Weiblichkeit und Schuldbegriff im bürgerlichen Trauerspiel des 18. Jhs. (German Edition)

Pandora, , Schiller, too, uses this pattern, in his Maria Stuart. The Mastery of Discourse New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, , 59— Ebner and Druskowitz met in Suhrkamp, , 96— Druskowitz, her mother Madeline von Biba. She occasionally claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of a Bulgarian prince called Tedesco Ventravin. As a writer, Druskowitz also used the pseudonyms Adalbert Brunn, H. Gronewold and Hensch also list five unpublished and now lost dramas written after Druskowitz was admitted into psychiatric care. Gender and Orient on the German Stage — Oxford: Clarendon, , — Schulbuchhandlung, , Camden House, , Schreibende Frauen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed.

Metzler, , —59 Freiburger Echo, , 11— In all the plays considered, rebellious women protagonists are tamed — whether by fate or by society — and neither dramatist was able to find a mode comic or serious of presenting such characters that might guarantee their popular appeal. But by the mid s, the conventions associated with Naturalism — domestic settings, the working- or middle-class milieu, prose dialogue, often in dialect — had begun to make themselves felt.

In the terms of gendered discourse, this brings drama closer to the women writer — both are now defined as natural and located tendentially in the domestic sphere, as Else Hoppe notes, with hindsight, in In all cases the woman playwright is seen as the exception to a rule, and specifically as a phenomenon that crosses the bounds of gender. She is therefore in need of explanation or rationalization by critics. The quickest and easiest way to explain away dramatic creativity in women is to cross-assign the writer to the proper, male, gender category: The method is much used: In the mainstream literary criticism and theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there is a clear, explicit insistence that drama is the realm of the male writer; it is gendered masculine.

Full text of "Deutsche Litteraturdenkmale des und Jahrhunderts"

An influential proponent of this notion is a woman: Ella Mensch, herself a prose 5 writer as well as a literary critic, who paid special attention to the problem of women playwrights in her monograph Die Frau in der modernen Lite6 ratur This is not just masculinity; it is hypermasculinity, the apex of the hierarchical patriarchal ideal. Mensch is developing a definition of drama and the dramatist that depends on utter separation from all that is associated with the feminine. Drama is architecture; it erects a monolith; and it is therefore an unnatural act for a woman to write a play.

Yet women dramatists at this time — themselves defined in critical discourse as creatures without creative or dramatic genius — show a distinct inclination to explore the potential of female and male creativity in their work. Women as Artists The drama of the female artist cannot — of course — escape the problems raised by the gendered discourse of creativity. The two major women characters in the drama, Helene the heroine and her friend, Melitta, are both practicing artists — at least when the play opens.

This is also, of course a risky situation — patriarchy is protectionist, and when a woman is not subordinate or protected she is vulnerable. Her friend, Melitta, is another character who takes risks, who lives without male protection: She is adamant that only self-ownership can enable self-expression: Melitta is so emancipated, so potentially threatening in her self-ownership and self-expression, that she might well need to be laughed at, for the sake of audience relief; but this is something her creator is keen to avoid.

Because Warbek no longer owns Helene as his wife, he is reduced to using sheer economic power to prevent her from appearing in public: It is as if Paar were appropriating and mimicking the discourse of gender, ownership, and power with the intention of exposing its dehumanizing, objectifying impetus. For a little while it really looks as if Helene might achieve the kind of personal and artistic freedom that Melitta enjoys, albeit like Melitta at the cost of her exclusion from the social support structure of the family.

There is an enormous effort involved in breaking free of this structure, as Helene explains: But Paar has no intention of letting her heroine escape. Und wir ziehen nicht nach Amerika? Bestimme Du, wo wir leben sollen. Ich habe keinen Willen mehr, als den Deinigen! In the context of the play, does Paar really expect her audience or reader to believe this? The scene is highly sentimental, and sentimentality almost invariably functions as a legitimating cover for brutality.

Its sweetness disguises the distasteful violence that has been done, for the second time, to Helene. Other elements in the play are less easy to swallow. Other, often tiny, details in the text offer an alternative reading alongside the conventional progress of the action. But this reads like an ironic joke, for a transformation from Sappho to Gretchen would reflect all too bitterly on the domestication, and in some senses destruction, of Helene that is imminent at this point in the play. The words are of course prophetic: Like many women playwrights, Elsa Bernstein-Porges preceded her career as a dramatist with work as an actress.

She has attracted more critical attention than any other German-language woman playwright of her generation. Not only were her plays well received by her contemporaries despite frequent comments on 17 her femaleness and only slightly less frequent remarks on her Jewishness , but she is the only woman writer of that generation to have become the subject of a modern monograph dedicated specifically to her dramatic 18 work. But she wrote at least twenty other plays between and ; of these, the best known are those which appeared in the s and early s, 21 which include Wir Drei.

Sascha shows striking resemblances to Bernstein-Porges herself. Another point of contact between the character and her creator are the reviews Sascha receives of her work. In this way she lives wifehood and domesticity vicariously, through Agnes, while continuing her activity as an artist. She only becomes active after Richard has made a declaration of love to Sascha: Previously, Agnes has only ever been owned; now she becomes an owner. Her power over a fetus that is potentially a child, another human being, somehow confers personhood on her. She leaves Richard only to find herself again under the control of Sascha, who decides first to take her in, and then secretly to allow Richard into the house.

This enables him to hear the birth of the child, during which he celebrates his proprietorship of Agnes: But the baby escapes all three of its waiting would-be owners: Richard, too, will have to give up his pretensions to an artistic career. She, who was rational, purposeful, and articulate when arranging her divorce, loses all will and is silenced by the death of her child.

When her dead baby disqualifies her from the position of owner, Agnes returns to her old status, as merely owned. As before, Sascha decides what is to be done with her: Agnes is finally reintegrated into the family structure by the mystical word: Evincing the first sign of life she has shown in this scene, Agnes repeats the word: Remarkably, a rapprochement is thus made possible: Part of this order is the exclusion of Sascha from the family unit.

A particularly interesting dramatic investigation of the woman artist in relation to the family, and the last I shall consider here, is Der stand23 hafte Zinnsoldat by Anna Croissant-Rust — , a play that was published in , but never performed. The boy is finally stabbed to death by his foster father in retribution for the murder. Der standhafte Zinnsoldat, on the other hand, is — like Helene and Wir Drei — a middle-class drama that deals with the subject of creative endeavor, and specifically as in Wir Drei literary endeavor. But instead of being angry with her — as she expects — for her secret authorship, Ernst is delighted and supportive.

Johanna asserts her separateness from Ernst, her autonomy as artist, even within the relationship to him: Ernst is keenly aware of the limits this puts on her personal freedom: Du warst gekleidet wie ein Priester [. Once again the price of artistic activity is exclusion from the normal social support structures. Contemporary critical responses to the play were mixed. They were also limited: The essence of the recurring complaint is that this piece is not dramatic, but epic.

Precisely this tension drives the dramatic action of Der standhafte Zinnsoldat, although that dramatic tension seems, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be inaccessible to the male reviewers who have themselves never been confronted with that dilemma. Clearly their reception in a male-centered literary critical economy, by critics who have never learned to perceive their own subjective interests as anything other than definitive, is one problem for these women playwrights. But another is the act of creating a play about female creativity in that same ideological environment.

Helene almost achieves the artistic freedom that Melitta has; Sascha almost has Richard for her lover as well as literary success; and Johanna almost has a career as a writer alongside a functioning marriage. We have to ask why each of the dramatists takes this alternative away from her protagonist at the very moment it seems to beckon most persuasively. Another possible answer follows from the Chodorowian interpretation of the writer-protagonist relationship offered by Judith Kegan Gardiner, 30 when she maintains: Women Supporting Men We find more extreme forms of the repression of women protagonists in dramas where the male artist is dominant, and women play a supportive role.

In Johannes Herkner, no obvious attempt is made to find space for female subjectivity. The studio in which Albrecht seduces Mirjam, and in which she works as his nude model, is dominated by an enormous sculpture of Lucifer; Lucifer as counter-figure to the eponymous patriarch Johannes, who is ever-present even though he never appears on stage. Lucifer is cast from his pedestal. The figure of the patriarch Herkner is central to the piece, and Albrecht is central to the action.

All the women revolve around and consciously depend on these two. Mirjam, for example, discourages Albrecht in sentimental tones from commitment to her, even though her own reputation and related quality of life are at stake they are sleeping together: The ideal she incorporates is rendered particularly insidious by the illusion of self-determination. Not a hint of irony disturbs the text.

Further difficulties arise when Elisabeth struggles to prove that her father, Johannes Herkner, was right rather than sexist in his preference for the absent son who ignored him over the dutiful daughter who was his unpaid secretary: Mutter — mich hat Vater lieb gehabt, aber Albrecht — den hat er geliebt. Was ist einem Mann eines Weibes Seele? But the most trying melodrama is still to come: Bernstein-Porges came from a musical family, and her father Heinrich was a fanatical admirer of Wagner to confess that they have been sleeping together. Mirjam, who opposes this revelation, is sent offstage with Elisabeth to make space for the man-to-man confrontation.

When Siegmund asserts his brotherly rights of ownership, Albrecht responds with a characterization of the educated, musically gifted Mirjam that makes her sound like a Neanderthal: Aber du bist es nicht — du kannst es deiner ganzen Art nach nie werden! Die nehm ich auf mich. Bernstein-Porges directs audience attention not at Mirjam, but at the two men and their relationship: For Mirjam, illocutionary or perlocutionary speech acts — the kind that get results, which the men are constantly involved in — seem impossible.

She asks Albrecht to decide her fate for her, and he performs a classic illocutionary act when he hands her over to Siegmund: Elisabeth is sent away to change into white robes, to take on the identity required of her by the creative male: But it is difficult to find any indication that Bernstein-Porges is making her characters perform gender as masquerade with conscious or critical intent. On a metaphorical level we can look for interesting touches: But if we view the drama more conventionally we see Albrecht, the sculptor, as a creator of bodies.

For a while there is a level of subversion in his studio: But with the advent of Elisabeth, clad in white, and the toppling of Lucifer, Albrecht now as St. In her far less well-known piece Seine Welt of , Prellwitz finds an ironic and often entertaining perspective on the world that revolves around men. Eine 34 Wotanslegende Seine Welt is dedicated to Heinrich von Kleist, whom Prellwitz admired.

It is another drama of the male artist: The other central protagonist is Dr. Hadumoth Silcher, whose name exudes all the exoticism of the presumably Jewish female intellectual. Hadumoth is clearly an extraordinary character. It is worth quoting at length: Und dann erklang uns seine Antwort!

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Another teaching colleague remarks: Weibchen, und in denen verehrt man die heilige Natur. But Hadumoth greatly admires Heinrich, and sees his efforts in the field of creative writing as proof that this field is beyond her: Prellwitz leaves it to the reader to draw her own conclusions, here and elsewhere in the play. No obvious criticism is made when Heinrich demands of Hadumoth that she function as speculum, allowing him to uncover her as a mirror of his poetic self: In exposing Hadumoth, what he expects and desires to see is not her, but a reflection of himself.

Heinrich is more obviously lampooned when he mixes his new love for Hadumoth with satisfaction in the notion that she will now do the donkey work of teaching for him: This ought to encourage us to read the following scene of the play critically. Und der Vater in seinem immer nehmenden Egoismus! Ich aber, ich bin ganz anders! Auch nicht die heiligste Pflicht! Yet in the same breath she condemns married slavery: Hadumoth, like a German Jane Eyre, instructs Heinrich that he will marry her, and purposefully stagemanages the ensuing interview with her father, but her choice of the pompous, self-indulgent, often ridiculous poet for a husband is not a satisfying one.

All the plays discussed in this chapter reiterate gender norms as well as performing an alternative. The status of the female body in these plays is worth considering. In this context, the female body is clearly an object for use as model or muse by the creative male. It also leaves them, in the end, outside of that organization; alone, isolated, without the security of the family. Her deployment of real bodies, models and statues on stage in Johannes Herkner provides for a striking visual event.

What the corporeality of drama also gives Bernstein-Porges, however, is the means of demonstrating the abjection of the female body. It is of course difficult, when writing within a discourse as powerful and all-embracing as the discourse of gender, at the same time to articulate an alternative to that discourse, or to rebel against it. For a writer, there is a strong temptation to opt to provide audience satisfaction through sentimental reiteration of familiar norms.

In Johannes Herkner, Bernstein-Porges succumbs to this temptation this is not true for all her plays — Maria Arndt , for example, is a different case. Paar, Prellwitz, and Croissant-Rust manage to play a double game, suggesting, albeit carefully, that the discourse might be changed: Dirnboeck, ; Marie Itzerott, Hilde Brandt: Ein Lustspiel in 5 Akten Berlin: Germanistische Erkundungen einer Metapher, ed. Metzler, , Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Columbia UP, , —36 Metzler, , 95— Das ist das Rassige an ihr. Mellen, , 43— Metzler, , —78 Wiener Wochenschrift 8 , Harvester, , —91 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: In this chapter I analyze three plays that advertise their concern with a female subject in their titles and subtitles: What makes these women remarkable is that they believe initially at least that they can assert an autonomous self, even in a society where femininity or femaleness is understood to be a subordinate reflection of dominant masculinity or maleness.

There is no evidence to suggest that this play was ever performed; given the subject matter, it is unlikely that a theater would have accepted it. In an early conversation with her father, in which she is arguing to be allowed to continue her education, Elfriede is polemical: When Father Laub laments his forced inactivity through illness: All the men in Elfriede Laub enjoy the right to define themselves and the world when they speak, while the women listen and are defined for example, when Laub tells Elfriede that her significance in the world derives from her paternity: In her book The Writing or the Sex?

How conversational space is acquired and used is another consideration. Interruption is the most common method of acquiring space and is, according to results cited by Spender, practiced far more frequently 4 by men than by women. Elfriede gets engaged through her silence, which Dr. Russek defines for her, as consent: So eigentlich Nichts [sic].

At this stage in the play she does not fully appreciate what that link is; later she will come to recognize that linguistic dominance, like rape, is an assertion of power rather than love. The fourth act opens five years later, on a miserable scene of domestic tyranny. To be rewarded as feminine, it seems that women must accept juvenile or even infantile status. Russek justifies his refusal to give Elfriede money or freedom with the borrowed eloquence of an established discourse of gender, as if he were reading from a book: The all-important realization that this status has little to do with the individual self, and everything to do with the concrete legal system that governs social organization and the institution of marriage, comes to Elfriede in the final act.

Act 5 reads like a practical lesson in nineteenthcentury marriage law. It opens after another time gap, during which Elfriede has left her husband and started seeking advice on divorce from a family lawyer. When the solicitor asks whether Russek betrayed her, she is quick to insist that he did: For Elfriede, the moral position is clear. She has still to discover that her children, too, are regarded as principally the property of her husband, and that she has no legal recourse to reclaim her own inheritance back from Russek.

Rather than performing womanhood uncritically and practically unconsciously as do most of the other women in the play , Elfriede can perform it consciously — she has grasped the terms of the gender contract. This gives her a head start on Russek, who is still performing masculinity unquestioningly, and is therefore trapped.

By reminding Russek that he defined her as financially incompetent, Elfriede doubles the allowance he gives her; by appealing to his authority when he said she was not fit to keep house, she acquires the right to a housekeeper. And when he protests that she must do at least some of the work, she invokes the gendered order against him: At this point Russek starts to lose his nerve: There is potential for comedy here, but the aftertaste is bitter.

Elfriede conjures an image that powerfully concludes the discussion: Russek and Elfriede are reunited. But the audience, or better, the reader by now knows enough about nineteenth-century family law to be aware that this is a necessity for Elfriede if she wants to retain access to her children and her inherited capital — both now the property of her husband. Where the male protagonist of the traditional Bildungsroman seeks and finds a path to self-sufficiency and selfexpression in the world, Elfriede Laub seeks self-sufficiency and selfexpression, but finds a world in which these things do not exist for women.

She subsequently learns how to become an agent through the manipulation of masculinist language and law. This is not so much a happy ending as a compromise driven by necessity. The final ray of hope is that Elfriede and Russek agree to live together as equal partners and friends, abandoning the ideal of romantic love that functions as kitsch 7 camouflage for gendered inequality. As a dramatist, she provides one answer to the question how far the writer can direct or control how gender and humanness are performed. The change is from an unconscious, forced performance to a conscious performance on her own terms.

She grew up in Riga, in modern-day Latvia then Russia , and only moved to Germany after she was married; she died like Helene Druskowitz in a psychiatric clinic, diagnosed as paranoic, in 10 Marholm is one of the few women dramatists in the later nineteenth century to use a female pseudonym. Her reason for publishing her later work as Laura, rather than Leonard, may well have been that she was soon better known as a cultural theorist than as a playwright: There is a similarity with Helene in that Marholm never engages in her drama with the subject of women who create art, but only with the more acceptable idea of women who interpret it.

The sexual association between Karla and her violin is spelled out and turned around when Collander confronts her with his reading of their physical intercourse: In both sets of notions she is heavily influenced by popular discourse. Both are enervated by their art and by their unmarried state: Und sie wird Virtuosin werden, wie alle die anderen. Collander is, to abuse turn-of-thecentury terminology, an homme fatal: His response puts us in the picture: For Otto von Wetterberg, the Germanic hero of the piece, the Jew Collander is a kind of fungus or bacteria, both dangerous and functional: Freilich auch ein sehr giftiger.

Because he is destructive rather than productive, his seed or spores, if we are going to stick with the mushroom imagery bring death, not life — he fails to see sex as a path to procreation. Unlike the two other men in the play, Wetterberg and the German merchant Eschenmeyer, Collander does not see women primarily as potential mothers, because his view of sex is entirely sensual. He destroys women by offering them sex without the will to inseminate, and without proper patriarchal domination: Collander insists on being enjoyed by women, and glories in the passive role he claims to have played in his encounter with Karla: Jewish men are perceived as in many respects more like women than like Christian men: The question arises why this anti-Semitic and antifeminist play is worth analysis, except perhaps as a sociohistorical document.

But there is something disingenuous in this idealizing portrayal of Lilli. Karla characterizes herself as complex and passionate, Lilli as simple and limited; anyone with half a brain would prefer the former to the latter. So at the same time as pushing the notion that Lilli is the ideal, Marholm is undermining that notion.

It is perfectly clear where her own authorial interests lie: She describes the essence of her protagonist as she sees it: None of the four women who play a role in the action is content or stable.

Ein lesendes Huhn, ein Litteraturhuhn. And Eschenmeyer does not emerge particularly well out of his conflict with the man who has cuckolded him: His triumph would be complete were it not for Wetterberg, who saves the day for Germanic masculinity when he steps forward to insult and assault Collander before he leaves the stage. There is even a certain parallel between the married relationships of the Eschenmeyers and the Collanders. When accused by her husband of infidelity, Frau Eschenmeyer responds in very similar terms: To put this in context: Laura Marholm worked not only with her husband, Ola Hansson, but with Strindberg, Richard Dehmel — , Edvard Munch, Max Dauthendey, and Julius Bierbaum, among other prominent male writers and artists of 23 the time.

As someone who was already treading a risky path as a woman writer, she may also have feared losing their approval and support if she did not embrace current gendered conceptions of creative activity. Immer sind sie da, wenn die Nacht gekommen und die Stille, und umkreisen mich. Ihr Leben ist an mir festgebunden durch die scheuen Werke der Nacht. Sie kommen und sagen: However, this theory collapses when we compare her with another figure who fears death, Frau Lilly, who has a beloved and devoted husband and a baby son, and yet is subject to similar nocturnal terror attacks.

Dann steht es im Nu ganz deutlich vor einem: It is something constantly under threat or under external pressure, as Karla explains to Lilly in passionate words: Nur sie — sie selbst — so wie sie war, als sie zum Weib erwachte — das durfte sie nicht sein, das wurde nicht an ihr geduldet — das, das, was ihr Ich war — ihr Weib-Ich. Given the battle described here that women face in gaining access to their selves, their subjectivity, their identity, it is no wonder that the extinguishing of their subject status in death figures, for Marholm, as the most fearful of threats.

It is doubly hard to be shown the door before one has even begun to achieve what one came for. In fact the play was never staged, and the reaction to the published drama was unenthusiastic: Marholm was accused of bad taste, and her frank treatment of sexual and family relations 30 in the play was taken to render it unperformable. That a woman was the author of such a text presumably only intensified the moral outrage of its readers we are reminded of the reproaches leveled at Elsa Bernstein and her fictional character, Sascha, of Wir Drei.

We view events from the perspective of the character with whom we are most encouraged to sympathize: She was par33 ticularly successful as a short story writer. In the drama, local superstition 37 attaches St. Genevieve Genoveva, patron saint of women to the ruins where Barbara, homeless and desperate, hides with her baby.

When a group of children spot her there, their report to the village not only turns her into Genoveva, but into a kind of Madonna figure: The transformation is ironic. What she is showing us here are the superstitions and religious beliefs that still exist side-by-side in rural communities, and function, like sentimentality, as a camouflage for social realities. When a second attempt to transfigure the central character is made, motherhood is again the point of reference. Where the children constructed a vision using ecclesiastical and Marian material, linking Barbara with a divine ideal of womanhood, the magistrate who deals with the murder of Lorenz draws on notions of the order of nature, and characterizes her as a kind of tigress who strikes out to protect her young 67— When Barbara provides the gory details of her crime, the same magistrate recoils from her depiction of her desperate violence.

Glorified motherhood is, as Laura Marholm discovered, possibly the only valorizing self-image available to adult women; but idealized commonplaces about gendered behavior, Viebig seems to suggest, do not stand the test of reality. Lorenz, we know, is party to the lie and colluding in it. Viebig is signaling a kind of alternative moral frame, whereby men are punished for their double-dealings and sexual hypocrisy, rather than just women for the results. However, Lorenz is no great villain, and his death is probably not worth the price Barbara will pay for it.

Like Agnes, Barbara loses interest in the outside world once her baby is gone; her attention refocuses, destructively, on herself. Barbara Holzer is here performing a powerful speech act: In the second of the four short plays that comprise 38 Der Kampf um den Mann, called Eine Zuflucht, social class and the right to define oneself in speech are critical. Kubizke, although portrayed as a fairly sympathetic character, prescribes silence for all her charges, and makes clear that the right to speak is absolutely linked to status: Wollt ihr wohl stille sein!

Hier wird nich jeredt! Hier rede ick blos. Janz muckstill, det is in de Hausordnung. In the presence of these three she loses much of her confident ownership of speech space; the change is signaled in her attempt to elevate her speaking style: At one point she shakes her head in response to a question, a minor act of self-expression which is, nonetheless, immediately picked up by Kubizke as excessive: In the face of the beneficent ladies who would control her future, she finally explodes: Die sollen mir lassen, se sollen mir janz in Ruhe lassen, ich will ihre Wohltat nich!

And Viebig leaves us under no illusions, for the worldly-wise Kubizke has already commented on the abusive nature of such liaisons: Abjebunden, anjekettet, fester wie anjetraut.

For Barbara and for Christine, the expression of self is not the expression of a free self. Both women assert their identities in a context that is self-destructive. For this to be possible, she needs him dead; for this is another abusive relationship, and her husband has betrayed her in an affair with a girl from the village.

Only his death can protect her status as his wife: Kein Wort, keinen Eklat! Still doch, sage ich! Ich gehe nicht mit dir. Scheuffler, the author of an early monograph dedicated to her work: Zeit und Jahrhundert was 41 published in Da ist alles elementar [. Not only the bourgeoisie are targeted: Her heroine, too, finally resorts to doubling: Dialect is conventionally perceived as low-status language, signaling class rather than gender status. In a play like Eine Zuflucht, which has an almost all-women cast, the order of class signaled in dialect use at times replaces the order of gender.

There are similarities, however: Such overlaps between the hierarchies of class and gender will concern us particularly in the next chapter. Notes 1 Elfriede Laub oder Weib und Mensch. All references are to this edition of the text. Blackwell, , 67— Suhrkamp, , 15— Texte und Dokumente, ed. Reclam, , 63— Ein Frauendrama in vier Acten Paris: Critical Essays on Women and German Literature, ed. Cocalis and Kay Goodman Stuttgart: Heinz, , — Zeitpsychologische Portraits, 4th ed.

Langen, , 4. Zur Psychologie der Frau, 2 vols, 2nd ed. Duncker, ; 1st ed. Polity, , 23—39 Duncker, , — A Social and Literary History, ed. Indiana UP, , —27 Ein Buch der Verteidigung Berlin: Routledge, , 53 et passim. Only the German version found a publisher. Schauspiel in drei Akten Berlin: Versuch einer Monographie Poznar: Zeit und Jahrhundert Erfurt: Beute, , — Genevieve of Paris, and tells the story of Genoveva, who was banished with her son Schmerzensreich and given sustenance by a doe in a forest.

Reclam, , — This brings Viebig closest to the writers this chapter will consider: We shall consider the possibility that women might be perceived as more interesting writers if their concerns are party political rather than gender political. So far this study has assessed how far playwrights who are also women can assert their subject status in the context of a discourse that tends to deny women both subjectivity-in-the-world the position of being the subject who sees, interprets, and names and creative intellectual ability particularly the capacity to write drama.

Here we shall take the opportunity to observe what happens when the focus is not on womanhood or on personal creative endeavor, but on class injustice and revolution, in the turn-of-the-century Socialist cause. Delle Grazie and Lask were both prolific dramatists, although their development as writers took them in different directions. Delle Grazie followed her first drama, Saul , with two overtly political pieces: Although she is these days less well known than Clara Viebig, delle Grazie was in her day considered a writer of timeless gen6 ius.

Yet, like Viebig, her area of real achievement is positioned by critics on the side of the epic, rather than the drama. She joined the German Communist Party, the KPD, in , and had her first major literary success with Die Toten rufen , a dramatic poem on the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht that was performed by a proletarian choir more than 30 times in and around Berlin.

Later, Lask claimed that the First World War was the crucial moment that converted 9 her to socialism. Her earliest drama, Senta , depicts a female odyssey; it is a stylized, lyrical piece, and details the path of the woman Senta from girlhood to death, which occurs at a moment of complete 10 emancipation.

All have enormous cast-lists, and are clearly designed to involve as many workers as possible in their performance. They were produced not at bourgeois theaters the texts were banned and confiscated by the censors , but at the political rallies of the later s. Begun in , Leuna was written in direct response to a request by workers, namely those who had survived the armed strike at the 12 BASF-owned ammoniac factory at Leuna in In the same year, the published play was censored and confiscated by the Reichsgericht. After that first publication by the Vereinigung Internationaler Verlagsanstalten, the piece was not reprinted until , in an edition by the publisher Dietz, and then again by the Verlag Kommunistische Texte in She also wrote political poetry, including a piece on the death of Lenin, 14 published in One stimulus for the composition of Bergarbeiter almost certainly came 15 from Zetkin.

The play was banned by the 16 Chinese government in Schlagende Wetter and Bergarbeiter: I suggested in chapter 2 that Naturalism, in the context of a society in which womanhood and the domestic sphere were seen as inevitably intertwined, created a certain space in theater for women dramatists. It is possible that she was perceived to be writing within her proper sphere, and this may have smoothed the way to a first production.

The opening scene of Schlagende Wetter is peculiarly intimate and feminine: Annerl is thanking Leni, who has just finished repairing her rag doll: Was die wieder plauscht! Lichtbild, Frontansicht des Leunawerkes mit den dreizehn Schornsteinen.

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Delle Grazie herself grew up in a mining community in Drencova in southern Hungary now Romania. She dedicated Schlagende Wetter to the memory of her father, who, as mining director, held an administrative, intermediary post between the workers in the mine and its owners — something like the character Baselli of the play.

The phenomenon of schlagende Wetter, which gives the play its title, was well-known and feared in such communities. The piece was written in response to the latest in a series of fatal mine accidents, this time in the Czech region of Karvina, and its author provides both practical information and a metaphysical interpretation: The play is classic Naturalist theater in form and content: The young mine owner is not demonized: Marie is the interface between the two locations of the play: Marie herself took an active decision to move into privileged space: Delle Grazie does not encourage us to blame her for that.

Delle Grazie, then, shows us a separation of society into two worlds — capitalists and workers. In the course of the play, she proves to us that such a division is flawed. The disassociation of personal interests between the classes has tangible consequences in the world of work: Her interpretation of events contributes to the development of a central notion in the play: Liebmann sees his fate in the burning mine as a personal one, and its significance as specific to himself: But Georg — trapped down the mine with his employer — interprets differently, universalizing events in the context of a capitalist system: It is, however, progress that will always be impeded by human greed and corruption: Theirs is not, therefore, a revolutionary question — more a stimulating moral challenge for the chattering classes than a profound inquiry.

Delle Grazie questions the system itself, rather than just the symptoms it produces. Fathers are important in this drama: Baselli is a positive paternal figure, who pleads for the workers and then dies with them down the mine; he is the type of father who sacrifices himself for the welfare of his children, while Liebmann, the negative patriarch, exploits them for his own gain. What we in fact see underground in the final act, between Liebmann and Georg, is patriarchal hierarchy itself defeated, by the power of a natural catastrophe.

Georg chooses not to exploit his new position: In Schlagende Wetter, no single figure dominates: The final showdown in the mine between Georg and Liebmann is not so much an indication of their predominance in the play, as a means of establishing equality between the two spheres of human existence that capitalism has artificially created: In the context of bourgeois theater, delle Grazie provides us with a play that asks more profound questions than its critics and possibly its audience realized.

The play was, in fact, soon declared unperformable in bourgeois circles. She was a city child with first-hand experience of the difficult living conditions in working-class Berlin; her father had been a minor official for the Prussian railway, whose death left the family with very little money. The brother and sister who head the cast of Bergarbeiter, Gretje and Hermann, are tubercular, and both die before the play is over. Unlike Schlagende Wetter, Bergarbeiter avoids the detailed settings characteristic of Naturalist dramas.

As we might expect, this shifts the focus of attention to male characters. Bergarbeiter has only one female character of any significance — Gretje — and her role is passive and supportive. That said, Gretje at least passively backs the revolution; Mother Wilke, a minor character, functions as a negative example because she is rendered potentially counterrevolutionary by her protectiveness and selfish love of her son. The only other appearance of women onstage is in a stage direction: Denn er ist ein ganz Besonderer.

Intellectual elitism is in evidence. It is stressed that the Gruber family — Hermann and his father, with Gretje in the role of praise-singer — is different from others in the mining community. Even the experience of tuberculosis needs to be articulated: This, too, is the revolutionary communicative task he gives his father: Sie sind stumm, Vater, du musst sie reden [sic]. Lass ihn flammen, lass ihn zum Schmerz eines jeden werden, und zum Trotz, Vater. Wald, the politician and one assumes an experienced orator, assures Burger: Niemand kann zuletzt in dieser Sache reden, als ihr, als du. Ich bin nicht Blut von ihrem Blut, kein Bergmann.

Words can express suffering, and the act of articulation of suffering and oppression is the prerequisite for revolutionary action. In one sense this is the opposite to what we see at the close of Schlagende Wetter. But it is also highly self-referential as a literary work: Bergarbeiter, for all it presents itself as proletarian drama, is a play about the role of the intellectual in the revolution. Hermann, its hero, is a writer and an intellectual, as well as before his tuberculosis a working miner.

He explains the genesis of his ideas to Gretje: Hermann develops ideas, which, as an intellectual, he is able to translate into words that stimulate the masses to revolutionary action. Bizarrely, we discover that he is also a dramatist. He takes time out of the action to describe his play, the existence of which is entirely irrelevant to the dramatic progress of Bergarbeiter.

In a kind of literary excursus, Hermann rejects bourgeois literature as trivial: His own drama, he suggests, is of a different ilk: Wenn einer von uns unter die Dichter geht, dann ist es ein Gesetz, dass er die Wahrheit seines Lebens darstellen muss. But his ideas — based as they are on a sense of outsiderdom in the literary community and the issue of authenticity that raises — resonate with the sentiments expressed by many women writers. We might well be reminded of Anna Croissant-Rust or even Laura Marholm when Hermann speaks of his need to write and his simultaneous fear of the consequences: Weisst du, Gretje, die Angst vor allem, was in mir ist [.

She thereby creates a significant space for her self — as transported by Hermann — within her text. At the same time, I would suggest, she supports masculinist assumptions when, in the self-abnegating figure of Gretje, she disingenuously denies the possibility of allocating significance to a female self. But if we look at the structure of these two dramas, we see something different: It is a documentary drama, based heavily on interviews conducted by Lask with the workers involved in the armed strike of March A year earlier, in March , Leuna workers had played an important part in the general strike that defeated the extreme right-wing Kapp Putsch.

On 7 January , the VKPD published an open letter calling all labor organizations to join the struggle for the social and political advancement of the workers. On 21 March, the Leuna workers voted for a general strike, and two days later took over the factory. The strike lasted six days, at the end of which the artillery were brought in under the direction of the factory owner, Dr.

Some workers were killed during the attack, and many more during the brutal court-martials that followed it. The events surrounding the end of the Leuna uprising are horrifying: Subsequently most of the surviving laborers were sacked, and those who stayed faced the loss of rights they had previously fought for, such as the eight-hour working day. We hear the voices of many workers in counterpoint, rather than a dominant, accompanied monody.

The failure of the Leuna uprising — after the great success of the general strike that ended the Kapp putsch one year before — seems to have affected the Communists in much the same way as the Fall of Constantinople, centuries earlier, affected Christians: For the sake of a sense of order in the world an answer is necessary, and the answer given to the Leuna question is lack of leadership. A GDR account of the strike, published in the nick of time!

Leuna shows us confusion, division, lack of leadership, and the infiltration of the striking workforce by government spies. The political force of all this is that the failure of the Leuna uprising was neither necessary nor inevitable, but brought about by specific circumstances that can be learned from, and hence avoided in the future. Sollst das Feuer ausbreiten, bis alle Proleten ein Feuer in der Brust haben wie du [. In a less spectacular way, it also caused suffering to a great many women.

As audience or reader we are not quite allowed to forget this: In intertwining dialogues we hear the discussion between each worker and his wife about the impending armed strike. Nur es ist so schwer, und nu kommt das Kind. Und du bist ein guter Mann. Only one woman, Else, sees her own involvement as necessary: It is a dramatic gesture, but we should be cautious: Punch when her parting words feminize him: The parting shot makes it perfectly clear: This is an idea developed in her other plays, especially the slightly earlier piece Die Befreiung, which is subtitled Sechzehn Bilder aus dem Leben der 33 deutschen und russischen Frauen, — But, in Leuna, no consideration is given to what will happen after the battle is won.

In the context of the play we have to assume that the women will simply return to their 34 kitchens and go on putting the currants on the Easter cake. While the historical context of her documentary drama makes this understandable, it limits the space available to her for the expression of female revolutionary subjectivity, and therefore for the expression of her self as writer.

Revolutionary Politics and the Woman Writer The dramas considered in this chapter were written for different purposes. Even though the term agitprop was not in use before the s, when it emerged as an abbreviation for the Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Communist Party in the USSR, the notion of agitatsiya propaganda as a political strategy was developed considerably earlier. Schlagende Wetter remains formally the most conventional of the three, which may be because it is the earliest: She jettisons Naturalistic dialect and detail in favor of clarity and brevity, even while she sticks formally to the domestic, working-class milieu.

Her drama is not only in the documentary style, but it uses the techniques of the political and artistic avantgarde: The contrapuntal, non-hierarchical arrangement of the characters remains an interesting feature, and one which Brecht for example hardly ever managed to emulate. Women are laborers rather than creators, an indispensable domestic workforce in the world from which the male genius isolates himself.

Delle Grazie only once does something similar — not in Schlagende Wetter, but in her overtly political one-act play, the Moralische Walpurgisnacht, in which the revolutionary procession is led by a writer. We should not overestimate the power of male-driven radical socialism to liberate female creativity. They were also, unavoidably, aware of themselves as women writers: Their concerns as socialist playwrights inevitably meet and interact with their self-interest as women writers in their texts.

Delle Grazie is the only writer of the three to imply in her play that women are oppressed by men as the proletariat are oppressed by the bourgeoisie. This parallel structures the relationship between Marie and Liebmann. Marie is both working class and a woman; Liebmann upper middle class and a man. But in the context of late nineteenth-century bourgeois theater, delle Grazie — like all the other women dramatists this volume has so far considered — had to accept a perception of her as a surprisingly gifted outsider: That would be a positive, upbeat take on their reception.

The coincidence that both are engaged socialist writers, however, also permits a different kind of conclusion. It seems that, if one is a woman dramatist, one had better be something else, too: Schauspiel ; 2nd ed. References are to the edition of the text. Drama der Tatsachen Berlin: The play was reprinted, with slight variations several references to film and photograph use are lost; the original division into twenty-nine scenes is replaced by a division into five acts and with an afterword by Johannes Schellinger, as Leuna Studien zu ihrer mittleren Schaffensperiode Munich: Both cited in Mayer-Flaschberger, 10— An International Anthology, ed.

Routledge, , 81—84 81— Eine Lebenslinie in acht Szenen Hannover: Henschel, , 75— After the war, the Leuna factory moved into the production of fertilizers. In the Vienna journal Arbeiterliteratur. Niemeyer, , 2. A Comparative Encyclopedia, ed. Manzsche, , —85 Cited in Kambas, 5. An English translation of the play is also available: Athenaion, , — Revue-Drama in 35 Scenen Berlin: Friedrich, , 3. Pandora, , — Europa, , 65—73 67— One way or another, all the playwrights considered have striven to create materiality for themselves through the medium of drama.

In the final chapters I shall look at the work of two writers who have, more than any of the others in this volume, been granted materiality — space or presence — in literary history: Both her dramatic work with the possible exception of Die Wupper and her prose have tended to be overlooked — she is known, read, and taught primarily as a writer of poetry. Even outside of formal readings she was a performer who incorporated her artistic creations: Naturalist elements have been identified and denied in the piece; it has been 7 seen as a forerunner of Expressionist drama.

All this might make one wonder more about the needs of critics than about the play. Die Geschichte meines Vaters. Even in Switzerland, though, the politics of such a performance were complicated, and Arthur Aronymus was dropped after only two show11 ings. K Her last major dramatic project, IchundIch, was written in —41 during her exile in Jerusalem. A second journey in was in preparation for another volume on Palestine, to be called Tiberias.

She had intended to write Tiberias in Switzerland, but when she was refused re-entry after a third trip to Palestine in , she settled — temporarily, she planned — in Jerusalem. At the time of her death in , the manuscript was finished although still imperfect, and she had not managed to find a theater or director to perform it. In fact the complete text was eventually published in , thanks to the 14 editorial efforts of Margarete Kupper.

Religious Structures and the Place of the Self: Importantly, there is no conflict here; on the contrary, the two are friends, even love each other. Social class and religious beliefs separate these two young men in the social matrix, but what we see in the play is the similarity of their aspirations. Both are looking to satisfy a certain vanity they view themselves as different from, and in some sense better than, those around them , and both are looking for a tool with which to control others. In his greeting to Eduard: In dialogue with his mother, he deliberately reverses the usual mother-son authority structure to condemn her support of Martha: The speech act — a veto — is both violent Frau Sonntag breaks down weeping and ineffectual: Eduard may invoke the authority of the Church fathers in his rhetoric, but he is not himself a father yet neither as priest nor as progenitor , merely a son, like Carl Pius, as his mother reminds him: Mutter Pius as his informant and confidante, Marta Sonntag as the object of his erotic interest.

The language of fathers and sons is also of relevance in Arthur Aronymus. He begins with an imperative, regarding the proper reward due to a casual laborer at their house: In his next words he re-establishes himself as the final authority in all matters: In one sense at least Simeon has won here: The voice of the father and his verbal authority is an important feature of the play.

In the short story Arthur Aronymus: We might also read a double meaning in her plea: We might very well see her as both things: Sie ist erledigt wie nach einer Operation. As spatial images, they are conscious of the conditions of the picture as a medium. In this regard, painting sets the stage for making spatial images functional in literature. Magritte also dealt with the subject of the exchange between painting and text in works such as Les mots et les images or Le masque vide. Spatial images are translated into two-dimensional contours and texts.

The translation of planimetry into three-dimensionality received special attention in the transitional era of modern painting and media art cf. On entering the room, the spectator experiences — physically to the point of experiencing real feelings of dizziness — a ubiquitous cyberspace where up and down no longer exist. This is a modern realization of sotto in su baroque ceiling paintings cf.

In view of this intermedial interrelationship, it makes little sense to draw too clear a line between each medium in modernism or to give priority to the materialness of one particular medium. It is more important that each new medium builds on the preceding, traditional media and their modes of perception. The historic change in spatial perception and the ensuing strategies that brought about such a change may be seen in scientific, psychological, and, finally, literary contexts. First of all, the scientific reconstruction of the world for Leonardo da Vinci is reflected in spatial images with the help of perspective and geometry cf.

Lambert projects the principle of perspective representation onto cartography, where optical perception and geometric surveying assist one another esp. Alexander von Humboldt also combines scientific description with visual per- ception in his work Kosmos. In the process, a new point of view comes to the fore in which the strict empiricism of geographic description is combined with the aesthetic transformation of what is perceived through landscape paintings. Outside space becomes inside space. At the same time, Humboldt orients his work towards the new media of his time. By doing so, he refers to visual media that have striven for the illusion of authenticity through an increasingly per- fect simulation of three-dimensional space since the time of Daguerre This aspect of simulation also gains much importance for the new medium photography.

Stereoscopic photography aims at simulating depth, just like a dioramic illusion, while the subjective component of visual perception also gains in significance cf. It is therefore no accident that the space of perception, which has been researched in science and which Pierre Maine de Biran attributes to a sens intime, now seems to complement the space of aesthetic imagination cf. As mentioned, rhetoric mnemonics also establish imagination as emerging from an arrangement of memory in space.

In contemporary aesthetics, visual perception of outside space and the mental activities of fantasizing and imagining are joined together. The theory of imagination corresponds to the simu- lation of a central perspective of a three-dimensional space in a picture, while the suggestive exteriorization of space in picture media corresponds to the interiorizing of space in the world of books cf. The space of perception, memory, and fantasy all seem to correspond to each other. It is remarkable that this development took place at a time when the old paradigm of visual representation, the camera obscura, which allocates a specific place to the spectator, starts to lose sig- nificance.

Instead, subjective perception, with its psychological and physiological dimensions, begins to assume greater importance. The aesthetic representation of space is the emancipation of aesthetic perception and mediated systems of representation that not only are equal to daily perception with their variety of simulation techniques but also reflect the autonomy of the aesthetic space of imagination.

Yet this development is not a linear one. Rather, this development characteristic of modern media is an inverted one. The technical and aesthetic possibilities achieved are therefore reorganized, reevaluated — at times even made less potent, or the diverse strategies of media are made functional. In literature, for example, the calculated alternation between simulated surface and depth perception is deployed as an indication of processes of the imagination.

RENNER The development of a new medium is therefore accompanied by the unfolding of a new way of perceiving, though the different forms of perception are adopted and changed by other media in the course of media history. Film sets the framework for a play of the alternation from three- to two-dimensionality. The relationship between canvas classical painting and film is similar. Conventional narrative film aims for a three-dimensional effect of space in order to overcome the flatness of a film image in favour of a credible impression of reality.

As a result, film uses techniques that were important in classical painting and discontinued in modern art: In abstract painting, these principles are no longer used, and surface and lines therefore become subjects, as does the emphasis on the vertical and horizontal. In twentieth-century literature, the calculated change between two-dimensional and three-dimensional simulated space controls imagination and reflection. He uses perspective, a telescope, a map, and geodesy as new instruments to give significance to the unfolding of space in the Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Novelle, and Wanderjahre.

In the second edition of Wanderjahre, all precarious meetings between men and women are structured through passages of great visual power and through the alternation between narrated images of surface and depth, relying on the tradition of painting. Often, the two-dimen- sionality of the images is changed into a three-dimensional space of memory. He initially describes them two-dimensionally according to their outlines and finally three-dimensionally as an opening shell.

But he also creates an association with the medium of photography because this perception presents one and the same view more or less as both a negative and a developed picture Proust Pl I, — The church in Combray is similarly described as a four- dimensional building in which the three-dimensional space of perception opens up to time, transforming it into a space of imagination Proust, Pl I, Again, the space of action becomes the space of memory, and the space of memory becomes the space of imagination, and time and space correlate with each other see Proust, Contre Sainte- Beuve ; cf.

Proust Pl III, Without a doubt, the preceding development of memory and imagination into separate concepts in nineteenth-century reflections on aesthetics may be observed again in modernism. At the same time, this act of visualizing can be read on another level. It marks the abolition of clear linguistic semantics, and creates — and marks the creation of — an imaginative and fantastic deformation of language: As the examples of Musil and Proust show, images of space in classic modernist novels often refer to visual perception and visual media.

Proust compares photographic notation with the psychological effects of impressionist painting, characterizing both by using the metaphorical nature of surface and depth. Musil, on the other hand, develops the same point in a narrative way. In his works, the two-dimensional space of perception and three-dimensional space of memory are continuously brought into relation to each other. Here the surface of portrait photography marks the restrictive power of familial systems of order Amerika ; also Der Verschollene , while the fantasy of space in Naturtheater von Oklahoma opens up a utopian space of promise, which, however, is signified through patriarchal order — a characteristic feature in Kafka Amerika ; Der Verschollene He perceives the sea and harbour as a flat picture, while the belly of the ship from which he experiences the harbour of New York is also a three-dimensional space that he experiences physically.

Thus we are dealing with a literary schematization of perception that visualizes the interdependency of writing and imagination and develops it with reference to visual perception. Film, whose distinguishing characteristic is regarded by many media theorists as the production of imaginary images of space, also depends on making con- structions of space functional. Sergej Eisenstein is one of the first to relate space in film to time and motion.

He believes the square screen to be most suited to giving the impression of movement because it allows a verticality of the field of vision to be created, which, together with horizontality, contains the promise of a dynamic relation. It is also significant that cinema creates an impression of space in a psychological and physiological way. In a famous lecture on how space is made dynamic, Panofsky said: In cinema […] the viewers can choose where to sit, but only physically […].

And the space the viewers see is as moveable as the viewers themselves. Not only fixed objects move in space but space itself moves, changes, turns, fades and crystallizes again […]. An internal semantic construct is converted into an external visual and optical construct on a two-dimensional plane. This is based not only on physiological, psychological, and intellectual processes but also on cultural codes.

Since visual perception is nothing more than a referential illusion, the perception of space depends on the experience of the perceiving subject. Physics demonstrates that simulation does not arise as a technique of media but is a modelling along the lines of natural perception. In film, space is to a certain extent immediately present, though in a different way than in texts: It is therefore surprising that film often pursues inverse strategies: The camera also displaces the speaker from the picture and intensifies the impression of two-dimensionality as a result.

In the visualization of the interaction between characters, two-dimensional silhouette images are alternated with three-dimensional spaces of action. These are, for their part, geometrically organized by a network of horizontal and vertical lines, along which the camera continues to move. The conscious representation of two-dimensionality and the reference to two- dimensional systems of representation have systematic origins in the cinematic adaptation of literature.

The reference to texts requires the transformation of narrated spaces into evocative images. The white fade-in picks up on a development in painting on canvas that Kandinsky ushered into a self-reflective phase by making demands on the presentation of the white surface in painting Kandinsky — , while Aleksandr Rodtschenko referred to the square on the pure white surface as the most essential form of painting see Spielmann ff.

On the other hand, the white fade-in performs a media- specific transformation that makes the viewer conscious of the difference between the media of film and literature. In the medium of film, the constant change between fade-in, image, and voice-over reconstructs the act of reading with its combination of spoken sign, mental image, and its visualization. Moreover, in Berlin Alexanderplatz this process is symbolically condensed. The withdrawal from the simulation of perspective is remarkable because film originally started with the opposite intention. Lighting, a clear differentiation between black and white, and cinematic architecture all support a continuing dramatization of spatial depth.

It is also supported by a moving camera, a characteristic of German filmmakers. Yet the concentration on structured space, which has been adopted by commercial Hollywood cinema in particular, decreases over time. Planimetrical cinematic techniques reestablish themselves in spite of these developments influenced by the transition to colour film with its more limited scope for depth of focus and reinforced by the transition from wide-angle lenses to telephoto lenses with greater focal length, which initially supported dramatizing effects.

Planimetrical techniques of filming hold the cinematic image to be the result of layers parallel to the picture and no longer as depth of space with diagonal vanishing lines. Vivre sa vie, are examples of this cf. At the same time, however, modernist cinema, which emerged in the s, works against the illusionism of classic Hollywood cinema through its narrative experiment with open endings and characters or plots with double meaning. It also demonstrates the artificiality and constructed character of the images by plani- metrical image designs.

The film screen becomes a very carefully composed display, and Godard makes the terse comment: He relates them to photography, cartography, and illustrated charts of the natural sciences, and he makes the viewer aware of the historicism of picture techniques in the process. He consciously creates visual clusters, while other directors try to implement one of the historically developed principles of constructing space.

Greenaway is convinced that the art of film has just reached the stage of cubism and, for the most part, does not take into account the possibilities inherent in its multitude of perspectives. Symmetrical image construction, tableaus, a static camera, or, in terms of painting, frame, central perspective, and image symmetry, all create a centripetal arrangement of the image area that is comparable to a painting on canvas but contrasts with the centrifugal tendency of cinematic images. This arrangement is reminiscent of the organization of perspective during the Renaissance with such visual structuring aids as grids or views through doors and windows Spielmann; cf.

His construction of the image unites viewfinder and lens on one axis, and the clip is organized according to a central perspective with the help of the framed picture plane. The image as a whole is broken up into a setting of boxed images that are presented through various masks, from the simple circular form of an iris shot to complex collages of various picture forms and formats.

This strategy replaces the sequential presentation of images commonly used in film. All this shows the unfolding of a special effect in film that relates the fabric of space and of time to one another. In contrast to the use of fading, typical of film, framing, the breaking up of the image into several image boxes, fixes moments and in doing so changes the three-dimensional space of the action into a more or less documentary image-space similar to a photograph.

This fixation breaks through the imaginary production of illusion, and the connection between the static images and the voice-over underlines this analytical character. If one observes this change in the medium of film towards a self-reflexivity that seems to be reserved for experimental film, then the question arises whether, in the age of media, there is not a new, but only differently defined, separation taking place between reflexivity and suggestiveness, and between profound and trivial forms of representation. While the schematization of perception in video games draws its suggestive power more and more from the octagonal simulation of three-dimensionality, replacing the picture of the original with the digital image, reflected art aims on the one hand to make the viewer aware of these processes of transformation and, on the other hand, opens a depth of space of imagination that needs no digital simulation.

It does this by alternating a three-dimensional perspective with planimetrical images, sometimes even by insisting on the planimetrical picture. Works Cited Alpers, Svetlana. Barck, Karlheinz, et al. Biran, Pierre Maine de: Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.

Mit Roomancer auf Tour im Rechner. Die Ordnung der Dinge. Neue Studien zur Psychologie der bildlichen Darstellung. Zur Psychologie der bildlichen Darstellung. Zum Wandel der raumzeitlichen Wahrnehmung in der Moderne. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michael. Handbuch der physiologischen Optik.

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Die Tatsachen in der Wahrnehmung. Wissenschaftliche Buch- gesellschaft, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body. Girard Etzkorn, The Hague: Entwurf einer physischen Erdbeschreibung. Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente. Introduction by Max Bill. Eine Wirkungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte. Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung. The Realization of the Living. The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Wahrnehmungs- und erkenntnistheoretische Aspekte der Medientheorie und Filmgeschichte. Das Ende des Buchzeitalters. Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen.

Zur vergleichenden Physiologie des Gesichtssinnes. Gedanken zur 3D-Kartographie, Didaktik und Plato. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Vom Doppelleben der Bilder: Bildmedien und ihre Texte. Perspective as Symbolic Form. A la recherche du temps perdu. Ein neuropsychiatrischer Beitrag zur perspektivischen Erfassung. Rost, Andreas, and David Bordwell, eds. Verlag der Autoren, Ernst Behler, et al.

Language reference general

Peter Greenaways Kunst der Regeln. Chateaubriand — Flaubert — Proust. Karl Maurer, Winfried Wehle. Der Film und die digitalen Bilder. Michael Wetzel, Hertha Wolf. Literaturtheorie ohne Bild mit Metapher: Rutschky 79 Das Schisma des Jahrhunderts zwischen literaler und visueller Kultur ist in erster Linie eine Frage der Theoriepolitik. Denn ob platonisches Bilderdenken, alt- testamentarisches Bilderverbot, theologisch-politischer Bilderstreit oder ut-pictura- poiesis-Poetik: In Diskussionen des Jahrhunderts, die das Visuelle als paradigmatische Entdeckung feiert, positiv wie negativ notwendig naiv.

Sie feiert oder verdammt nicht das Sichtbare generell, sondern das technische Bild: Der Text muss unsichtbar sein. Waren Texte zuvor langsamer und weniger effektiv? Nietzsche beschwert sich schon im Damit ist alles und nichts gesagt. Denn jede Theorie, die von dieser Differenz ausgehend organisiert ist, steht vor der Entscheidung, ob sie mit dieser Differenz beobachtet, oder ob sie die Differenz selbst beobachtet. Jeder Anfang ist kontingent. In seiner Auseinandersetzung mit den Arbeiten Winckelmanns kritisiert Lessing weniger den Ansatz Winckelmanns als dessen Vorgehensweise in der Beschreibung: Was sie jedoch nach der geistigen Seite hin gewinnt, verliert sie ebenso wieder nach der sinnlichen.

Das ist kein Zufall. An ihre Stelle tritt das Symbol als Gedankenfigur. Im Symbol wird das Sichtbare eine Idee, die die Differenz zwischen Sichtbarem und seiner Beschreibung aufhebt, in der Allegorie war sie eine Beschreibung, die ihre Distanz zum Beschriebenen aufrechterhielt. In der Literatur des Dabei verschwindet das technische Bild aus der Literatur. Die Literatur wird Bildung. Wie auch die bildende Kunst Bildung wird. Die neuen technischen Sensationen der Panoramen dominieren Ende des Jahrhunderts und die Entdeckung der Fotographie im Die Philologie des Jahrhunderts schreibt im Namen des Symbols Literaturgeschichten, Literaturkritik und Literaturinterpretation.

Das Symbol wird weiterhin zu einem guten Teil die Philosophie insbesondere die Philosophie der Kunst beherrschen: I wird erst wieder mit Paul de Mans literarischer deconstruction positiv an Bedeutung gewinnen. Das literarische Wort wird auf seine gesellschaftliche Funktion hin befragt, als Wort aber bleibt es konkurrenzlos unbefragt. Aber auch hier ist Theoretisierung von Text und Bild in Bezug auf die Literatur in gewissem Sinne naiv, wenn sie nun die semiotischen Vorzeichen einfach umkehrt, um dem Bild die Reverenz zu erweisen. Aber weder die Literatur noch ihre Theorie hat die Bilder angefasst.

Der aufgehende Mond im Kinderlied, die aufgehende Blume im Liebeslied machen noch keinen lyrischen Text aus. Es geht um die Notwendigkeit des Missverstehens von Sprachbildern, seien sie alte Stereotypen oder neu gepresste. Denn ob frisch oder versiegelt, neu oder alt, im Sprachbild lauert die Tradition des Textes. In diesem Sinne benutzt es alte Bilder neu. Das Gedicht steht in der Tradition selbst-reflexiver poetischer Schreibweisen. Auf die Geborgenheit traditioneller Literatur- und Kunstinterpretation kann man sich im positiven wie negativen Sinne verlassen zur akademischen Brinkmann-Rezeption vgl.

Die Reihe Godzilla zeigt bearbeitete Fotographien mit Gedichtaufschriften. Auf dem hier gezeigten Bild Abb. Was man sieht und was man liest sind zwei Bilder. Das zweite beschriebene Bild, stellt eine Szene vor: Aber welche Lesart auch immer: Foto und Gedicht als ein Text.

Rembrandt by H. Knackfuss

Auch das geht noch im Fahrwasser der Textexegese. Der Text unterstellt sich noch, den Sinn anzuleiten, die Interpretation zu lenken. Die Worte fallen ins Bild: Die Worte fallen ins Bild und umgekehrt. Man hat Worlds End wie folgt beschrieben: Das ist alles so richtig wie es nicht falsch ist. Brinkmann selbst hilft hier nicht weiter: Aber all das ist schon wieder die Tradition der Texte. Das eigentliche Problem verschiebt sich immer weiter.

Denn welche Passagen des Textes beziehen sich auf die Bilder? Als Leser von Texten, die das Bild umgehen, ist man ungeeignet, den Bildern ein Bedeutungsmonopol zuzugestehen. Oder dass hier Sprachkritik als Wirklichkeitskritik vorliegt vgl. Ich brauche die Bilder nicht, um das zu lesen.

Warum etwas ist wie es ist? Fensterscheiben in Autos, die den Fahrer nicht erkennen lassen. Ein Mann und ein Junge, die auf die Betrachter zukommen und durch sie hindurch sehen, weil sie sie nicht sehen. Viel Glas, viel hindurchzusehen, aber alles matt. Coca Cola, Hapac Lloyd oder China. Aufschriften liest man nicht, man sieht sie, nebenbei. Was sie zeigen, ist allenfalls die Zeigbarkeit.

Die Kunstwissenschaft hat ihren Bilderkanon, wie die Filmwissenschaft mit dem ihren begonnen hat. Die Philologie blickt noch in die Ferne. Die Philologie, die heute nicht fernsieht, wird an der neueren Literatur vorbeischreiben. Ob das gut ist, oder schlecht, steht hier nicht zur Debatte. Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films. Was ist ein Bild? Boehm, Gottfired, und Helmut Pfotenhauer, Hrsg. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Brinkmann, Der Film in Worten 95— Der Film in Worten. Brinkmann, Der Film in Worten — Bild und Text im Dialog. Eicher, Thomas, und Ulf Bleckmann, Hrsg.

Evans, Jessica, und Stuart Hall. Text und Bild, Bild und Text. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Eva Moldenaur und Karl Markus Michel. Hoesterey, Ingeborg, und Ulrich Weisstein, Hrsg. Kritik der visuellen Kultur. Melville, Stephan, und Bill Readings. Entwurf zu einer mnemonischen Emblematiktheorie. Giorgo Colli und Mazzino Montinari. Urteilsbildung im Zeitalter der Unterhaltungsindustrie. Kein Bild ohne Text. Der Verlust der Sprachkultur.

Prosaformen bei Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. Verlag der Kunst, Texte zur allgemeinen Literaturtheorie und Theorie der Prosa. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Liebe Dein Symptom wie Dich selbst!: Jacques Lacans Psychoanalyse und die Medien. Image, Voice, and Truth: This has been the question at the centre of most international debates on documentary since the s. The work of Trin T. Minha and Claire Johnston is representative of this trend.

In contrast, when looking at the East German documentary tradition, it is almost impossible to find this type of formal self-reflexivity. The close relationship between the documentary film and television studios was strictly enforced, which meant that a great majority of documentary films were commissioned by the state for television. Filmmakers were faced seminar Like other documentarists who came before her, Misselwitz focusses in particular on aspects of everyday socialist life.

While scripts for feature films and the audio of documentary footage were screened for inflammatory language, the images remained relatively uncensored. As other scholars have suggested cf. On the one hand, these films provide an escape from larger, overtly political topics. Die Kamera hebt nichts hervor, diskreditiert niemanden, idealisiert nichts. Like so many other social theorists, Eduard Schreiber sees this focus on women and the everyday of socialism as an awareness on the part of artists that women functioned as a site of crystallization for social contradiction and rupture: Therefore, both notions — truth and authenticity — are not absolutes, but rather textual constructs that have critical value.

Both Sonja Michel and Julia Lesage have argued for the importance of certain realist structures for achieving feminist goals in filmmaking. Thus, in using this technique, Misselwitz participates in the demystification of the past by providing women a public forum in which they can speak about their lives and articulate new knowledges — new truths — of socialist experience Lesage ; Michel ; on the talking-heads technique cf. The film does not limit itself to one space and time, as is often the case in previous East German documentaries that focus on a single woman, on women working in a particular brigade, or on women working in one factory or living in one town.

Beginning with a shot from inside a car, waiting at a railroad crossing, she says: Sie schreibt in ihr Tagebuch: The image is replaced with a second still of two girls receiving diplomas, while the sound of the opening sequence a passing train is replaced by the sound of creaking. The still image is replaced by a medium shot of a man cranking the railroad gate open.

Misselwitz asks to see the tattoos decorating his chest and back, wondering aloud what kind of women he has inscribed there. Having been born a daughter, rather than the son for whom her father had longed, she was a mixed blessing. While she is born into a state of supposed gender equality, her sex is clearly presented as a barrier. Further, this sequence illustrates that alternative forms of history writing, like the diary or autobiographical forms, give voice to experiences that are often silenced in official narratives — here, the supposed gender equality in the GDR.

As the camera moves slowly through the hall, Misselwitz recounts the first time she left her small town: Mit neunzehn Jahren verlasse ich diese Stadt, um meine Wege zu gehen. Eine feste Arbeit, Geburt der Tochter, zweite Ehe. Studium mit Kind, zweite Scheidung. Beharren auf sinnvolle Arbeit. This section of the monologue functions like an abbreviated Lebenslauf noting major life changes: It also functions as a commentary on the previous third of the opening sequence, in which Misselwitz obliquely suggests that all official attempts to enact emancipation from above through social policy — marriage and divorce rights, inexpensive housing for married couples, access to higher education and job training — have only partially alleviated the problems women face in society.

The challenges of single motherhood and its naturalized meanings; see Behrend; Hornig and Steiner; Nagelschmidt; H. This narrative device invites the viewer to join Misselwitz in a personal journey that is also a public attempt to rewrite history through dialogue. From inside the train car, the camera looks out the window as the train passes through the countryside.

Auf der Reise werden wir miteinander reden [ The numerous secondary screens in the film — like the photos and the tattoos — reflect on the visual medium and its tendency to objectification. Thus, in looking out the window of the train, the camera suggests the problems with the documentary gaze.

Although the camera does not include Misselwitz in the frame, her presence is made clear through her voice in dialogue with Hillu. She begins by talking about her marriages, the first having occurred after becoming pregnant at age nineteen. The way in which she narrates her memory illustrates the contradictions between her expectations and her experience: Warum sind da so wenig Frauen? Und auch von meinem Kollektiv war ich die einzige Frau [ In this single monologue, Hillu very clearly and concisely expresses both the gender inequality in the GDR and the astonishment at how that inequality has been maintained.

And although her expectations, informed by official discourse, are contradicted by her personal experiences, Hillu continues to express some surprise. Are the two positions reconcilable? Further, it asserts the visual ideology with which Misselwitz is attempting to engage. The camera cuts to a medium shot of a dark room in which a worker is banging pipes. As the worker emerges, back first with coveralls and hard hat on, it is not clear that this is a woman.

However, after emerging from the second dark room, Christine turns briefly to face the camera. The camera follows her at a medium shot as she walks along seemingly endless pipes in the dark factory, banging them along the way, the noise of the machines sometimes drowning out the sounds of the pipes. The camera cuts to a medium close-up of Christine as she sits writing in the work log. Here, the viewer discovers that she makes this trip eight times per hour, banging the pipes to keep the soot from settling, ensuring its release into the air above the factory town.

Their conversation begins with a long shot of a small cluster of houses with the smokestacks of the factory in the distance. The image creates a sense of isolation that was not felt during the previous encounter with Hillu. The viewer also becomes acutely aware of the geographic and class differences between the women being interviewed.

The image of the tiny, isolated town directly contrasts with the hustle and bustle of the Berlin train station. Her interpretation of this long chapter in her life reveals little more than disappointment. Her fears and isolation stem from the troubles she has with Ramona. She is on the verge of tears. Her mouth is turned down and trembles as she talks. She looks down at the table and her eyes are glassy.

Aber das wird praktisch in unserer Gesellschaft gar nicht akzeptiert. Das wird gar nicht geachtet. In doing so, she also shifts from a generalized discourse to an extremely personalized discourse. It proposes a critical reflection on the part of viewer: Becker and Greenberg; Eghiagian; Gries; and Helwig. Misselwitz restructures the truth of social and gender equality in the GDR by confronting the viewer with the marginalization of women like Christine and her daughter and compelling the viewer to contemplate his or her own participation in that marginalization.

Misselwitz turns her attention at the end of the film to the problem of girlhood in a sequence that focusses on two runaways. Here, questions of equality and emancipation are constructed from the perspective of marginalization, for which the two young punks, Kerstin and Anja, become markers. Misselwitz focusses particularly on the gendered image as a way of creating a bridge for identification between the mainstream viewer and the marginalized girls.

Throughout the scene, the girls look almost directly into the camera toward Misselwitz, who seems to be positioned just outside of the frame, and the sound of passing trains can be heard sporadically above them. Their pose against the trestle is nonchalant and lazy, suggesting boredom and disaffection. The placement of the girls below the tracks, rather than inside a train car as in other interviews, is crucial.

Misselwitz begins by asking how and why it is that they have run away. Es hat uns allet angekotzt. War eenfach zu viel. Was hat euch angekotzt? Die Vorschriften und allet. Wollten praktisch durchsetzten, allet wat wir machen wollten [ Doch, ick finde, dat wollte ick ooch erreichen. Rather, their hatred of rules, parental and communal expectations is a typical marker of youthful rebellion and has been portrayed in several DEFA feature films cf.

The larger social critique of this sequence becomes most obvious in the following scene, in which we discover that, after the period of filming, Kerstin and Anja are punished by the state for not following social rules. The viewer watches Kerstin and Anja depart the scene, walking the tracks hand in hand, laughing. Anja und Kerstin bleiben wiederholt tagelang von zu Hause weg, gehen nicht zur Schule.

Der Vater kommt von der Nachtschicht, um sich von seiner Tochter zu verabschieden. The camera then cuts to a medium close-up of Anja standing on the train platform. Her worried look is directed again just to the left of the camera at Misselwitz. Her hair is no longer spiked and dyed white, and it is pulled back into a ponytail. She is no longer wearing her punk clothes, but rather a pair of jeans and a buttoned-down shirt with matching earrings.

In this final scene, after Anja has boarded the train and is about to depart, she meets Misselwitz at the open window of her train car. No longer outside or underneath the tracks, Anja has assumed her place in the normal everyday of the GDR. Rather, Anja is being shipped off, most likely to be forgotten by that very normal everyday that the train represents. As the train pulls away, Misselwitz waves good-bye. Finally, the camera cuts to a perspective from inside a train car looking out onto the passing winter landscape, as the sound of the train continues from the previous scene.

As we watch her depart, we are forced also to imagine and identify with her perspective as she sets out on her journey to the youth camp. Denn letzten Endes, man hat nur ein Leben. The camera pans the ocean with the horizon falling into the centre of the frame.

It is faint, but it is there. In taking the perspective from the ship towards the horizon, this final sequence hints at an optimistic sense of movement and accomplishment in the final voice-over. Yet this sequence is ambiguous. As asserted at the beginning of this essay, while the film presents a variety of perspectives and voices, Misselwitz maintains a certain level of artistic control over the text. Instead, the black and white of the film blurs the sky into a monotone grey, leaving the viewer to seek the warmth of summer elsewhere. As a result, the song takes on an ironic tone that underscores the grey ambiguity of the image.

To the expansive nothingness of the sea? Hollywood Behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. U of Minnesota P, East German Forensic Psychology and its Deviants — Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. The Triumph of the Ordinary: U of North Carolina P, A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies Am Rande der Gesellschaft: Alte und Behinderte in beiden deutschen Staaten. Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Hornig, Daphne, and Christine Steiner. Initiativgruppe Geschlossener Jugendwerkhof Torgau.

Die DDR in den 50er Jahren. James Dean lernt kochen. New York UP, Berufs- und Familienarbeit in der DDR. Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. Joy Webster Barbre et al. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. U of Wisconsin P, Intersubjectivities in Oral History. U of California P, Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland. Conversely, the final scenes from Masurca Fogo convey the hope that follows loss. Furthermore, the intersection of gender issues and universal issues about the human condition not only offers a social com- mentary on modern society but also probes facilely conceived victim-perpetrator con- stellations and thus constitutes the philosophical common ground between the two artists.

This collaboration between them in Hable con ella has received little scholarly attention. She has challenged the boundaries between dance and theatre, as her dancers are also simultaneously actors, singers, and comedians, and, by using different media at her seminar She is internationally acclaimed by critics and dance practitioners, and she enjoys immense popularity with dance aficionados. Now in the third decade of its existence, the Tanztheater Wuppertal boasts a repertoire of over thirty works.

Each year the company produces a new work, frequently commissioned by public institutions for special occasions, and it continues to tour the world. With her creative selection of music, often drawing on world music, her signature choreography and inventive staging, Bausch has an undiminished power to impress, entertain, puzzle, provoke, annoy. The subjects that she represents on stage — fear, loneliness, frustration, age, relationship between men and women, the ex- ploitation of humans — all resonate with her audience.

Elements of theatre are apparent in the way the dancers sing and speak and wear costumes that are regular street-clothes rather than dance costumes. Is it the sheer spectacle that attracts? Big subjects love, anguish, struggle, loss. Big company twenty-plus dancers. Big sets based on nature with leaves, water, or earth. And her works are complex. Mixed media in Danzon and Masurca Fogo. Many scenes of montaged dance fragments and snatches of text. A collaged soundtrack folk, classical. The analysis offered here examines her dance theatre as performance art and therefore primarily as a visual text.

More specifically, it explores the nexus between the semiotics of the dancing body, the use of space, time, props and costume, music and multimedia, and choreographic patterns in order to elucidate the strategies at work in the text. While dance as a cultural phenomenon is frequently studied within the field of anthropology and historical dance research focusses on stylistic developments, periods, influential dancers, and choreographers, theoretical research on dance tends to focus on issues of movement and body-analysis.

Recent approaches in dance research, led by Anglo-American academic discourse, have identified the body, movement, and dance as significant subjects of interdisciplinary studies Balme Performance studies has in fact maintained that, with the development of aesthetic performances i. In a similar fashion, Erika Fischer-Lichte has expanded the understanding of what deserves our interest in studying performance. Akin to this view, and seeking to validate the specific generic qualities of dance with regard to the act of interpretation, the dance scholar Janet Adshead-Lansdale claims that the genre-specific transience and impermanence of dance needs to be viewed as a strength rather than a weakness.

It just depends on the way you watch. For example, the female dancers in the plays often wear high heels, most of the time complementing a costume that consists of elegant, femi- nine dresses, made from colourful, flowing, printed fabrics, that allude nostalgically to the style of the fashion in the thirties and forties. The high heels could be interpreted as a symbol of cultural oppression forcing women to walk unnaturally, transforming them into sex objects.

By having her dancers wear this footwear, she demonstrates how cultural aesthetic standards are inscribed and internalized, but the shoes — closed-toe shoes — are noticeably very elegant and thus fulfil an ambiguous function of feminization that cannot be narrowed down to sexual objectification. Bausch draws our attention to accepted conventions by decontextualizing them, as, for example, when male dancers appear in cross-dressing costume, with high heels and female ball gowns, or in Masurca Fogo on stilts underneath a long dress.

This reversal and exaggeration has an alienating and comical effect. The artificial, nondecorative presence of nature appears surreal, alienating, and, according to Bausch, simply aesthetically pleasing: This presentation of nature, however, clearly con- trasts with the culture represented in the actions of the dancers, who, if not dancing solo, play short episodes that illustrate interactions between people. The fact that so many things happen on stage simultaneously causes the spectator to feel overwhelmed at times or unsure about where to focus attention. The idea of dance as a type of language was articulated early on in the theory of modern dance, for example by Mary Wigman: In the same vein, pointing to the theatricality of nonrepresentational, nonnarrative performance, bereft of unity and entered action, Wright seems to suggest that Bausch portrays the world as an absurd and dark place that leaves the individual unprotected: Her effects contain no guide to interpretation via any programmatic texts, nor do her actors comport themselves with a conscious understanding of their role vis-a-vis one another.

Stable selves disappear; intelligible contexts metamorphose unaccountably, foregrounding the vulnerability of the subject and its feeble defences. The point of recog- nition with the object, the gesture, the situation is the crucial and definitive factor in appropriating the observed, and it is based on experience, familiarity, and knowledge — in this respect not unlike the vocabulary of language.

In this way it becomes possible for the viewer to relate to what is performed. Ursula Fritsch describes this process of understanding as resonance and emotional appropriation based on our physical memory. Her method appears plausible: Her point of departure is to work with the dancer as a whole person, drawing upon his or her imagination and creativity in the collective effort of approaching dance.

The task or question challenges the dancer to use his or her body in a reflective and decontextualized, perhaps also playful manner beyond mere physical mastery of move- ment. Associations of this sort as well as movements and gestures of every day life produce material for the choreography that also may be inspired by places and cities Fernandes 25—34; Hoffmann 12; Mulrooney —97; Schlicher —20, —45, Servos —37, and Wildenhahn. This material is subsequently treated through the various factors of dance compositions such as energy, form, space, and rhythm Schlicher Through her method, Bausch has de- veloped techniques and preferences that result in a unique vocabulary.

One example of her choreo- graphic strategies see Fritsch —71 , is her technique of condensing a story to a single word, image, or gesture. The effect could be either theatrical or, depending on the context, also poetic. This sequence is repeated excessively, thus suggesting despair and mutual torture. Likewise, the vertical plane is complemented by the horizontal plane — an earmark of modern dance. Academic classical dance technique emerged during the time of French abso- lutism, and, with its artificiality, codified stylization, and regimentation, it symbolizes the restraint and control of human affects and passions.

By contrast, early twentieth- century modern dance liberated the language of the body and its movements by seeking emotional expressiveness. Based on the different purpose and aesthetics of dance, the function of the body changed, for no longer was it the ideal of dance to defy gravity and no longer was the ultimate goal the physical encapsulation of controlled emotions. Ausdruckstanz was the dance of expression epitomized by the works of expressionist choreographers such as Rudolf Laban, Oskar Schlemmer, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Jooss during the s cf.

Manning and Benson 30— Jooss latter was a mentor of Bausch at the Folkwang school in Essen, and it is safe to say that she reexplored this tradition of Ausdruckstanz in the late sixties and the seventies Cody Fernandes underscores that the interdependence of the body and society must be re- cognized: In addition to this, by exploring and subverting the expectations and rules of dance, she ironically and playfully comments on the medium of dance itself.

Jones, and Peter Stein Ross. In Hable con ella he included the aforementioned two excerpts from her dance pieces. In addition, the central female character is a young ballet student who has decorated her room with pictures of her idol, Pina Bausch. Apart from these subversive themes and his critical insights into the social construction of norms around gender and sexuality, his penchant for women and their stories is also of interest in this context: When it comes time to write and direct, women attract me much more.

On the other hand, women have more facets, they seem more like protagonist types. Willoquet-Maricondi x The film begins where Todo sobre mi madre ended: Two women in a coma, who, despite their apparent passivity, provoke the same solace, the same tension, passion, jealousy, desire and disillusion in men as if they were upright, eyes wide open and talking a mile a minute.

Press Book 13 The performances of these two pieces are an integral part of the plot development, as they enable the encounter of the protagonists. Moreover, the dance segments frame the film and thus function as a poetic symbol for the themes of love, loss, communication, and friendship. Finally, they represent performativity and the act of watching, and both are clearly an important part of life and become prominent themes in their own right. The atmosphere is one of chaotic loss. In the play there is no explanation for the state in which the women appear on stage — it is described only through portrayal.

The accompanying music of this sequence underlines the sense of disorientation and sadness. During the dance sequence, the camera cuts twice very briefly to the auditorium of the theatre and shows two male spectators in medium close-up. The second time, we realize that one of them Marco is weeping, moved to tears by emotion. After this dance sequence lasting about three minutes, the camera cuts to a shot in a hospital room, as is soon apparent from the blue nurse uniform the younger man of the two Benigno is wearing.

He tells Alicia, a patient not visible in the frame, that the performance he witnessed was so beautiful that this man cried. Masurca Fogo, the second piece incorporated into this film, was created for the Expo 98 in Lisbon and uses Portuguese fado, tango, samba, jazz, and pop songs. Apart from the appealing music, the inclusion of dialogues, film projections, outlandish costumes, and other visual effects and gags make for a stunning production, which enjoyed rave reviews in a recent tour in North America Citron.

The excerpt from Masurca Fogo that we see near the end of Hable con ella opens with a midrange shot of the stage: All the while the woman breathes into a seventies style microphone, and her amplified sighs are a strange, disparate sound accompanied by k. After being lifted to an extreme elevated and open position with arms stretched out to the side, she lets herself fall down in the waiting net of arms of the male dancers.

The camera zooms in on the female dancer, tracking her movement and revealing her safe landing only at that very moment. Again, the theme of the song is that of loss, of alienation and sudden disillusionment, and the song enhances the emotion of mourning. The very last dance sequence shows an organized and oddly stylized pair dance, in which only a small sway of the hip and the lush stage setting of a bucolic idyll hints at its erotic nature.

Yet it is unmistakably a sexually charged atmosphere. Choosing this idyllic scene for the end of the film corresponds with the miraculous recovery of Alicia, the young dancer, and the allusion to the blossoming romance between her and Marco. Thus their physicality and bodies are placed in the foreground and remain so later, as they both become immobilized in comas. Yet they seem to seek out that game, perpetuating it to the point of exhaustion. Her representation of gender relations has been commented on by numerous critics as depiction of the sadomasochistic terms of heterosexual power relations Cody It follows that the emotional range from joyfulness to obsession, from exuberance and pleasure to pain, desperation, and frustration is portrayed by both women and men in her dance theatre.