-Muff, in terms of a border poetics, a reading practice in which the border emerges as a central figure that works across temporal, formal, textual, linguistic, and cultural limits (e.g. Michaelsen and Johnson, 1997; Schimanski, 2006; Schimanski and Wolfe, 2007). Thus, breaching a number of different planes and categories, I treat the border as a zone rather than a line, “in which case the border becomes not only the division between two territories or places, but also a territory or place in itself (with its own borders)” (Schimanski, 2006: 49).

For instance, in reference to François Truffaut’s seminal article “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” (1954), I argue in the first part of this chapter, that Machorka-Muff is deeply informed by an ethical position that structures the relationship between filmmaker and subject matter. Bearing itself structural similarities to a borderline position, this ethical imperative was central to a theory of New Wave filmmaking, while it differed radically from notions of authorship developed by Young German filmmakers a few years later. This is part of the reason why critics and viewers in West Germany reacted at first rather negatively to Machorka-Muff.

In the second part of this chapter, I am showing how figurations of borderlines inform Straub–Huillet’s films also on a textual, discursive, and formal basis in Machorka-Muff and in one of the couple’s later works, the French–German co-production Lothringen! (Lorraine! 1994). Developed in response to specific personal and biographical experiences (which were themselves triggered by geopolitical border politics and conflicts), both films are inscribed by discernible traces of border formations that appear on multiple levels: first, in reference to extratextual discourses that reference geopolitical events as well as the filmmakers’ biographies external to the film texts; second, in the form of intertextual and intermedial relations (operating between texts or between text and profilmic location); and, third, as part of formal figurations of borderlines that are directly inscribed into the filmic mise-en-scène.

The choice of these two films is not coincidental. Straub–Huillet made Lothringen! only a few years after the Berlin Wall had come down in 1989, followed by German unification in 1990 and the founding of the European Union in 1993. Bracketing the beginning of these events, Machorka-Muff had been filmed one year after the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961. Marking the beginning and end of Cold War politics as they had been mapped onto a German topography, the two films are structured around multiple border zones that unfold a genealogy of West European, in particular French–German, territorial conflicts. While dealing, for instance, at the outset with the nationally specific topic of 1950s West German defense politics, Machorka-Muff also bears traces of the French colonial conflict that took place around that time in Algeria. In addition, the film opens its view onto Straub’s birthplace in the Alsace-Lorraine region, a place he experienced as a child under Nazi occupation. This same place provides the main setting in Lothringen! and connects it to a broader history of French–German border conflicts from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 to the post-Wall landscape of Germany in the early 1990s.

One of the border’s most distinct features (and effective measures) is its ability to institute conflicting meanings. With its “polysemic nature,” the border means different things to different people (Balibar, 2002: 81). It welcomes and invites some to cross, while (violently) prohibiting others to do the same. For instance, in the winter of 1958, the military draft forced Straub to cross the border into neighboring West Germany, a territory that was itself heavily divided by interior borderlines.

In the following months, Straub (who was frequently accompanied by Huillet) traveled freely across those interior borderlines while conducting research of archival material and scouting for original locations for the couple’s long-term Bach film project. The Bach project and, more precisely, the biographical parameters established by the historical figure Johann Sebastian Bach, compelled, in a sense, the couple’s border-crossing into German territory and determined their journey across German–German borderlines. Outside of France, Straub’s involuntary exile turned into an expedition of two filmmakers on the trail of Bach. Since it followed Bach’s map, and not the territorial reconfigurations of a divided German landscape, Chronicle became a German–German “co-production,” at least in terms of filming on original locations in both East and West Germany. Unlike most East Germans (and Eastern Europeans) at the time, the French émigré filmmakers had a certain mobility in exile, which allowed them to cross inner German–German state lines. This kind of mobility stands in contrast to the conditions Straub had been running from in France. Threatened by the draft, he (and many other young French men) had only three options which all substantially limited their mobility and implied various forms of expulsion beyond either social, national, or imperial borderlines: to go to war meant, first, to participate in a colonial border conflict; second, to refuse the draft meant either to be sent to prison, a place of social and civil deportation within the country’s inner borders, or it meant, third, emigration and exile.

To conclude thus far, Straub–Huillet’s border-crossing in the late 1950s is informed by a number of contradictory meanings and movements, involving passages across exterior and interior boundaries, some of them restrictive and others transgressive.

Another variation of the border’s polysemic function lies in the possibility that a person can experience the “same” border in more than one way. Something like this happened in regard to Straub’s own biographical experiences with the French–German border. Born in 1933 in Metz, in the border region of Alsace-Lorraine, he spent parts of his childhood under Nazi occupation. His later ostensible engagement with German-language arts and culture appears especially interesting in this regard. In 1958, Germany must have presented, in this respect, both a certain familiarity and a difficult choice. Moreover, in Straub’s first experience it was the border that moved, crossing and violating an entire region and its people. But in the late 1950s, the “same” borderline had changed its meaning: this time Straub was the active crosser (rather than the other way around) while the border functioned as a barrier that protected him from being sent across the sea, where he would himself have become part of an occupying army involved in the redrawing of France’s colonial map.

2. Border Criticism

Straub–Huillet’s professional collaboration had already begun during the couple’s Parisian residence, a period that coincided precisely with the formative years of the French New Wave. The “film that brought Straub and Huillet together” (Byg, 1995: 51) was based on an idea that existed at least since 1954 (Roud, 1972; Heberle and Funke Stern, 1982). Already engaged in the idea of making a biographical film about Bach, Straub asked Huillet if she would help him write the screenplay for the film. Even though the film was not realized until more than a decade later, the Bach film is largely considered Straub–Huillet’s first project.

Whereas our knowledge about the couple’s early Parisian residence is mostly anecdotal, we can infer that the two were part of a vital young French film culture. Critics often claim that Straub worked as an assistant for the, at the time, already established filmmakers Jean Renoir, Abel Gance, and Robert Bresson, yet the only credit he actually received during that time was for a low-budget short film called Fool’s Mate (Le Coup du Berger, 1956), retrospectively considered one of the first films of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• First Movement: Destabilization
• Second Movement: Dislocation
• Third Movement: Disidentification
• Index