Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter

217 Pages·2006·1.63 MB·English

by  Michelle Langford

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Werner Schroeter is one of the most important and infl uential directors of the New
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German Cinema, yet discussion of his fi lms within fi lm theory has been intermittent
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and unsustained. This book provides a long-overdue introduction to Schroeter’s visually
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lavish, idiosyncratic and conceptually rich cinema, situating its emergence within the
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context of the West German television and fi lm subsidy system during the 1970s, then
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moving on to engage with some of the most pertinent and important arguments in
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contemporary fi lm theory. Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin,
and Bertolt Brecht, the author negotiates her way through the complex allegorical a
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terrain of Schroeter’s fi lms by focusing on their insistent and original use of the
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cinematic tableau, allegorical montage, temporal layering and gestural expression. allegorical
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Allegorical Images serves not only as a compelling and sophisticated introduction to
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Schroeter’s cinema, but also makes a major contribution to a range of debates in
contemporary fi lm theory around allegory, tableau, time and gesture.
Michelle Langford is a lecturer in the School of Media, Film & Theatre at the University of New South Wales.
tableau, time and gesture in the cinema of
ISBN 1-84150-138-7
00 werner schroeter
Intellect PO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE UK / www.intellectbooks.com 9 781841 501383
Allegorical Images
Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema
of Werner Schroeter
By Michelle Langford

Allegorical Images
Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema
of Werner Schroeter
By Michelle Langford
intellect
Bristol, UK
Portland, OR, USA
First Published in the UK in 2006 by
Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First published in the USA in 2006 by
Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon
97213-3786, USA
Copyright © 2006 Intellect Ltd
Malina
Cover image: Isabelle Huppert in , 1990.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons
Copy Editor: Holly Spradling
Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-955-8 /
ISBN 1-84150-138-7
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cambrian Printers.
Contents
Introduction 7
Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of
Werner Schroeter
1 A Cinema on the Margins: Contextualizing the Films of Werner Schroeter 17
2 Towards a Theory of Cinematic Allegory 53
3 The Allegorical Tableau 89
4 Allegorical Montage 115
5 A Gestural Cinema: Allegorical Figures and Faulty Performances 133
6 Brecht and Beyond: From Social to Allegorical Gestus 169
Werner Schroeter Filmography 193
Bibliography 197
Index 211
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the assistance, support and
encouragement of many individuals and institutions. My thanks go to the following
institutions: The University of Sydney, Department of Art History and Theory; The
Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst; Wolfgang Längsfeld and the library staff
at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film, Munich; Staff at the audio-visual lab at
the Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich; Anne Even at ZDF, Mainz; Dagmar James
at the Goethe Institut, Sydney; The Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi; Gerrit Thies and
Wolfgang Theis at the Filmmuseum Berlin – Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek. Deep
appreciation must also be extended to Juliane Lorenz – editor of so many wonderful
films and director of the Fassbinder Foundation, Berlin – for tracking down a copy
of Deux and finally putting me in touch with Werner Schroeter. My sincerest
appreciation goes to the following individuals: My family and close friends; Frances
Calvert for her vibrant conversation and generous hospitality; Dr Lis Thomas for her
careful reading and cheerful friendship; and the late Karsten Witte of the Institut für
Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität, Berlin. I would also like to thank Dr Laleen
Jayamanne for her inspiration, encouragement and guidance; Professor Timothy
Corrigan for his generous comments on the manuscript, as well as Professor Thomas
Elsaesser and Dr Jodi Brooks for theirs. Thanks also to Therese Davis at the University
of Newcastle and to Professors Philip Bell and James Donald at the School of Media,
Film and Theatre at the University of New South Wales for their support and
assistance during the final stages of the process. I would also like to thank May and
Lucinda at Intellect for their helpful and patient guidance through the publication
process. Most of all, I would like to thank Werner Schroeter for creating such a
wonderful and inspiring body of films.
And, finally, I dedicate this book to my grandmother, Heather J. Stoltenberg.
Introduction
Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the
Cinema of Werner Schroeter
In Werner Schroeter’s 1990
film Malina, based on the
Ingeborg Bachmann novel of
the same name, the French
actress Isabelle Huppert plays
a writer who is marked by a
series of inabilities. She is
unable to write, unable to
communicate, unable to
remember her father, unable
to act and interact properly
within her environment, or to
engage fully with others in
that environment. The world,
both her external milieu and
Isabel Huppert in Malina,1990. Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin –
her internal mindscape, have
Deutsche Kinemathek © Werner Schroeter
become the loci of impossible
relations between sensations
and reactions, thoughts and actions, signs and meanings. This is borne out
manifestly in her gestural sphere, in the nervous energy that interrupts everything she
attempts to do, in the apparent breakdown of her sensory-motor coordination.1
She rushes from one end of her apartment to the other, weaving in and out of
rooms for no apparent reason: stopping suddenly, turning, stopping, turning,
collapsing onto the floor. She composes letters, or dictates them to her secretary,
but never sends them off. She simply shoves them into a draw instead, or else into
the trash. At one point she even tells the postman to stop delivering her mail. Each
time she attempts to cross the road, a car screeches to a halt, or a tram rushes
by bringing her within centimetres of her life. At times she even has to remind
8 |ALLEGORICAL IMAGES
herself to breathe: “Ich muß atmen, Ich muß atmen,”2 she repeats to herself. This
motor incapacity manifests itself also on a filmic level: partly through the fragmented
and non-sequential development and continual deferment of narrative progression
and the use of ‘irrational’ editing, but not least for the way Huppert’s body is
separated from its own voice and breath. Huppert is effectively deprived of her ability
to speak. The particularities of her own vocal inflections that would normally work
in harmony with the facial and gestural expressions of the body have been erased
and replaced with a rather deadpan post-dubbed voice.3 However, this ‘voice-over’
does not function as a disembodied voice-over narration in the conventional sense,
for it is still closely (but not quite) synchronized to Huppert’s on-screen body. This
voice emanates from elsewhere and attaches itself to her body, or rather to the body
of her character, who does not even have a name.4 The film does not attempt to
replicate the first-person narration – the ‘Ich’ – of Bachmann’s novel, but rather
constitutes her character as a kind of dislocated subject, whose sensory-motor system
has been disabled: sensations are not immediately transformed into actions, and,
when they are, they remain fragmentary, dispersed, forgetful.
Confronted with the cinema of Werner Schroeter, I, too, am faced with a certain
sensory-motor helplessness. Upon viewing Schroeter’s films, although I am deeply
moved, I am frequently deprived of my ability to speak. Words fail me. I find it
impossible to speak of Schroeter’s films, to describe them or to draw meaning
from them immediately, but then, perhaps, I am not supposed to. The images and
sounds of Schroeter’s films generate a cacophony of affects through his use of
intensely rich colours (particularly reds); music that swells so seductively that the
viewer is encouraged to listen with her entire body, or else her lips are coaxed to
sing along. Gestures and gazes generate such a mixture of pathos, pleasure,
disgust, pain or laughter that diverse emotions may no longer be easily
distinguished from one another. Schroeter’s films address the spectator not so
much intellectually as somatically and, in the process, momentarily cut off our
ability to ‘read’ his images. To some extent, it is this somatic address, which is able
to momentarily hold us and carry us along in the film’s rhythm, to take over our
senses and render us speechless. Rather than voyeuristic pleasure, Schroeter’s
films produce what Vivian Sobchack might call “cinesthetic pleasure”,5 or what I
wish to call a kind of “haptic fascination”. This is a kind of fascination that does
not ‘hold’ the spectator in the classical sense implied by the notion of suture.
Rather, it is a fascination that invokes the ‘haptic’ as a kind of ‘pure touching’.
Schroeter’s films ‘touch’ the spectator in such a way that turns them into allegorists,
causes them to adopt new ways of seeing. His films destroy our capacity to ‘read’
cinematic images in conventional ways, but create new ways of engaging with film
images. No longer do images, sounds, gestures have a ‘logical’ relationship to
meaning, for they have been ‘torn’ (sometimes violently) from the contexts and
processes that may originally have produced them. Schroeter’s cinema is
allegorical in the most complex sense of the term, where allegory comprises not
simply the content of the films (the story or characters), but their very substance,
their mode of expression and their mode of address, which in turn deeply inflects
the way we receive and respond to them.
INTRODUCTION| 9
That Schroeter works in such an allegorical mode presents a problem not least for
the viewer experiencing them for the first time, but also for the film critic and theorist.
One is never quite sure what to say about such films that do not appear to subscribe
to most of the cinematic conventions we are familiar with, nor does one feel
adequately equipped to theorize them, for no existing paradigm of film theory seems
to ‘work’. I sift through the stores of knowledge I have acquired through reading
various film histories, theories and criticisms, watching films and writing on them.
But none of these seem to mediate adequately between my experience of Schroeter’s
films, and the act of writing about them. The paths from perception to thought, and
thought to discourse are continually being interrupted, intercepted. Schroeter’s films
constantly lead me astray.
Schroeter’s films do not subscribe to many of the codes and conventions by which
narrative films usually make meaning. His narratives are fragmentary and elliptical
and characters are not developed into psychologically complex individuals, but
remain figures or types: fragments. These figures tend to quote or describe their
parts, rather than enacting them. Action is continually being arrested by the refrain
of the constant pause. This inhibits the movement of the films, which is driven more
by rhythm than by action and deposits narrative into a series of autonomous
tableaux. Gestures, postures and poses swell up with the residues and excesses of
actions that cannot be fully performed. These gestures are the surplus of movements
and narratives that cannot take place, or have perhaps already taken place.
Furthermore, montage does not serve to smooth over the fragmenting processes of
film, but rather enhances them, makes them more visible.
In fact, as early as 1974, the German film critic Ekkehard Pluta stated the problem
most succinctly:
The dilemma of the reception of Schroeter’s films lies in the following: In order to
understand the dialectical effect of image and sound in Schroeter’s films, one must
analyse them carefully at an editing table. But then the pleasure, which they are
intended to produce, will surely be lost. From the impossibility of untangling the
complex system of optical and acoustic signs, with all their intertwined layers,
results the often impressionistic and emotional views of the film critic.6
Pluta’s dilemma is not so different from my own, for Schroeter’s films challenge
us to seek out an appropriate conceptual language through which to interpret
them without, however, destroying the great pleasure and mesmerizing rhythms
that these moving images produce in the viewing, feeling subject. Pluta is quite
obviously marking the inadequacy of certain methods of film analysis that had
become prevalent in film studies in the 1970s, namely the structural analysis of
film narrative pioneered by such figures as Raymond Bellour. Pluta laments that at
that time there was really no precise film-theoretical language to account either
for the dialectical effect of Schroeter’s complex montage of sound and image, nor
for the unravelling of the many interconnected layers out of which Schroeter’s films
are composed. In fact, the title of Pluta’s article, “Das denaturierte