If the tendency of writing on Weimar film has been to focus on the fantastic and upon the implicit male spectator – be it the Oedipally defeated spectator of Kracauer or the poststructurally destabilized one of Thomas Elsaesser – a counterweight has been thrown into the balance recently in the form of Patrice Petro's Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Petro's perspective is feminist and deeply indebted to Laura Mulvey, but the precise aim of her book is unclear; for although she claims that she is not seeking “to ‘correct the balance’ of film historiography, as it were, or simply to provide an account of the female subject to match existing accounts of the male subject during this period” (p. xxiv), her choice of films undermines this claim, for she brings to the fore melodrama – a term whose ambiguities she never discusses – and the Dirnentragödie: A canon appealing primarily to female spectators is placed under analysis. Despite Petro's apparent wish to overthrow Kracauer's master narrative, all her selection does is indicate his failure to tell the whole story. A truly radical attempt to overturn the male bias Petro discerns in Weimar film historiography would address the films on which the accepted critical narrative of Oedipal defeat has been based: The Student of Prague, Caligari, Nosferatu, Waxworks, Metropolis, and so on.

Perhaps the best point at which to begin a consideration of Wenders's itinerary, of the road that led him to Wings of Desire, is in medias res – with The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge), the most self-referential of all his fiction films. The State of Things was made during an interval in the tortuous shooting of Hammett and showed a film crew stranded on the location of their science fiction film when the money ran out and the director was compelled to visit Hollywood to seek supplementary finance from his American backers (who turned out to be a Mafia group none-too-pleased to have bought into a barely saleable black-and-white European art picture). It was a smoldering meditation on Wenders's own experiences with Hammett, the entrée into the American market sought by so many European directors – particularly those who cherish a childhood association of Hollywood with cinema and believe that only if one makes it in America can one be said truly to have arrived. As Wenders watched editors impose a more conventional narrative shape on the abstracted rhythms of his work, his illusions peeled away one by one: They fall languidly like slow-motion apple peel in his short Reverse Angle. Wenders perhaps had more illusions to lose than most European directors: In his earlier films the man in a cowboy hat on Hamburg's streets had represented the American colonization of the unconscious of young Germans growing up in the ghost town of their own culture.

Realism, totalitarianism, and the death of silent cinema

The received accounts of the development of the arts during the past 150 years speak of a movement from realism to modernism, and thence to postmodernism. This schema is often extrapolated to the history of cinema, which is said to replicate, in speeded-up, time-lapse form, the history of the other arts. The model implies a history that proceeds in dialectical fashion, with the inherent shortcomings of one form calling forth another to correct it and that a successor, and so on. Each stage constitutes an organic response to – an answer to the lack in – the preceding one. But what if this is not the case in cinema? What if one is dealing with mechanism rather than organism, with a history that has been dictated by violence rather than anything even vaguely resembling necessity? Thus sound cinema is not the answer to silent cinema; it is qualitatively different from it. Silent cinema does not die a graceful, biologically ordained death but is destroyed by a catastrophe. The same applies to monochrome in the sixties. It seems to me, moreover, that cinema does not begin with realism but with modernism, with an alienation of our everyday experience of reality that is then dispelled by the coming of sound, with its enhancement of realism – sound's advent being part of the international fascist and socialist realist backlash against modernism. (A backlash is less a necessary response than a counterrevolution.)

On representation and repression

Representation is never neutral, for it is usually reserved for and by the strongest, who deem themselves the fittest to reproduce and be reproduced. And yet even when we are consciously aware of this we are still likely to concentrate so exclusively upon what the representation places before us that we fail to perceive what it omits. But if a society's prevailing modes of representation can therefore be experienced as uncanny, in league with evil, on the other hand omissions can be justified as the unavoidable corollary of the necessity of form: Structure is founded upon exclusion. In any case, is an event's omission always tantamount to its repression? This is one of the central questions the present chapter will address to a series of recent West German films.

Thinking the unthinkable

It is often contended that certain things are best left unrepresented, and that their omission from the visual sphere is a matter of tact rather than repression. Foremost among these are intimate sexual encounter and death, linked by Elizabethan puns on “dying” and critiques that speak of a “pornography of horror.”

This book situates itself on the border of comparative literature and film studies. In recent years film studies has devolved into a somewhat insular possession, jealously guarded by its first colonists – if one can conceive of it as a country, it is a France whose capital is Metz – the generation that set up university film programs in the late sixties. Having once been compelled to fight clear of literature departments to secure their own existence, film programs are often averse now to recognition of the links between filmic and literary texts. Given film's status as the executor of the Gesamtkunstwerk's testament, film studies once promised to become an open forum for reflection upon the separate arts and cultural domains. Instead, once-exciting theories have been deprived of their speculative status and frozen into an orthodoxy that needs to be challenged in the name of the very theorists it takes as canonic: A Barthes or a Benjamin would surely have been appalled by his work's cooptation by the academy. All too often complacent orthodoxy speaks of difference and excludes anything that differs.

It is often claimed that there are two tendencies in film history: on the one hand, realism, transparent reproduction of the world's appearances; and on the other the stylization and distortion associated with expressionism. The assumption – subscribed to, for instance, by Kracauer – is that realism is the more virtuous of the two. (In Bazin's terms, mise-en-scène and deep focus are to be preferred to montage.) It would however be too large a generalization to subsume expressionism under stylization; if this were the case, then Von Sternberg would be an expressionist. Expressionism's legacy is in fact the use of stylization to indicate the state of the mind viewing the world. A vindication of expressionism might argue that it does so in order to counteract the reifying behaviorism of the camera – the result being a fusion of the objective and the subjective that allows one to view both a figure moving through the world and the way that figure perceives the world. Expressionism in film thus becomes profoundly dialectical, and is far from a simple negation of realism – a term that is itself far more multivalent and problematic than its proponents like to admit.

The world becomes uncanny when it is perceived as no longer simple substance, but also as shadow, a sign of the existence of a world beyond itself, which it is nevertheless unable fully to disclose. The uncanny sign is not allegorical, for it only suggests the presence of another world. Such suggestivity may seem to render it akin to the symbol, but it is in fact neither symbol nor allegory; it lacks both the transparency of the allegory and the positivity of the symbol. It is frustrated allegory, negative symbol.

The uncanny world is a world of conspiracy. It is experienced as such by the modernist imagination, with its fascination by – and anticipation of – total systems. In his famous essay “The ‘Uncanny,’” Freud may have noted sardonically his own lack of an instinct for its perception, but he is nevertheless himself enough of a modernist – sufficiently interested, like the great modernist novelists, in the creation of a personal encyclopedic system – to be able to cite an experience of the uncannily that itself uncannily resembles the accounts Hofmannsthal or Mann give of passage through Venice, that labyrinthine deathly city of alienated desire:

Is there any significance in the fact that the two finest Western directors to have made versions of Macbeth – Polanski and Welles – should also have made a film noir piece (The Lady from Shanghai and Chinatown) about the same time as their Macbeth? Or that these two films noirs lack many of the traditional elements of the genre, while retaining what to my mind is the keystone of noir ideology, the image of the threatening female – an image that also dominates Macbeth? These may be merely random thematic and biographical echoes. But are they?

The fundamental noir scenario is one in which a wife plots with her lover to murder her husband, who is usually a much older man: Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice are the prototypes, fused in pastiche in Kasdan's Body Heat. This scenario is only tangentially present in The Lady from Shanghai and Chinatown; the reason, I suspect, being that Welles and Polanski had already filmed an alternative version of it, Macbeth. Macbeth has every appearance of being a garbled account of a myth of kingly succession in a matriarchal society: The Queen disposes of the old priest-king (Duncan), who is no longer referred to as her consort since he can in fact no longer satisfy her, and she appoints a younger man to take his place (the rite de passage he undergoes to prove his suitability for this role is the murder of the old king).

Introduction

In this final chapter, the separate preoccupations of this book converge, filings congregating around a single work: Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane (Die bleierne Zeit). Here the horror pervasive in expressionism is sparked by a return of the historical repressed, the resurgence of the German past, as the fearsome images of concentration camps or Grünewald's painting of the crucifixion spawn further images of tortured bodies, the fruit of the terrorist's futile attempt to end terror through further terror. Von Trotta's film, a reworking of the story of Gudrun and Christiane Ensslin, invites comparison with two other films in particular: Bergman's Persona, whose terrifying images (a burning monk, the Warsaw Ghetto photograph) harrow the mind like Grünewald's painting, and which resembles Von Trotta's work in its concern with doubling, splitting, and dead and victimized children; and Straub's Not Reconciled (Nicht versöhnt), a film version of Böll's Billiards at Half-Past Nine, which also considers terrorism as a cry in the echo chamber of the Nazi past, and reflects on how that past is to find a future – that is, children. Where Bergman's Elisabet Vogler is silenced by the world's violence, Von Trotta's Juliane strives to articulate horror.

Early cinema is an art of allegory; and it is due to the profoundly rooted modern (post-Romantic) opposition to allegory that its displacement was inevitable. Its primary allegorical feature is its location of writing and image on the same plane. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin quotes Schopenhauer's condemnation of allegory, which nevertheless shows a grasp of its complicity with writing:

Der Versucher (The Tempter; otherwise known as Die Verzauberung and Der Bergroman) tells of the fatal influence exerted upon a mountain community by a gold-obsessed charismatic leader, who persuades it to reinstitute human sacrifice; narrated by a doctor who is a precursor of Mann's Serenus Zeitblom, the book is Hermann Broch's allegory of the workings of National Socialism. Set in the heartland of the Heimatfilm, it was the first major German literary text to dramatize the relationship between the Heimat ideology and National Socialism. The work's ultimate failure may reflect the difficulty of establishing the mediations between country and city in a land only recently unified – a difficulty Edgar Reitz utilizes to virtually sever the links and cut the countryside free of responsibility for the Third Reich – and may also demonstrate that the mountain is too central a totem of German literature for the self-reflexive effort to critique the ideology associated with it to succeed. Now that Heimat ideology seems to be resurgent in the German-speaking countries – Reitz's Heimat itself having been extended into a second installment – Broch's work of the mid-thirties has acquired a new timeliness.

The German, the French, and the monster

Romanticism and expressionism dream of the unseating of a reason they identify with quantification, mechanization, and the tyrannous control of the father. When the reason of the Enlightenment sleeps, it dreams Romanticism; when it wakes, it deems monstrous the events that transpired during its abeyance. The valorization of the ugly and monstrous in Romanticism and expressionism embodies a split consciousness that partially identifies with the instrumental reason against which it is in revolt: These movements may bring into the light the repressed and oppressed of society, their features twisted by furious knowledge of their own marginalization, but inasmuch as the Romantics and expressionists depict such figures as deformed, they identify with the power they oppose, which also apprehends them thus. The classic instance is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, split between revolt – the calls of sentiment link one, through pity, even to that which seems most monstrous – and conservatism – the oppressed return as a criminal class whose anonymous disaffection drives the revenge of the monster. Kracauer has discerned the same division within The Student of Prague (1913), where it leads naturally to the theme of doubling:

If several modernists present men transformed into animals or insects, even more depict them as having become machines. Even The Metamorphosis suggests a link between the two forms of transformation: Gregor's shell is described as panzerartig, like armor, and the donning of armor is a rudimentary form of mechanization of the body. This interest in the body as automaton had been manifest in the work of Hoffmann, but only with the advent of modernism does it become a widespread theme. In some cases the identity of man is fused completely with that of the machine: Eliot's Tiresias throbs waiting like a taxi, while the typist whose seduction he has witnessed “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” – her hand passing across her hair with the automatism of the record player's hand jerking across to land on the record's outer rim. In the works of other modernists man is either the ghost within the machine or exists in dual form, as both man and machine. In each case, the native softness of the human body is opposed to its potential hardness.

Broch's Joachim von Pasenow can be seen to exemplify the former alternative. Soft and vulnerable within the hard shell of his uniform, he is an emotional creature whose expressions of feeling are nevertheless firmly corseted by his other identity as social machine, cog in the Prussian Junker order.