Allegorical images

Michelle Langford

Description

Werner Schroeter is one of the most important and influential directors of the New German Cinema, yet discussion of his films within film theory has been intermittent and un-sustained. This book provides a long-overdue introduction to Schroeter’s visually lavish, idiosyncratic and conceptually rich cinema, situating its emergence within the context of the West German television and film subsidy system during the 1970s, then moving on to engage with some of the most pertinent and important arguments in contemporary film theory. Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht, the author negotiates her way through the complex allegorical terrain of Schroeter’s films by focusing on their insistent and original use of the cinematic tableaux, allegorical montage, temporal layering and gestural expression. In doing so, this book also makes a valuable contribution to developing a theory of cinematic allegory by locating Schroeter’s films in the context of a wider “allegorical turn” in contemporary European and post-colonial filmmaking.



'Allegorical Images' serves not only as a compelling and sophisticated introduction to Schroeter’s cinema, but also makes a major contribution to a range of debates in contemporary film theory around allegory, tableaux, time and gesture.

Sujets

• Mathematical
• Earth Sciences
• Sciences et techniques
• Earth science
• Geography
• Computational
• General officer
• Physics
• General
• Film
• Science
• Physique
• Physical attractiveness

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841509556
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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
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
Cover image: Isabelle Huppert in Malina , 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
Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter
1 A Cinema on the Margins: Contextualizing the Films of Werner Schroeter
2 Towards a Theory of Cinematic Allegory
3 The Allegorical Tableau
4 Allegorical Montage
5 A Gestural Cinema: Allegorical Figures and Faulty Performances
6 Brecht and Beyond: From Social to Allegorical Gestus
Werner Schroeter Filmography
Bibliography
Index
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 L ngsfeld and the library staff at the Hochschule f r 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 f r Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universit t, 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

Isabel Huppert in Malina , 1990. Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin - Deutsche Kinemathek 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 her internal mindscape, have 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 herself to breathe: Ich mu atmen, Ich mu 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.
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