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64 Die Versöhnung
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| Between
the Young and the New Pop Sensibilities and Laconic Style in Rudolf Thome's Rote Sonne (1969) "Young German Cinema is Boring" |
| [Forthcoming
in Screen] Johannes von Moltke University of Michigan |
 |
In
the 100-year history of German cinema, few landmarks stand out as pointedly
as the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962. This year marks a watershed in what
remains the standard historiographical narrative concerning the development
of German film: after the bygone glory of the Weimar art cinema and its
descent along a trajectory leading, in Siegfried Kracauer's terms, "from
Caligari to Hitler", filmmaking in Germany seems to enter a long period
of dormancy throughout the Nazi years and their continuation through the
1950's - interrupted, at best, by the dim and passing promise of a
new beginning with the "Trümmerfilme" [rubble fils] and the
founding of DEFA in the late 1940s. Against this background as well as the
more immediate and explicit sense of a perpetual Filmkrise throughout the
1950s , the collective intervention by 26 young filmmakers at the Oberhausen
Short Film Festival has entered German film history as the crucial turning
point of a previously parochial German cinema on its way back to international
recognition, aesthetic respectability, and a collective critical voice that
was worth taking seriously. To be sure, this mythologization of Oberhausen as a point of origin contains more than a kernel of truth: at least retrospectively, it is quite evident that the publication of the manifesto and especially the institutional and personal initiatives that backed it up, produced an unprecedented situation for German filmmaking indeed: among the repercussions of the "Oberhausen moment", we find the institutionalization of a unique system of film subsidy, the founding of crucial film-cultural facilities (e.g. the film schools in Munich and Berlin and the Berlin "Kinemathek"), as well as the gradual recognition of a national Autorenkino both at home and abroad. On the other hand, the almost obsessive fixation on "Oberhausen" as the wellspring of a rejuvenated German cinema has problematic implications for questions of periodization and canonization. Not only is there the issue, already raised insistently by Eric Rentschler over a decade ago, of the historical background for the manifesto itself, as well as of the continuities that this new "Zero Hour" of German filmmaking supposedly eclipses; but there is also the problem of Oberhausen's apparent inclusiveness as a blanket reference for all German cinema that comes after it. To claim, for example, that the Manifesto has "remained the Magna Charta of the young German cinema" through the early 1980s , or to still view it as "Ausgangspunkt des Gegenwartskinos" [point of departure for the cinema of today] in 1992, tends to elide both diachronic and synchronic differentiations: neither has there been any sustained effort to determine whether the "Oberhausen moment", however we define it, has come to an end and what kinds of turning points mark the advent of "post-Oberhausen" German film, if any; nor does the very notion of a "New German Cinema" always allow for sufficient internal differentiations. Particularly in the patterns of its American reception , the celebration of a handful of directors has tended to hide the fact that "Oberhausen" was (and continues to be) a heavily embattled point of reference. Ever since American film critics excitedly announced, "The Germans are coming, the Germans are coming!", it would seem as though there has been no turning back: after Oberhausen, Germany's cinema followed a straight path towards international success through the 1970's, or so the mythology would have it. For this reason, it still comes as something of a surprise to find an article in the September 1967 issue of twen, a seismograph of then current trends in youth culture, that heralds the inanity of Oberhausen filmmaking under the headline, "Der junge deutsche Film ist langweilig doof." Here, the well-known publicist Joe Hembus, a lifelong supporter of most things "new" in German Cinema, argues that the Young German Cinema of the Oberhauseners has entered into a "war on two fronts: Opa's Kino still ridicules them as 'Bubi's Kino', whereas the up and coming forces already laugh at them as aging warriors." From the point of view of this new generation of "Jüngstfilmer" whose unconventional approach to filmmaking Hembus discusses in his article, the Oberhauseners themselves have ended up making "Väterkino." Who were these "Jüngstfilmer", and how did their critique of the first Oberhausen generation play itself out in their films? In an effort to reconstruct what might be considered an intermediate stage between the Young German Cinema of the 1960's and the internationally renowned New German Cinema of the 1970's, this article takes a look at an exemplary film coming out of a group of filmmakers which gained a certain notoriety in the late 1960's as the "Neue Münchner Gruppe." It is a group that defined itself in opposition to the signatories of the manifesto, locating the "fathers" who need to be replaced in the early to mid 1960s, as opposed to the golden years of "Papas Kino" in the 1950s, which had constituted the Oberhauseners' nemesis. The critique of "Oberhausen" as a signifier for film politics and funding, for group identity, and for a certain approach to filmmaking turns out to be seminal for the formation of this group, both in terms of their films and their writings. Rotating through each others' projects as directors, producers, actors, or cameramen, they stage their early films (as well as their reviews) as an uprising against the allegedly established style of the Oberhauseners. Thus, Rudolf Thome, asked recently about the way his feature films Detektive (1968) and Rote Sonne (1969) relate to the Young German Cinema, retorts: Their relationship to the Oberhausen movement? These films were made against it, they were really consciously made against those other films. What the established Young German Cinema of the Oberhausen signatories wanted to do was to make socially critical, political films. We wanted cinema. [...] We stood in opposition to the Oberhausen filmmakers. And Thome's colleague Klaus Lemke rhetorically asks "what distinguishes our kind of filmmaking from the Jungfilmer-productions? - We're simply fifty years younger!" While this kind of rhetorical posturing usefully exaggerates some film historical lines of differentiation that I want to follow in the present context, it hardly amounts to any kind of evidence in the absence of a discussion of the "Jüngstfilmer's" own productions. For this purpose, I want to turn to the work of Rudolf Thome as an example of a particular style of filmmaking that remains poised between the early successes of "Oberhausen" and the canonized works of the New German Cinema's most famous Autoren. To the extent that the films of Thome and the "Neue Münchner Gruppe" actually facilitate the transition from the "Young German Cinema" to the era of Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders - by whom they would be permanently eclipsed -, the film-historical function of these "Jüngstfilmer" becomes that of a catalyst or "vanishing mediator", consumed and obliterated in the very process they enable. While this would certainly be reason enough to take another look at this brief moment of German film after Oberhausen, my purpose here goes beyond simply reconstructing the hidden "influences" that shaped early Fassbinder, or Wenders. Though Thome may deny the social and political import of his own approach to filmmaking, we can detect in the laconic style of a film like Rote Sonne a specific kind of "pop" sensibility that links it in important, though mediated ways to the social and cultural terrain of the 1960's, even as it prepares the ground for the German cinema of the following decade. This sensibility, I suggest, manifests itself particularly in the laconic narrational and stylistic strategies of the "New Munich" films, as well as in the equally laconic performances of masculinity, whose latent masochism provocatively invokes and undoes some of the Oedipal assumptions of a classical Hollywood paradigm. Baby, You Can Drive My Car When Rote Sonne premiered in 1969, Wim Wenders wrote a euphoric review in Filmkritik that has accompanied the subsequent re-releases of the film like a seal of quality. Under the title "Baby, You Can Drive My Car (And Maybe I'll Love You)," he sings the praises of Thome's stylistic "take," playing on the double meaning of the German term "Einstellung" as both an attitude or stance and a cinematographic unit: Rote Sonne is one of those very rare European films that don't simply try to imitate American cinema (and end up demonstrating that they should really have been made in New York starring Humphrey Bogart), but have rather taken their stance (Haltung) from American films: one of quietly and unobtrusively spreading out the surface of their world for 90 minutes and nothing else. This attitude (Einstellung) is visible in every frame of this film. In its celebration of "surface," Wenders' review not only situates Thome's film within a discourse on Americanization and on popular culture; he also provides important clues regarding the significance of Rote Sonne in terms of the cinematic language of German film at the time. As a film that moves beyond mere "imitation" of American models on the one hand, and which on the other hand apparently refuses to transport any of the hermeneutic or cinematographic "depth" that we readily attribute to the art cinema, Rote Sonne does indeed mark a filmic "stance" (Haltung) that is worth looking at more closely for a moment. As Gerd Gemünden has recently pointed out, this privileging of "surface" was a significant gesture in the late 1960s, marking a particular generational position at the intersection of avant-garde and popular (which in most cases meant "Americanized") cultural practice. Writers like Yaak Karsunke, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Peter Handke, Wolf Wondratschek or Elfriede Jelinek set out to challenge what they perceived as the elitism and esotericism of high modernism by insisting on the sensual surfaces of things and their translation into radically descriptive forms of prose and lyric. As Gemünden's detailed case studies show, the driving forces behind this cultural paradigm turn out again and again to be of American derivation - whether the paintings of Edward Hopper, the pop art of Andy Warhol or Hollywood cinema and American popular culture more generally. As I hope to show, the aesthetics of the New Munich Group clearly belong in this historical and cultural context, which indeed they helped to prepare. I thus take Wenders' review as my starting point because I consider its terms not only symptomatic but ultimately also quite concise in their explanation of how Rote Sonne is constructed. I would suggest, in other words, that it is indeed possible and productive to organize the film's various aesthetic strategies around its "undialectical" treatment of surface. I take the emphasis on "surfaces" to provide a key to Thome's signifying practices both in Rote Sonne and elsewhere. In order to unpack the central metaphor of Wenders' and others' contemporary "sensibilist" (not to say congenial) critiques, then, we need to consider what exactly it might mean for a film to "unobtrusively spread out the surface of its world." Laconic Narration The basic conceit of the plot is simple enough: four young women have decided to kill any man with whom they remain together for more than five days - "after all, they deserve it," explains one of the characters. For all its laconic understatement, this "explanation" certainly has a referential ring to it in the 1960s. To take only the most literal example, Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto had only recently been translated and published in Germany, and has been acknowledged by Thome as a relevant intertext for his film. On a more metaphorical level, the murderous gender politics of the women could also be read in reference to the then recent beginnings of the new feminist movement in Germany at an SDS conference in Frankfurt. A number of contemporary reviews suggest that these oblique references were indeed available at the time, and that viewers at some level did pick up on them: Klaus Bädekerl, for example, finds that "the emancipation of these girls lies ... in the fact that, like Valerie Solanas in her SCUM manifesto, they resist male logics" ; another reviewer agrees that "Rote Sonne makes one think of emancipation, though it is never mentioned [in the film]", and Friedrich Luft, while critical of the "cinematic coercion" exerted by the film on its (presumably male?) viewers, similarly suspects that "with this malicious invention of women's emancipation, Rudolf Thome is seconding 'Womans lib' [sic]." In this sense, it would be wrong to suggest, as one reviewer did at the time, that Rote Sonne presents us with a "vacuum, in which you are left with only the film and no marks of reality." It would be equally misleading, however, to insist on reading Rote Sonne referentially as an "anticipation of the extraparliamentary opposition [APO]", as a more recent viewer has suggested. Rather, perhaps the best description of the film's mode of historical referentiality has been offered by Peter Körte who now views it as a "time capsule ... a precise expression of the sixties." However, this statement differs from contemporary reviews in that it benefits from the hindsight (and the retro-fashions) of the 1990s, suggesting that we be careful not to misconstrue its praise of Thome's "precision" as an unproblematized form of documentary referentiality. Indeed, I would suggest that such referential readings as may be constructed - usually with hindsight - are clearly not favored by the film itself, which significantly transforms contemporary cultural intertexts in at least two ways as it integrates them into its narrative: on the one hand, Rote Sonne is anything but a feminist manifesto, ultimately remaining at least as interested in the fate of a central male protagonist as in the fashionable female guerilla. In this sense, the film reads more like a masochistic male fantasy than as a feminist manifesto - a distinction that would be born out by a comparison of the laconic rationale offered by Rote Sonne for the women's decision to take action with Helke Sanders's use of documentary footage of her own famous speech at the 1968 SDS conference in Der Subjektive Faktor/The Subjective Factor (1981). Such a comparison would also point to a second transformation of the feminist "pretext" in Thome's film, which I locate on the stylistic level: whereas Sanders carefully layers historical references, authorial commentary, and semi-fictional situations, Rote Sonne follows a minimalist logic in terms of narrative and style: like many other films written by Max Zihlmann and/or directed by Rudolf Thome, Rote Sonne, I want to suggest, is characterized by a strong laconism, a refusal to dwell upon, or in any way embellish a point once it has been made. Through the film's paratactic narration, we are presented with a highly contrived piece of fiction as though we were witnessing the most banal and ordinary of occurrences. This stylistic economy defines Zihlmann's script with its stylized dialogs as much as the film's unspectacular cinematography, the numerous temps mortes without much action or dialog, or the casual introduction of the characters (I will return to these points in more detail below) - and it is recognizable even in the basic plot structure whose premise turns out to be as simple as it is baffling. The plot follows the murderous designs of the women from the point at which Thomas (Marquard Bohm) hitchhikes his way into town, finds Peggy (Uschi Obermeier) in a bar and returns with her to the appartment which she shares with the other women. As the days go by, Peggy becomes reluctant to do away with Thomas, but is pressured by her housemates to proceed according to the agreement. Thomas gradually realizes what is going on (as does the spectator, though always ahead of Thomas), and half-heartedly tries to dissuade the women from going through with their plan. Despite occasional resistance by one of the women, however, the group has decided not to let feelings interfere with their principled procedure, and so the two leading characters end up at the Starnberger See where they almost musically kill each other in a highly stylized shoot-out as the red sun comes up over the lake. The construction of an early scene, in which we see the four women kill one of their men for the first time, neatly encapsulates the film's pervasive laconism. Isolde is apparently reluctant to do away with Howard ("Isolde macht Schwierigkeiten" [Isolde is causing trouble]), so Sylvie comes to wake Peggy, who is in bed with Thomas. The four women convene almost wordlessly in an adjoining room, where the camera briefly focuses on each face with a close-up (Fig. 2.1 - 2.4); Peggy tells Isolde to "be sensible" ["sei vernünftig"], and then the four of them move on to a locked door, behind which we find Howard - gagged and bound to a chair. Peggy casually assembles a muffled pistol in front of Howard (Fig. 3) and hands it to Isolde. The camera cuts to a close-up of Howard from Isolde's point of view, in which the man simply returns her gaze impassively. Isolde shakes her head, gives the pistol to Peggy, who shoots Howard in the head with a brief click, while the camera shows Isolde's faintly disgusted reaction. Peggy disassembles the gun, walks across the room (with Howard still bound to the chair in the background) and, after a brief exchange with Christine about how best to dispose of the corpse, returns to bed to frolick with Thomas. The point is not only that the narrative refuses to delve into character psychology in a situation ostensibly full of psychological drama, but that the camera registers that situation itself as though these women routinely get up in the mornings to get rid of men, assembling and disassembling muffled guns the way others brush their teeth. Neither the editing nor the use of music or any fancy camera movements work to emphasize the intensity of the scene. Instead, its slow, steady rhythm, which leaves ample room for the characters to perform in ways that are not immediately relevant to the progression of the plot, suggests an attitude of patient (though by no means impartial) observation. For a film that has variously been categorized as a "fairy tale," a "total adventure film," and as "strange, utopian, one of the few science fiction films," Rote Sonne treats its own plot in a surprisingly casual and unspectacular manner which Thome himself has described in terms of a documentary approach: The fact that girls kill men is as much of a conceit, a fiction as are [the science-fictional plots of] Supergirl or Galaxis. And the documentary aspect lies in the fact that it was incredibly important to me to narrate this rather improbable story quite normally and realistically and casually, just as if these were things that occurred every day. Here, Thome pinpoints a split between the story and its treatment, a split which one might choose to discuss in terms of the division of labor (contrary to the reigning ideology of the Autorenfilm at the time) between the scriptwriter Zihlmann and the director Thome, whose role we would have to situate somewhere between Truffaut's metteur en scène and Reitz' autocratic Autor. Where Zihlmann's script generates highly stylized fictional situations, Thome films them as though they were everyday occurrences. Indeed, Thome himself has repeatedly pointed out the "artful and extremely stylized" form of Zihlmann's story-lines and dialogs which contrast with his own approach as a director involved in a "documentary" mode of filmmaking: "I actually had the feeling and was conscious of the fact that I was making a documentary about actors who are playing a script by Max Zihlmann." Without wanting to generate the impression that the director is necessarily (or even ever) the best reader of her/his own films, I would suggest that in this case, Thome's stated ("conscious") intentions correlate with the formal structure of the finished product. For it is precisely this tension between a highly fictionalized situation and its often quasi-documentary treatment that accounts for the effectiveness of the film. The question remains, though, how we might back up statements such as Thome's analytically rather than by reference to auteurial intentions or first impressions. In other words: by which formal means does a film like Rote Sonne manage to create and sustain its "laconic style"? As I argue in more detail below, Thome achieves this effect through cinematography and character treatment, but its laconic stance can also be traced in the way it deals out narrative information. In the terminology proposed by David Bordwell for the analysis of filmic narration, I am labeling the "tactics of syuzhet construction" in Rote Sonne laconic because of the film's refusal to share with the viewer more narrative information than necessary to establish its fictional world. Thus, although the narration is highly straightforward, even "communicative," regarding the basic premise of the plot (i.e. the women's murderous gender politics), when it comes to "explaining" the action, constructing psychologically "round" characters, or outlining these characters' "aims," Rote Sonne displays a general dearth of motivation; it is, in Bordwell's terms, relatively "uncommunicative." We never learn what brings Thomas to Munich, for instance; there is no coherent "argument" for the decision to kill men; and the fact that the police might be investigating the murders is never even raised as a possible aspect to be pursued by the narrative (or the spectator, for that matter). The causally "loose" story is hardly designed to generate any significant form of narrative suspense: though Rote Sonne (like Detektive [1968] and 48 Stunden bis Acapulco [Klaus Lemke, 1967] before it) obviously borrows thriller, crime, or mystery elements from American genre formulae, its narration is never organized in a way that would engage the film's spectator in solving a case, unravelling a thrill, or awaiting the punishment of a crime. In this sense, Thome might be said to copy the copy, borrowing not only directly from Hawks or Walsh, as he himself has claimed, but also from Godard's or Melville's appropriations of the American B-picture. As in A Bout de Souffle/Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959), for instance, Thome's spectator is kept abreast with the development of the plot in a way that leaves few enigmas towards whose solution s/he and the narrative might work. If Rote Sonne nonetheless is able to generate and sustain a remarkable tension in terms of spectatorial investment in the image (in other words, if it is not simply boring), this has to do precisely with what I have been desribing as the film's laconic style. Flat Images: A Cinematography of Surfaces In this respect, we can now see how it might make sense to speak of Rote Sonne and similar films as "spreading out the surface of their worlds": the particular stance or attitude of such films turns on their refusal to pursue questions of motivation, psychology, social realism, or of history. By "documenting" the way in which its own generic or contrived plot unfolds, Rote Sonne (but also Detektive, Supergirl [1970/71] or 48 Stunden bis Acapulco) elaborates the strictly economical narrative style whose avoidance of any informational redundancy I call laconic. In addition to the organization of the plot, however, there are at least two further aspects of filmic signification which buttress this narrative economy and thereby contribute significantly to the effectiveness of this "superficial" aesthetics. Thus, if we look at Thome's cinematography, a film like Rote Sonne pays attention to surfaces in a rather literal sense: in what is perhaps the film's defining aesthetic gesture (its "dominant" in neoformalist terms), we are presented over and over again with "flat" images that frame the characters at medium distances against monochrome walls (Fig. 4). With relatively few camera movements and a limited variety of camera angles and distances, the cinematography of Rote Sonne serves to maintain a sense of cinematic space that refuses to operate with any significant depth of field. Accordingly, the camerawork and mise-en-scène for the film are as economical as its narration and dialog: the appartment which constitutes a kind of "home base" for the comings and goings of the characters in an oddly stylized Munich, for example, is treated in a strictly functional, though aesthetically intriguing way: with few furnishings, it neither serves to characterize its inhabitants, nor does it invite any intricate deep focus cinematography, since there are few objects that would help to mark different planes of the image for the viewer's gaze. Instead, characters are presented against the backdrop of the green, red, or orange walls in framings vaguely reminiscent of mug-shots. In other words, Thome's cinematography, his use of the camera for creating striking "takes" without depth, remains committed to "spreading out the surface" of the profilmic space. This technique leads Wenders to compare the images of Thome's film with the aesthetics of a cartoon strip. In his review he speaks of the "strange colorlessness of the colors which is exactly the same as in Mickey Mouse comic books: nobody would be surprised if the walls which had still been yellow just a moment earlier were suddenly blue - things like this can happen." And Wolf Donner compares the sets with those of Godard's films of the 1960s: rather empty, light, full of effective colors. In these sets, the characters often have a flat, plane quality [etwas Planes, Plakatives], and at the same time, these backgrounds and the unobtrusive camera direct our attention to every little detail: gestures, attitudes, a sentence, a laughter, a gaze are suddenly of utmost importance and can become an event. The recurrence of this trope of pure surface without depth is at once symptomatic of the critical discourse that accompanies the "Neue Münchner Gruppe" and provides a useful organizing concept for the analysis of an individual film such as Rote Sonne. But where I have been arguing on the level of the film's narration and its cinematographic treatment of spatial relations, Donner's remark now suggests that we also look for the staging of the superficial in terms of character treatment. "Ein gewisser kaputter Charme": Performative Resistance Regarding the function of character in Rote Sonne, the reference to Godard is as apposite as it is with respect to the similar use of cinematography and mise-en-scène. For a figure like Thomas not only "cites" the protagonists of A Bout de Souffle or Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, F 1965) both in terms of the shifty characters and in terms of the way they are played by Bohm and Jean-Paul Belmondo, respectively. More to the point, like Michel Poiccard in A Bout de Souffle, many of the characters that Bohm plays around the time of Rote Sonne are conceived "citationally" from the start, and his acting only serves to underscore this point. Thus, where the character of Poiccard is designed to quote the hard-boiled detective of the film noir and Belmondo notoriously imitates Humphrey Bogart (whose photograph he discovers in a cinema window), the figure of Thomas iterates this process: not only does he display traits of the "shabby, obsessively lonely hero" of the noir thriller who, as Frank Krutnik has shown, "suggests a masculinity that has turned narcissistically in upon itself" ; in addition, when he nonchalantly drives a VW bug into the Starnberg lake, tests the water temperature without getting out, and reverses back onto the shore, for example, Thomas's actions directly quote Belmondo as Pierrot le Fou. Other roles of Bohm, such as Andy in Detektive or "Kid" in Roland Klick's western Deadlock (1970), where both the characters and the plots are recognizably generic, emphasize this citational aspect even more clearly. Like 48 Stunden bis Acapulco, these films explicitly take up Hollywood formats (the thriller, the western); the highly stylized treatment of those generic templates, however, generates the impression that these templates and their attendant assumptions about gender identity are not so much fulfilled but rather become the object of citation and, more importantly, commentary. By virtue of the fact that these films seem continuously to reflect on their own generic mode of construction, the fictional characters, too, remain identifiable as intertextual constructs. Consequently, these characters seem to move in a citational universe, in which their existence is always already defined as playing a role created elsewhere. In the case of Rote Sonne, this citational construction of character turns on Bohm's enactment of Thomas as a latter-day tough guy born out of starring roles in Hollywood's "male" genres. Though neither a Westerner nor a hardboiled detective by any definition, Thomas is characterized by the same kind of laconic, self-sufficient narcissism - "a certain, beat-up charm" (ein gewisser kaputter Charme), as he himself puts it close to the end - that typically shields many of these characters from emotional engagement (though not necessarily from physical injury and, more likely, death). The characteristic nonchalance of the tough male is quickly established in the first two scenes of the film, which opens on Thomas waking up in the back of Mercedes on the way to Munich. When the driver expresses his annoyance at the hitchhiker for having slept for hours rather than keeping him company, Thomas merely asks for a cigarette and a light, passively refusing to live up to the driver's expectations. Eventually, he insists on being dropped off at a Munich club called "Take Five", causing the increasingly exasperated driver to detour from his route to Salzburg, and even asking him for 10 DM before he drives off in a huff. The following scene focuses on Thomas' attempts to enter the "Take Five" where he will eventually find Peggy at the bar. The doorman, however, refuses to allow Thomas to enter for lack of the required tie, whereupon Thomas digs for one in his bag, hanging rather than tieing it around his neck over an unbuttoned shirt. Again, the doorman does not grant him access; he is powerless, however, when an admitted guest (Howard, the American who will soon become the women's victim) claims that Thomas is in his company. As he enters the club, Thomas ostentatiously points out his makeshift tie to the bewildered doorman. With his entry into the club, the basic "traits" that make up the character of Thomas have all been established. With hardly any dialog, the two opening scenes have managed to outline a character on the fringe of social normativity. Both the exchange with the Mercedes driver and with the doorman (a representative and a guardian of a certain social order, respectively) revolve around Thomas' "passive agressive" refusal to play by the rules of communication and social distinction, which he simply disregards in the first scene and treats ironically in the second. With the establishment of his socially deviant status as a "Gammler" (or "tramp" - a category suggested by the driver, which Thomas neither refuses nor accepts), the film thus lays the groundwork for a character who plays with the rules rather than by them. Without any pathos or revolutionary zeal, the figure of Thomas casually deconstructs the demands and expectations with which he is confronted. Repeatedly, this occurs through a form of ironic citation, as in the way he wears his tie, or in his "scientifically" motivated refusal to work (as he explains to Peggy, "I can't just take any job. Work that collides with your own rhythm of life can have disastrous consqeuences for the entire organism"). This approach to character is mirrored, I would argue, in Thome's and his actors approach to screen performance, which undeniably also has its roots in the Nouvelle Vague. Thus, Thome shares with Godard the willingness to let his actors work in a peculiar mix of "presentational" and "representational" forms of acting. Though all characters in Thome's film move exclusively within the diegetic world, never transgressing the conventional "fourth wall" as occurs frequently throughout Godard's work, the ways in which the actors perform these characters nonetheless remain highly legible throughout. Details such as Marquard Bohm's diction, his idiosyncratic use of fillers that hardly correspond to any written script, Uschi Obermeier's soft-spoken voice or the post-synchronization of the dialog combine to generate a fundamentally "citational" mode of performance: rather than representing fictional characters, the actors in Rote Sonne present those characters as fictional constructs which they "quote" and thereby perform. James Naremore's reading of A Bout de Souffle applies here as well. Drawing on Erving Goffman's frame analysis, Naremore finds A Bout de Souffle exemplary of a particular "modernist" approach to acting which, instead of making a clear demarcation between theatrical and aleatory codes [...], problematizes the relation between actors, roles, and audiences, sometimes confounding the audience's ability to 'frame' or 'key' the action on the screen. In terms of spectatorship, this (potential) confusion of "primary" frames with the specifically "theatrical" frame would mean that at times we cannot distinguish between Marquard Bohm, the actor, and Thomas, the character that he is supposed to be playing. The "fourth wall" erected by and for the fiction becomes permeable, and our attention shuttles back and forth between the character supposedly enclosed by that wall, and the actor who almost reluctantly enters the (work-)space of the fiction. In Thome's film, this provocative effect is brought about by two means. On the one hand, he exploits the historically specific function of star images, notoriously underdeveloped in Germany at the time, but nonetheless pertinent to the casting decisions involved in Rote Sonne, as well as to the use of actors in other films by Thome, Lemke, and Zihlmann. By the time of Rote Sonne, Marquard Bohm had already become established as a kind of stock player who - though perhaps not quite yet a "superstar of the German underground" - had indeed begun to develop an intertextual image that suggested a continuity of the actor behind the impersonation of different (or not so different) roles. Uschi Obermeier (Fig. 5), on the other hand, had undisputably acquired a veritable star image at the time. Besides presenting her as a model and covergirl, the press had by then published significant details of her life that could count as "private": her beginnings as a secretary, her rapid rise to fame and glamour in the modelling business, and her sudden decision to join the infamous Kommune I in Berlin in 1969. Moreover, this story, which is told as a tale from riches to rags in twen for example, clearly resonates with her role in Rote Sonne, where she bartends for money at night, but is identified primarily as a key figure in the film's version of a Kommune. It was possible and probable, in other words, that the audience would read her performance in a kind of "feedback loop," characteristic for the reception of star images, between the fictional role of Peggy and the life of Uschi Obermeier that had been publicized, read, and discursively constituted as "private." If the recognition of a split between actor and character depends on a particular historical, discursive context on the one hand, I would argue that Rote Sonne also cues us to apply varying "frames" to the act of "impersonation" on a more formal level. For I take Naremore's point to be that certain approaches to performance (which he labels "modernist" and I am treating as "citational") spell out the theatrical frame so clearly that it becomes recognizable and in a sense "deductible" from the performance text, leaving us to contemplate the work and gestural repertoire of the actor: thus, when Bohm hesitates before completing a sentence or a gesture for a moment longer than the consistency of character or the demands of the plot would seem to require, this "baring the device," serves to highlight an underlying gesture of resistance as a corrolary of the film's outward laconism. Such lapses, in other words, constitute the defining "semantic gesture" of Bohm's acting as well as of the film's social commentary as a whole. Both in his spoken lines and perhaps even more so in his minimized gestural repertoire, Bohm works with intermittent "pauses" which generate a differential between "acting" and "not acting," a diacritical opposition between an actor at work on a fictional role and an actor's mere presence in front of the camera. However, in addition to making the split between actor and character legible, these pauses also serve to de-emphasize the act of performing, thereby rendering the performance "laconic" and again blurring the lines between a seemingly lethargic actor and a fictional character who is practically defined by his resistance to labor. This resistance is tangible even in Bohm's gaze, which rarely meets with his interlocutor's. Instead, Bohm often seems to be "re-citing" his lines to himself, and for the benefit of the audience, moving ambivalently "in" and "out" of character. In an article somewhat misleadingly entitled "No Role, Just Character," Rolf Aurich has listed other, related instances of Bohm's idiosyncractic hesitation: The hard punch with which he hits Ulli Lommel in Detektive is rather sudden and in a certain sense it comes "straight from the heart," and yet it involves a short moment of hesitation, a split second of reflection, which marks the difference from your usual movie-fight. Bohm never seems to be completely convinced by his actions. In most of his performances, we find a latent reservation about what he is currently saying or doing (p. 6). This display of laconic performance, I would suggest, constitutes the third level on which Wenders' notion of Oberfläche usefully illuminates the functioning of Thome's film. Through a specific mode of acting which emphasizes the tension between the speaker and the spoken dialog, between the gestural code of the character and that of the actor, the figures of Thomas, Peggy, Isolde, Christine, and Sylvie become constructed "citationally." In this sense, Thome's characters disable, or rather comment upon, the dialectics of surface and depth in an important sense. We do not read the psychological, identity-constituting subtext of the characters, but rather remain with them at the level of the filmic construction of character itself, which is to say that the film invites us to treat "identity" as an assemblage of traits which begin to cohere only under the conditions of a given performance. Again, Naremore's reading of the acting in Godard's A Bout de Souffle illuminates the performances in Rote Sonne, too: having described the way in which Godard's film reverses "Method" assumptions about the role as an authentic "expression" of the actor's subjectivity, Naremore concludes that "instead of treating performance as an outgrowth of an essential self, [Godard's film] implies that the self is an outgrowth of performance." The Politics of the Laconic As I suggested above, Thome's laconic style of narration works with a "double standard" of verisimilitude, the one generic, and the other documentary. It seems to me that to pit the two generic modes against each other as mutually exclusive is to miss the potential of the film; I would disagree, therefore with Volker Baer's suggestion that "at best, one can take [this rather contrived story] as a gangster fairy tale, but it certainly contains no critique of the times [Zeitkritik]." Where other Young German films use documentary methods to link their narratives with contemporary or identifiable historical events, the "documentary" aspect of Thome's films does not "authenticate" its plots; rather, the observational camera, the long takes and the laconic rhythm of the editing, as well as the occasional undecidability regarding the actors' performative modes serve here to irritate our perception - including the filmmaker's own - of the film's politics: A French critic interviewed me in the final stages of completing the film (Detektive) and asked me, whether I would ever make a socially critical or political film, and I told him no, I didn't intend to. But now I realize that this film probably wouldn't have been shot the way it now is if it hadn't been for all the events of April and May, the student revolts, and all these things, which have all found their way into the finished film, somehow... The fact that these people [i.e. the characters in the film] simply disregard certain things and do what they think is right at the moment, whatever comes to mind, and without any further consideration. This slippage between a seemingly self-enclosed, hermetic construct and its referential grounding in historical and political discourse, which Thome claims to have recognized only after the fact, is crucial to the function of his early films. Thus, while the referential readings of socio-political events or motifs in Rote Sonnewere available at the time, as I have been suggesting, they do not necessarily constitute a dominant among the reactions of contemporary audiences, if the reviews are any indication. As an article in Filmkritik put it, Watching Thome-Films is to suddenly realize that it's not about solving mental problems, constructing causal connections, sensing the deeper meaning of things etc.; rather, [these films] initially ask of their viewers to simply learn certain modes of comportment [Verhaltensweisen], to accept them and to recognize them as adequate [...]. This notion of reading the film for its "Verhaltensweisen," I would argue, is central to the politics of Thome's film, which lie not in its referential grounding in any institutionalized, "leftist" political culture, but rather in the intransigeance of its laconic style, which, after all, is not to be confused with simplicity. Rather, the acting, in particular, repeatedly transports a tangible sense of refusal - from the very refusal to "act" described above to a given character's refusal to engage in a form of socially or narratively expected behavior - blocking the spectator's access not only to redundant information concerning the construction of the narrative, but also to the very notion of interiority as such. The politics of this film, then, have as much to do with a perceptual register available to the spectator in the cinema as with any referential grounding in a historical/political moment. Peter Wuss has recently proposed a model of film perception in which to locate what he calls - following a monograph on Antonioni - "behavioral films" (Filme der Verhaltensweisen). Following Wuss's terminology, I want to suggest, then, that Rote Sonne, as well as most of the films attributed to the Neue Münchner Gruppe, can indeed be described as "films de comportement" whose loosely structured plots don't emphasize narrative suspense but rather seem to observe the behavior (Verhalten) of their characters. Thus, Wuss introduces this category to describe films that work strongly on a perceptual level, rather than conceptually or through the use of recognizable stereotypes. The often sketchy or rudimentary plots do not engage the spectator in the inference and construction of an "argument," but rather present her/him with recurring perceptual topoi that are gradually learned and understood in the course of the film. Wuss gives the example of Kaurismäki's Ariel, which opens on a number of disjunctive occurrences in and around a coal mine: someone switches off a light, a door closes, a character named Taisto throws his work-clothes into a garbage can, closes a suitcase and is then shown at a bank where he closes his account. According to Wuss, these moments only begin to cohere for the spectator as s/he gradually recognizes the repeated suggestion of an endpoint to different developments as the underlying topos. Following Mukarovsky, Wuss calls this repeated topos of "closure" the scene's basic "semantic gesture." One task for film analysis, according to Wuss, must lie in reconstructing the coherence of isolated motifs or occurrences into such "semantic gestures" which, while often barely recognizable for the spectator on a conscious level, contribute significantly to her/his perception of any given film on the whole. The cognitivist model advanced by Wuss would imply that, together with two other types of "invariants" which need not concern us here, the reconstruction of these perceptual topics helps to account analytically for the majority of all filmic forms of narration. While I have strong reservations about such universalizing claims and about the cognitivist pretensions to "scientific" (as opposed to "naive" and "primitive") hermeneutics, I find Wuss's analytical model useful for the way in which it points to a link between the "semantic gestures" of filmic narration and the ways in which spectators are led to induce behavioral models (Verhaltensweisen) from a given narrative. Indeed, one might go one step further and suggest that, if the structure of the film's narrative emphasizes certain behavioral codes without motivating their use within that narrative in terms of character psychology or suspense, then the spectator is likely to look elsewhere for such motivation, beginning to understand and evaluate the relevance of such behavior beyond its mere diegetic function. I would propose, then, that in the case of Rote Sonne, as well as of other films with Marquard Bohm in the lead, it is worth taking the notion of a "semantic gesture" quite literally, and to enquire into the perceptual function of Bohm's gestural repertoire which coheres around a recurrent trope of laconic refusal: in his numerous "pauses," Bohm refuses to act, his gaze refuses to meet his interlocutor's, and his casual physical movements refuse to register with the spectator as expressive of anything but a certain degree of resistance to the strictures of both the fictional and the profilmic situation. If we include the dialog (which Thome has justifiably described as "gestisch" in its own right ) as part of Bohm's gestural code, the recurrent non-sequiturs and the deliberate misunderstandings further suggest that the basic "semantic gesture" of the film is encapsulated in Bohm's various forms of laconic resistance. Again, contemporary reviews suggest that this perceptual register, as well as its implicitly political use-value, were indeed available to the audience at the time. Ulrich Kurowski, for instance, makes this link explicit in his suggestion that "by registering behavioral modes (Verhaltensweisen), the director engages in social analysis." And Kraft Wetzel rightly insists that Thome's and Zihlmann's treatment of character "avoids the commitment to both subjective "depth" and to figures that are objective, i.e. referentially bound to social and political reality" ; instead, he argues, Thomas's/Bohm's self-attributed "battered charm derives from his latent recalcitrance, his non-observance of social rules." It is through the almost parodic citation of these rules that a figure like Bohm suggests their malleability. If the iterative treatment of fictional characters that I described above suggests a fundamentally constructivist notion of identity, then Bohm's "battered charm" consists in the way his semantic gesture of refusal usefully lays bare the rules that habitually govern the construction of (gendered) identities. Genre, Gender, and the Americanization of the Autorenfilm If the laconic figures that I have been describing call to mind not only characteristic performances of the French nouvelle vague but also some of the petty gangsters of Fassbinder's early films, this is surely no coincidence, but rather the consequence of a kindred form of cinephilia that leads Fassbinder to explore the construction of filmic character along similar generic lines as Thome or Lemke. Indeed, we might read this as an instance where the Autoren of the New German Cinema return to the French auteurs' fascination with the manipulation of Hollywood genres. Beyond the obligatory nod to Fassbinder's "noir" and "Sirkean" phases, however, these and other constructions of character, narrative, and style through generic borrowings remain largely unexplored in the context of the New German Cinema. Thus, not only would the films of May Spils and Werner Enke merit a much closer look in terms of the way they use and revise comedy and slapstick formats for the purposes of social critique (particularly through defeatist performances of masculinity by Enke). One might also reconsider the productive use of melodrama in the so-called Frauenfilm: For example, by looking at some of the patently generic (melodramatic) aspects in films like Die bleierne Zeit/Marianne and Juliane (Margarethe v. Trotta, 1981) or Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist die Liebe/Love is the Beginning of all Terrors (Helke Sander, 1986), we might dislodge such films from their ghettoizing association with an essentialized "women's experience" and begin thinking about their relevance in a broader project to connect "issue-oriented" filmmaking with the politics of the popular. Rather than simply dismissing the use of generic patterns as forms of depoliticization and trivialization, we should take these films as an opportunity to reopen the case for the inherently political function of genre, particularly in the New German Cinema. Similarly, the borrowing of "noir" references and the resultant explorations of gender and modernization in urban settings is not limited to Fassbinder or the early 70s. A film like Doris Dörrie's Happy Birthday, Türke! (1991) for example, makes highly productive use of the hard-boiled genre by articulating the generic gender identity of the tough guy with an investigation of his ethnic identity; as a result, the film is able to construct both the German-Turkish and the male identifications of its (anti)hero in an uneasy and highly provocative mix between stereotyping and performance. Finally, particularly in light of the recent return to genre in the German cinema, detailed attention to past and present uses of generic forms of characterization, narration, or style might prove helpful in reassessing the history of German filmmaking since 1962 in terms of its continuities and its discontinuities: juxtapposing the send-up of the Western in a film like Detlev Buck's Wir Können auch anders/No more Mr. Nice Guy (1993) with Roland Klick's Deadlock, we might find the generic affinities highly useful for tracing broader shifts in the construction of masculinity, a national imaginary, or a national cinema, for that matter. Though this is not the place to pursue these investigations, I would hope that my reading of Thome's film might provide some starting points for such a project. In particular, the citational adoption of "American" generic styles, characters, and narrative patterns in Rote Sonne suggests that we conceive the function of genre in terms of what it enables, rather than simply pigeonholing it for its trivializing lack of authenticity; instead of dismissing these films on some preconceived norms of realism, we should study the kinds of "realities" that the different genres and their critical appropriations produce; rather than insisting that "'patterns don't pay' in the cinema of the Federal Republic," we should look at how those patterns add an important dimension to the "variety" that supposedly constitutes the New German Cinema's "strength." This proposed revaluation of genre also entails some more detailed attention to the function of Americanization in postwar Germany. Here, my analysis was meant to show that there are at least four different levels on which we can usefully trace what Wenders describes as an American "stance" towards surfaces and the superficial: the levels of cinematography, editing, acting and character treatment, and the level of the narration itself. Following Wenders' own suggestions, we might in fact code each of these levels with particular "Americanisms": thus, the cinematography and editing of Rote Sonne recall the aesthetics of American comic strips, the characters call up and play upon American star images (Bogart, Bacall), and the narrative is ovderdetermined by numerous referencs to so-called "male" Hollywood genres (noir and gangster films, the Western; Duel in the Sun). In this respect, Rote Sonne and the other films of the Neue Münchner Gruppe constitute a specific intervention in the discourse of "Americanization" that has provided the rather uneasy counterpart to the development of the New German Cinema since its beginnings. Clearly, Thome shares with other filmmakers the basic premise under which Corrigan describes the New German Cinema as a whole: namely, that Hollywood's dominance - if not "tyranny" - over the filmic vraisemblable entailed a situation in which "the roots of [a given German filmmaker's] style and filmic structures would always be more or less American and always to some extent in tension with his or her own filmic, cultural, and political history" This is a tension that Rote Sonne confronts in a manner that is characteristic for the films of the Neue Münchner Gruppe, a manner that I have attempted to describe as "laconic": rather than negotiating Hollywood's dominance in terms of cultural imperialism in this regard, or trying to simply negate some aspect of the Hollywood system in an attempt to forge a unique "auteurial" vision, the young Munich filmmakers' (Franco-)American cinephilia leads them to functionalize the topical issue of Americanization on the level of character treatment. Attempting to fathom the use-value of American popular culture for the late 1960s in Germany, these films are built around characters that Wenders locates in American B-pictures and in comic books; those characters are "pop" in precisely the sense described by Georg Seeßlen in his essay on German film in the late 1960's: Pop is the nobilitated form of Popular Culture, a presentiment of camp and more closely related to the Beat-Culture that leads to the Flower-Power movement than to the culture of rock, which tends towards the political underground. ...During these years, Pop also stood for a lifestyle which drew more pleasure from role playing than from self-identification. This valorization of role-playing over self-identification, which I attempted to describe in terms of the opposition between Wenders and Thome above, is typical for the characters that people Thome's early films. Inasmuch as these films are "pop" - or, more precisely, "Münchner Pop," as a recent article on Eckhart Schmidt's early film describes it -, they also pursue a "strategy of aesthetic opposition" that articulates itself most clearly, perhaps, in the performative gestures of refusal exemplified in both character treatment and acting. In this respect, it is hardly surprising that their films play with generic expectations and a self-styled star system not at the characteristically New German level of the Autor, but in terms of their casting politics, which led Lemke to build a film around Ira von Fürstenberg in Negresco**** Eine tödliche Affäre (1967), Schmidt to cast photographers and models in Jet Generation (1967), and Thome to bank on Bohm's and Obermeier's subversive "glamour" in both Rote Sonne and Detektive. The intransigeance with which these characters move through the films' contrived plots - "in Rote Sonne, the people all talk as though the progression of the film was of no importance to them" (Wenders) - accounts for much of the effectiveness of these films even after 30 years. At the same time, however, the "aesthetic opposition" embodied in Thome's and Zihlmann's professed "love for the simple things, the popular," or in their refusal "to accept the distinction between art and entertainment that our culture has made and continues to uphold," needs to be contextualized: while these films clearly elaborate a noticeably subversive discourse, it is an opposition that becomes most legible in, and perhaps remains limited to, the historical context of the New German Cinema as Autorenfilm. My reason for focusing on Thome, then, is not simply to add his name and his films to the ranks of the canonized Autoren. In fact, as I have already suggested, the very notion of an Autorenkino that is so central to the emergence and international image of the Young/New German Cinema proves somewhat inadequate as a framework in which to inscribe Thome's filmmaking. From the importance of the scriptwriter who is not identical with Thome, the director, to the willingness (even the insistence) on Thome's part to work with the established industry, a number of factors combine to resist the label Autorenkino. Patalas already sensed as much in an early review of Rote Sonne: [Zihlmann's and Thome's] films also resist the law in the fact that they are no Autorenfilme. Their aim is not the expression of a sovereign bourgeois identity, but the greatest possible anonymity, siding with the objects [Parteinahme für die Objekte]. Not "Kino der Autoren," but Kino tout court. [...] Zihlmann's films do not yearn for a return to the precapitalist artisanal forms of production for automous artworks. Rather, they push the development of outdated forms towards their own destruction. As Rolf Aurich has pointed out, Rote Sonne was treated as a B-picture and shown in the corresponding type of cinema; "the high-class-cinemas showed the films of Kluge, Herzog, Syberberg, but not mine," remembers Thome. In order to gauge the significance of Thome's film in its historical context, we might usefully contrast its laconic style with the canonized productions of the Young German Cinema, which are rarely as radical in their refusal to motivate the fictional pretenses of their plots as is Rote Sonne. Thus, in Abschied von Gestern/Yesterday Girl (1966), Alexander Kluge motivates the nomadic existence of Anita G. through numerous references to the past and present of the Federal Republic (as well as of the "Ostzone" which Anita has fled); Peter Schamoni pits the young generation against the old in Schonzeit für Füchse/Closed Season for Foxes (1966) for both dramatic tension and explanatory power; even a film like Lebenszeichen/Signs of Life (1968) by Werner Herzog, which at first sight would seem to share some of the impassive stance towards the unfolding of the plot with Rote Sonne, ultimately takes care to motivate the explosive designs of its hero Stroszek through lengthy third person voice over commentaries. This is a tendency which is only amplified with the transition from the Young to the New German Cinema. Particularly insofar as the latter has come to be identified as a cinema preoccupied with the nation's past and present, it is consistently assumed that New German Films relate in more or less direct ways to the socio-political context of their times. In this context, Thome's/Zihlmann's version of pop was bound to irritate, representing as it did a noticeable departure from then current conventions of post-Oberhausen cinema. While none of the New Munich filmmakers emerged into the mainstream of the New German Cinema, they provided significant impulses for those who followed, including, most obviously, Fassbinder and Wenders. While Fassbinder, in particular, experiments with a highly similar laconic approach to the cinema in his early "noir" films, Wenders's cinematic practice evolves in a slightly different direction from this common point of departure; his analytical insights into Thomes film, however, testify to an acute awareness of the significance of the laconic style at this juncture in German film history: This is the first German FEATURE film (SPIELfilm). ...Everything here is surface and a sign for itself, never "subtle" (hintergründig), "deep," or "meaningful." For precisely this reason, though, Rote Sonne succeeds where half a dozen German films have recently failed.... Because of the fact that the film never pretends to be problematic or faithful to reality, and because it never wants to generate "seriousness," choosing instead to present its own overblown science fiction plot in an insistent and uncomplicated fashion, thus never hiding its play (SPIELcharakter), this film manages to make more reality tangible and to show more of the generation that it represents than all other German films that came before. |