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2009 Imagined Cinemas: Europe, Identity, the Transnational and Postnational in European Cinema John Arrington Woodward

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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

IMAGINED CINEMAS: EUROPE, IDENTITY, THE TRANSNATIONAL AND

POSTNATIONAL IN EUROPEAN CINEMA

By

JOHN ARRINGTON WOODWARD

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2009

The members of the Committee approve the Dissertation of John Arrington Woodward defended on April 3, 2009.

______William Cloonan Professor Co-Directing Dissertation

______Mark Garrett Cooper Professor Co-Directing Dissertation

______Stanley Gontarski University Representative

______Birgit Maier-Katkin, Committee Member

Approved:

______Nancy Bradley Warren, Chair, Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities

______Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii

Pour Virginie

L’oiseau que fut mon Premier Amour Et qui chante encore comme au premier jour… --Verlaine

et Eléa

Viens, ô toi que j’adore, Ton pas est plus joyeux Que les vents des cieux ; Viens, les yeux d’aurore Sont divins, mais tes yeux Me regardent mieux. --Hugo

et Tess

On dit que ce brillant soleil N’est qu’un jouet de ta puissance ; Que sous tes pieds il se balance Comme une lampe de vermeil. --Lamartine

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No work is created from a vacuum; and this one is no exception. I would like to thank Mark Cooper for his unending patience, assistance, support, and willingness to put up with what I am sure were my many wild ramblings, asides, digressions, and so forth. I would also like to thank him for sparking my interest in Film Studies and allowing me to explore many of its intricate facets under his guidance and forbearance. There are also many others involved in such a collaborative undertaking, colleagues and fellow students especially. Of these I would like to mention Susan Ingram for her encouragement, interest, and for reading early versions of each of the chapters; Bill Cloonan for his unending support and friendship in the most trying of times (may your garden grow for all eternity!); and my many current colleagues in the Modern Languages and Linguistics department, as well as the many who have moved on to different, if not greener, pastures. Finally, this would not have been possible were it not for the help, encouragement and love of my one true love, Virginie: “All the promises we make, from the cradle to the grave, and all I want is you…”

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... vii

1. Introduction: What is Europe?...... 1

Europeans and Others: Various Forms of Colonization ...... 4 Christianity, Revolution, Europe: the Borders of Europe...... 9 European Cinema: A Methodological Overview...... 16

2. Chapter 1: The History of European Cinema and the Public Sphere ...... 22

A Brief History of (Trans)National Cinema Production in Europe...... 22 The Bourgeois Public Sphere, Nationalism, and the Early European Cinema...... 29 The Public Spheres of Production...... 38 Conclusion: Postnational Europe and Etienne Balibar ...... 44

3. Chapter 2: Towards a Theory of the Cinematic Borders of Europe: Intersubjectivity, the Public Sphere, and the Cinema...... 53

Towards a Theory of Borders ...... 55 European Cinema and the Borders of Europe...... 63 Fictive Ethnicities in European Cinema ...... 74 “Hors Texte”: Unity, Homogeneity, Continuity and Haneke’s Cinema ...... 81

4. Chapter 3: Gaps between the Present and the Past: The Interstitial History of Europe ...... 91

Case Study 1: The American Friend: The Political Modern Subject and History...... 93 Case Study 2: Run Lola Run: Performative or Instrumental History? ...... 107 Case Study 3: Caché: Problematic on Film ...... 114 Conclusion ...... 119

5. Chapter 4: Family—Individualization, the Past, and Transnational Class ...... 122

v

Political Modernism and the Tensions of Individualism, Family and the State ...... 122 New Representations of the Family in the Age of Individualization and Globalization...... 130 Case Study 1 ...... 130 Case Study 2 ...... 134 Case Study 3 ...... 138 A Critical Mode of the Family in Crisis (a Problematic) rather than as Crisis...... 140 Case Study 1 ...... 141 Case Study 2 ...... 145 Urbanization, Globalization, Transnational Reach and the (Bourgeois) Family of Ideality...... 147

6. Chapter 5: (Dis)Integrating Space: Urbanity, Speed, Alienation and Immigration ...... 153 Urbanity and Speed ...... 154 I. Chronotopes...... 154 II. Integral Cityscapes, Disintegrated Cityscapes, and the Marginalized...... 160 III. Speed, Urbanity and Second Modern Society ...... 165 Alienation, Immigration, Hybridity, Ethics—Fatih Akin and Michael Haneke ...... 169 Conclusion ...... 178

NOTES ...... 181

REFERENCES ...... 199

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 204

vi ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the concurrent development of the European Cinema and the European public sphere. This dissertation focuses on delineating a mainstream European Cinema as addressing a specific ‘European subjectivity’ rather than a purely ‘national subject.’ I track this mode of address through the linking of ‘old Europe’ and an aesthetic mode of filmmaking in early narrative cinema, tying this to the legitimating functions of the bourgeois public sphere that were subsumed into the public spheres of production. This connection allowed cinema to legitimate itself as an art form, and also established a certain subject position for the art house film. I then examine films from Fatih Akin and other directors to show the points of interface between the specifically ‘European’ public sphere and the mainstream European cinema. This allows me to outline the formation of borders for Europe that are, in many ways, the reflection of internal, social, political and cultural borders to the periphery. At the same time I identify particular cinematic strategies in the films of Laurent Cantet, Michael Haneke and other European filmmakers that go against a mainstream representation by both questioning the concept of an idealized European subjectivity and opening gaps in the supposed historical and cultural continuity of Europe.

vii INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS EUROPE?

Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong, [it is] a geographical concept. Bismark Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is Europe, it is the whole of Europe that will decide the fate of the world. de Gaulle

General divisions and deep tensions between the possible and the real, the idealistic and the realistic, the European and the national, divisions that have long and complex histories, continue in the politics, literature, and culture of contemporary Europe. These discourses crystallize in, inform and even determine European films. Is there a Europe? Is there a collective identity formation (or identification)? A European? Or is Europe always to be reduced to a set of differential identities (or identifications)? There is a certain ‘Realpolitik’ in contemporary Europe that supplants older pragmatic disavowals of Europe—i.e. Europe exists as an economic and political force. But, what does that mean for the cinema and European identity? In the following brief foray into the complexity of European history and socio-economic development I will pull out the contradictions in these discourses more than the correspondences. This introduction is intended to speak to the very contradictions and paradoxes that are Europe and that inform European identity, and to point out the manner in which Europeans have traditionally formulated a conception of self—contradictions are then inevitable. My general argument is that European Cinema is European in the manner in which it represents, or bildet nach to use Christian von Ehrenfels’s terminology meaning to copy, replicate or emulate, the European public sphere to itself; and it does this as a continuation of traditional Nachbildung of centuries past. It is therefore, in my opinion, part of a long and continuing discourse on what it means to be European, though one rooted in the visualization and realization of the public sphere to itself, Europe as a giving visuality, and as one projected onto the screens of the nation-state as well as those neighboring screens. It is, indeed, a Nachbildung of the projection and consumption of identity in the public sphere itself, and thus more profoundly effective.

1 The parallel, paradoxical discourse on European identity has certainly been a part of European society for longer than the period of the 1990s, what is known in German Cinema as the postwall period, as the two epigrams above from two essentially nationalistic European leaders suggest. They indicate very different and yet prescient understandings of what Europe means to the world today—it is and yet it is not. Perhaps these contradictions are less epochal than epistemological. Bismark, scribbling his note in the margin of a letter from the Russian chancellor, shows himself always the pragmatist with the profound view that Europe is, as de Gaulle himself would say in a much different context, a ‘Europe of nations,’ distinct, sovereign entities with partially conflicting ideologies—and perhaps a unified desire to quell the Bolsheviks. He is also in the very real political position of being able to deny the assumption of a unified Europe, faced with a weakened French government, a distant British threat, and the absolute disintegration of ‘internal’ resistance to the Prussian bureaucracy.1 Moreover, the conditions warranting this statement on the part of Bismark, while reflecting his larger approach to world politics (the art of the possible) are themselves telling. Bismark’s is a private thought, a momentary inclination and immediate response to the content of a diplomatic letter. There is no Europe, he says, as though it were an unmediated exclamation; there is no single and unified entity that can set itself in opposition, as a state would do, to the east. But what is the driving force behind the assertion? Simply the denial of this assumption foregrounds the assumption itself, the very similarity, politically, socially, economically, culturally, which delineated and homogenized the Europeans for the rest of the world. This is the cry of the colonizing tribes, asserting continually that they are not a homogenous whole in the face of the homogenous whole they see. The denial is the secret confirmation of this state of similarity. And for a politician as adroit as Bismark, the homogeneity pressed upon the world by cultural imperialists would be a definite mistake in the face of the global political pressures of the late 19th century. For de Gaulle, the political thrust of his post-war presidency was radically different. His confirmation of the positive political power of the Europeans is at the very foundation of the contemporary European Union. Separated by a century of war and politics, for de Gaulle pan- European peace is possible, the process of real political and economic unification has begun; of course, Jean Monnet, one of the founders of the European Community, would later offer the caveat: “we should not create a nation Europe instead of a nation France.”2 Bismark’s Germany

2 is defeated, radically changed in the process, splintered, and, strangely, lionized in the post- WWII political economy—not so strangely if one considers West Germany the ‘hero’ of the liberalizing political system of the west, a shining example to the east. The horse of the European economic cart is post-war Germany, a position that it has held now for some decades; this continues to be largely true with a GDP of some 2.13 billion euro, almost 22% of the European GDP. Yet, there is an unrealized dialectic within the thought of de Gaulle, the man too simple for politics. Because, for de Gaulle, Europe is above all a Europe of nations. It is a composite wherein compromise and treaty work is meant to lay the ground for a future free of transnational political violence, an openly interdependent future. Thus, de Gaulle seems to see Europe as demarcated by its place amongst continents and, importantly, defined by the interrelationship within its broad borders between the nations that once composed some of the most powerful empires in the history of the world—indeed created much of the history of the world. It should also be remembered that he is speaking in a period of colonization, an historical remnant of that great period that cemented all intellectual and political relationships within Europe, namely the Enlightenment. In fact, the colonial conflicts of the 18th and 19th centuries were defining moments in European history, representing a primal change that occurred in politics, where wars were fought not simply over continental European land, people or political ideology, but over the far reaching colonies and the property of those European kingdoms involved, i.e. the other. In what follows I aim to correct a lack I perceive in recent works on European cinema, namely a reluctance to engage specific, essential philosophical questions of European identity. Ian Aitkin’s article “Current Problems in the Study of European Cinema and the Role of Questions on Cultural Identity,” is typical of work on European identity in Cinema which presents philosophical considerations of identity in the global context then privileges parallels between national historical events and their allegorical appearances in ‘national films’ without explaining the transnational appeal of such allegories.3 I also depart from a procedure common in language departments in US universities, which involves searching for new ways of composing national cinemas in the face of transnational flows.4 At the same time, I am not content to consider the development of identity apart from its Nachbildung by cinema as a public sphere. Europe is filled with contradictions; the only manner of approaching identity formation in Europe, then, is by incorporating these contradictions in our logic. I focus on the development of European contradictions by cinema with particular attention to what I see as two starkly

3 different ways of bringing the long discursive history of Europe into the present: one smoothes over and updates the contradictions of the bourgeois public sphere; the other exacerbates them and identifies the new European project with their supersession.

EUROPEANS AND OTHERS—VARIOUS FORMS OF COLONIZATION European Colonialism was a period in which Europe recognized itself, laid claim to itself, as economically whole—indeed, as the social, cultural and economic masters of the rest of the world.5 It is in this history that we can begin to see the development of a modern moral universalism and what Tzetzan Todorov calls axiological globalism. These logical categorizations of the ‘rest of the world,’ as Shohat and Stam suggest, continue to inform European cinematic narratives.6 The spirit of Europe haunts the postcolonial, though we know not what Europe is. But more importantly they allow us to see the manner in which Europe developed an early concept of itself in reference to the rest of the world. As I suggested above, Charles de Gaulle saw postwar Europe as determined by new and strengthening transnational connections. E. J. Hobsbawm suggests that the transnational connections to which de Gaulle alludes are already present in nineteenth century proto- revolutionary political discourse. Indeed, Hobsbawm refers to Alexis de Tocqueville’s statement to the Chamber of Deputies in 1848 as a seminal moment, which “express[ed] sentiments which most Europeans shared” (Age of Capital, 9). Alexis de Tocqueville, in making his statement, offers a warning to what Hobsbawm would call the superstructure about the need to stabilize the base, curb the revolutionary tendencies in the proletariat across Europe. This newly awakened awareness within the French superstructure is reflected across the continent, an awareness of common interest in the oppression of revolutionary interests. A similar and inverted realization, this time of the demise of the ‘real, existing socialism’ in the East, signaled the full completion, the eschatology of Cold War capitalism made real, of Europe as a collective identity, a common people reunited across the scars of the past—Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! is an example of the importance of this shift. As Hobsbawm also points out, the rise of the colonial / ‘imperial’ America in the nineteenth century with the instatement of the Monroe Doctrine, which condemned any further actions by ‘European powers’ in the western hemisphere, further isolated Europe unto itself.7

4 The picture that Hobsbawm draws for this period, including a shift into a new mode, ‘imperialism,’ is one of Europe and the major world powers as bureaucratic administrators of the world’s politics, societies and cultures. While Hobsbawm refers to Europe as, essentially, an assemblage of different nation states, it is still largely a unified political entity with a distinct international policy, one which positions itself in opposition to the Russians in the east and the Americans in the west—a third pole of power in the modern, imperialized world. The development of the Welfare state in Europe also demonstrates its position as mediator between capital and labor in the Cold War period, reflected in world history as a mediator between rampant free market capitalism of America and the authoritarian socialism of the Soviets. It is difficult to get beyond the tendency to collectivize the continent through the reduction of political decisions to relationships of contiguity and propinquity—Europeans live in Europe; European cinema is produced in Europe. In order to postulate a deeper relation than simply the tautological, it is necessary to construct the beginnings of a unified social field of reference, a political identity structure that could be looked upon as uniquely ‘European,’ without playing out stereotypes. The differential relationship Tzvetan Todorov draws out between Montaigne and the ‘savages’ of the New World in The Morals of History is pertinent here, and the concepts elucidated by Todorov from the thought of Montaigne lays the groundwork for the imperial tendencies of later European generations.8 Todorov’s thesis pertains to some theoretical questions of ethnography and the representation of the other in contemporary and historical European discourse; but his methodology highlights the ethnocentric viewpoints in both the positive and negative depictions and recitations of other cultures. He portrays Europe as the sociological and cultural determinant for the rest of the ‘known’ world, i.e. the world as it was slowly ‘dis-covered’ and plastically and discursively represented by these very same Europeans—as though the discovery (an act of narrative creation) of the external was really the revelation of the internal. In each encounter and retelling of these encounters, the Europeans carry on conversations with idealized or demonized versions of the other, i.e. they interact with discursive remnants rather than perform in actual intersubjective fashion. It is this approach to the discursively determined other that threatens the European subject; and thus the other is quite firmly marginalized in these exchanges as primitive and childlike. The non-European other becomes the salubrious return of the repressed for

5 Europe, in the eyes of Montaigne, the reminder of a once ‘primitive’ past. How does this return affect Europe? Todorov examines closely one of Montaigne’s essays in this light. While Montaigne’s essay, “On Coaches,” is often hailed as a shining light of colonialist reason in the drab terror of early colonialism, certainly countering the usual colonial discourse of subjugation, Todorov points out that, at its base, the ethnocentric reality of the European society is in no way transcended. “One cannot help being struck,” writes Todorov, “by the fact that Montaigne seems to vacillate between two positions that at first appear to be contradictory.”9 What Todorov is referring to is a dialectical conflict within Montaigne whose synthesis can only be found in certain ethnocentric assumptions about the relationship between Europe and other communities. Montaigne’s representation is bifurcated in the following manner: the other is primitive and savage (negative) and it is also non-European, primitive and exotic (positive). These two poles exist within each individual caricature of the savage for Montaigne, as they will for Rousseau later. As Todorov points out there are also two theses involved in Montaigne’s conceptualizations: 1) that mankind develops historically according to the model of the individual, through ‘life stages’; 2) that man has moved from a ‘golden age,’ a period naturally closer to the origins of mankind, blissfully ignorant of original sin, so to speak. While Montaigne goes to great pains to portray the native populations as nearer the primal origins of mankind, the so-called ‘golden age,’ it is clearly only in reference to Europe’s own aged state. The premise of his essay is not so much that the natives are naturally more moral, better examples of humanity whom ‘we,’ i.e. the Europeans, should emulate, but that the Europeans have the ‘misfortune’ of being in the latter stages of human development; thus western civilization is always already in the position of intellectual superiority, for better or worse. The best example of this woeful tone in Montaigne, the assumptions that the natives are children and the double bind of Montaigne’s argument for the protection of the natives, can be found in his defense of them when referring to the war with the Spaniards. Todorov points out that Montaigne does clearly defend the autochthonous other in this context, claiming that the Spaniards had the unfair advantage of advanced weaponry, horses, and techniques of modern warfare; however, Montaigne again cannot help but place the natives in the position of terrified children: “The Indians were surprised, he said, at seeing ‘the unexpected

6 arrival of bearded men, different in language, religion, shape and countenance.’ But why don’t the Spaniards experience the same paralyzing effect upon meeting beardless men who, obviously, were just as different in language and religion?”10 For Todorov, Montaigne’s reasoning and representation of the other indicates an “axiological (or ethical) globalism.”11 This concept of axiological globalism seems to differ from universalism in one key respect: globalism, for Todorov, is an act of classification, a transitive action that forces disparate cultures into an artificial relationship of moral subordination to the European subject; in this fashion it is deductive. Thus the subtle and masked ethnocentric nature of Montaigne’s narrative forces the other into a differential relationship to European mores, a more or less unified field of reference, that is preconditioned to support that very same ethical system; the native society becomes an extension, a shadow of a global, European based, ethical / moral system and must conform to it if they wish to be seen as ‘civilized.’ Even in Montaigne’s defense of these cultures, his reasoning indicates this primary quality of the colonizer. With colonization, the European intellectual elite was able to look at itself, through Montaigne’s moral filter, as synchronically superior, confirmed in its ‘higher’ evolutionary plane in a parallel critique, rather than looking into history. History and cultural evolution become a pyramid of struggling civilizations, each trying to reach the top. However, the conditions of this teleological evolution are decided by Europe, those subtly differentiated cultures already at the top of the pile, and thus form a determined path of evolutionary progress. The moral and intellectual history of Europe becomes the ethical, moral and cultural roadmap for all successful civilizations. It is really during this period of colonization that the Europeans can begin to see themselves as uniquely figured in the world, culturally and ethically dominant, bound together by their shared histories and shared processes of cultural evolution. This parent / child relationship is still an aspect of contemporary world politics, theory, and literature, as current postcolonial discussions make clear, though the terms of the interchange may be radically different. Even academia, in all of its supposed leftist liberalism, is not completely free of this implied distinction.12 With Hobsbawm we are given a realpolitik view of the imperial powers and the process of colonization and globalization. With Todorov, however, the mode is moral. Todorov assumes that the push towards colonization was political and economic, much as Hobsbawm suggests, but that there is a crucial, colonial moral code, a moral framework which makes the process

7 palatable to western society, to European society as a whole. Both, however, demonstrate to some extent the extension of a pre-concept of Europe as a cultural whole. And the combination of both suggests the European interweaving of economic (or ‘amoral’) and ethical reality. Hobsbawm mentions the role of colonialism in imperialist countries in a more favorable light. That is to say, he sees positive aspects of the relationship between the intellectual and artistic elite in nineteenth century Europe and the autochthonous other. Hobsbawm admits that the economy and business interests of the west have no such consideration for the colonized: “non-Europeans and their societies were increasingly, and generally, treated as inferior, undesirable, feeble and backward, even infantile.”13 Todorov disproves that this was necessarily a discourse limited to the nineteenth century; however, the progressive drive of the economic imperialist societies forwarded this tendency into the mainstream in order to make the exploitation of these societies more palatable and even desirable to the investors. Hobsbawm and Todorov offer evidence of two complimentary and substantive discourses that inform and determine Europe: Hobsbawm, that Europe is a collective system of political, economic and social administration, rationalizing the world order in the nineteenth century; Todorov, that Europe is a collective moral concept, i.e. Europe as the ‘parents’ of the world. We can continue to see what was once called exploitation in Ulrich Beck’s approach to cosmopolitanism in his “Cosmopolitan Manifesto.” Here the power of consumption can shift world economic policy—and of course fair trade movements in the United States and Europe also work on the same principals. Spivak writes in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” that the very desire to give voice to the other adumbrates the continuing processes of physical and discursive oppression.14 The implicit relationship between twentieth century bohemianism and ‘primitive’ art negates any aesthetic redemption and mainstream acceptance of the other. This primitive art is taken up as a commodified resistance to the axiological globalism inherent in mainstream, economically driven, European society. Thus, the other cultures are not taken on their own conditions, are decontextualized in the act of appropriation, and are used to yield specifically non-ethical meaning, always in inherent relation to European mores. Indeed, when this art of the natives was commodified—just as the natives themselves went on display in Paris (e.g. Saartjie Baartman) and became embodiments of Gesamtkunstwerke, artifacts of the other and other cultures—the sacral nature inherent in much of the art was eliminated, reified, or objectified. The shift from

8 axiological globalism to universalism, and even relativism, entails or at least goes hand in hand with the commodification of other, non-European cultures. And this shift also takes place in a differential mode, distinguishing European society continually from the (largely homogenized) cultural periphery.

CHRISTIANITY, REVOLUTION, EUROPE—THE BORDERS OF EUROPE Outside of the economic unity and identifications forged by colonialism, and to some large extent subtending them, there is the unity of religious discourse in Europe, a unity of theme that has existed since the 6th century conversion of much of Europe to Christianity. This unity is still a large aspect of a mainstream discourse on European identity and can be seen informing powerful cultural assumptions in European films such as Christian Carrion’s Joyeux Noël (2005). Indeed, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel said in 2005 that “democracy is unthinkable without Christian values.”15 Christianity is certainly now and has traditionally been one of the foundational discourses on Europe, as can be seen in Novalis’s essay fragment Die Christenheit oder Europe. It is necessary to reconstruct this transnational potential in its historical context—an ideological moment that, as we have seen, is not at all unique to our contemporary world struggling with ‘globalization.’ And, in order to more completely compose such a history it is absolutely necessary to approach the Christian and Catholic roots of European transnationalism. In 1799, Friedrich von Hardenberg, also known as the German Romantic poet Novalis, composed the following lines: Es waren schöne, glänzende Zeiten, wo Europa ein christliches Land war, wo eine Christenheit dieses menschlich gestalteten Weltteil bewohnte; ein großes gemeinschaftliches Interesse verband die entlegensten Provinzen dieses weiten geistlichen Reichs.—Ohne große weltliche Besitztümer lenkte und vereinigte ein Oberhaupt die großen politischen Kräfte.—Eine zahlreiche Zunft, zu der jedermann den Zutritt hatte, stand unmittelbar unter demselben und vollführte seine Winke und strebte mit Eifer, seine wohltätige Macht zu befestigen. Jedes Glied dieser Gesellschaft wurde allenthalben geehrt, und wenn gemeinen Leute Trost oder Hilfe, Schutz oder Rat bei ihm suchten und gerne dafür seine mannigfaltigen Bedürfnisse

9 reichlich versorgten, so fand es auch bei den Mächtigeren Schutz, Ansehn und Gehör, und alle pflegten diese auserwählten, mit wunderbaren Kräften ausgerüsteten Männer wie Kinder des Himmels, deren Gegenwart und Zuneigung mannigfachen Segen verbreitete.16 Novalis here positions Europe as a desideratum of the past, a wished for and almost utopian world, ruled by the father figure of the pope, and unanimously supported by the structures of the church. As with Montaigne, this critique is oriented inwardly. However, Novalis locates this Christian utopia, the progenitor of the ethical system on which Montaigne relies, in the darkest past, the European Middle Ages, and not in the differential relationship to the other. This is a revealing moment for a Europe that has been splintered, divided and in tumult since the protestant revolution. The history of Protestantism, for Novalis, is a particularly bloody one. Outside of the obvious system of desire and history that will later help to structure the Romantic movement in Germany and England, Novalis’ text highlights a distinct understanding of the nature of Europe, i.e. a Christian community united under the pope and the Catholic Church, and whose security comes, for Novalis, not from a supposed political stability in Europe due to this social structure, but rather from a spiritual coherence and longing, a search for the religious and spiritual in the world through the magical motions of symbolic acts. Novalis, a Christian mystic, who also spoke in other places of a pantheistic view of religiosity, is here expressing a longing for a social tension between the everyday, economic world and the protected, mystic world of the church, the monasteries, the religious centers. It is, in some sense, the longing to return to an intimate world that is shared in its intimacy, even if rather disparate on a communal and intersubjective level. Of course, that time to which Novalis wishes to return is a mystical structure, a confabulation of his own internal desires for familial stability, the archetypal return of the murdered father, the reclaiming of the dead mother. It is a wish that can never be fulfilled. And yet, when it is cast onto the map of his world, formulating a particular understanding of Europe, it resonates—all the more so in our contemporary world that is struggling to realize the secularized version of his desires. Though this text is more than two hundred years old, reflecting a proto-romantic mode of thought that is derived from and parallels the work of Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and other romantic philosophers, it is particularly resonant even in today’s Europe. Recent discourses over

10 the structuring, language and ratification of the Constitution of Europe are evidence of this movement; especially the international (intra-European) attempt to have language that concretizes the roots of Europe in early Christian society.17 It thus seems unavoidable to discuss the relationship between Christianity and Europe when plumbing the origins of the imaginary continent, origins that have for a long time been said to exist in an almost mythic Christian past à la Novalis, and origins that, by the time Novalis composes his tract, have been concretized in European society by the discovery of mankind’s ‘evolutionary past’ still existing in the new world. The discourse over origins, or what one might call the diachronic discourse, can be divided into the teleological, the historical and the etiological. The historical and the etiological will hold for later discussion. In the teleological category, one could place the claims of the Vatican, especially those in such positions as Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens. The language of such claims strongly suggests that there is a transhistorical connection between the Catholic Church, or at its most reductive Christianity, and the establishment of ‘Europe’ as it is thought of today, i.e. as a cultural descriptor. The beginning of this process could be said to derive from Charlemagne’s ‘rebirth’ of the Roman Empire (Carolingian Renaissance) in the west in the ninth century, and the close ties made between political empire and religious empire that continued through to the nineteenth century. The political and historical reality of such connections aside, however, the teleological discourse sees this historical reality as partitive action, i.e. incomplete. When H. B. Christodoulos, Archbishop of Athens and all Greece, says that “the European Union exists, it did not wait for this day and for our concerns so that it could be born...,”18 he is framing an innate cultural connection between the states of Europe, a connection that is founded in and constructed from Catholic Christianity; he is suggesting that this Union is the final stage in a process that has been developing and moving along for almost two thousand years. There is a sense of the inevitable in such claims. The Christian Church, however, is not the only political entity employing this teleological language when discussing the Union. Indeed, the politicians of the Union themselves tend to revert to this form when ‘advertising’ for the potential and historical inevitability of the Union. Contemporary popular political discourse tends to incorporate the historical reality of the pre- established economic ties between these communities that have existed for centuries, and the definite economic interests of industry and corporations in Europe for the concretization of the

11 Union. This discourse does not tend to deal with realpolitik or even questions of defense, nor with the transnational political ties formed between national parties that help to further transnational corporate and political interests. Instead, more often than not, pro-Union parties and politicians reiterate the possibility of a disparate and diverse European identity and the ability the Union has to redistribute money to smaller communities for the preservation of an innate, autochthonous and normative cultural identity. Minor European ethnicities, e.g. the Sorbs in Germany, receive funding from the state and the EU to further the use and study of the language, the preservation of the culture and a cultural identity. The European Framework Convention for the Protection of Minorities, which entered into force in 1998, provides legal protection against discrimination for minority groups such as the Sorbs, German Danish and Roma in Germany and other European countries, indeed any ‘national minority’ (though it does not apply to Gastarbeiter), by “promot[ing] the conditions necessary for persons belonging to national minorities to maintain and develop their culture, and to preserve the essential elements of their identity…”19 While such language is weighted towards ‘preservation’ and not ‘celebration’ or restructuring the cultural subdominant or subaltern as the dominant, or even validation, it is indeed indicative of the overall ethical- cultural framework of the Union. In his The Fragile Absolute as elsewhere Žižek postulates that the racialization of European society, the normative pressures of the mainstream and, specifically, the economic pressures of the Union itself, especially on the level of economic subsidies, work to pressure smaller nations into a subservient role within the world market and cultural field.20 The ‘proletariat’ has even been racialized in mainstream Europe (e.g. the Poles). The common lament throughout the more developed, founding members of the EU is that the influx of Eastern European workers into the western economy stagnates unemployment figures and causes jobs to go to non-citizens. The Netherlands is currently considering restrictive legislation that will limit the number of Eastern European workers issued work permits per year.21 While this demonstrates the continuing autonomy of the nations within the Union for economic self- determination it is also representative of larger fears throughout the Union, racialized fears of the Eastern European other. Here is what Žižek has to say on this matter: “there is ‘reflexive’ Politically Correct racism; the multiculturalist perception of the Balkans as the terrain of ethnic horrors and

12 intolerance, of primitive irrational warring passions, to be opposed to the post-nation-state liberal-democratic process of solving conflicts through rational negotiation, compromise and mutual respect. Here racism is, as it were, elevated to the second power: it is attributed to the Other, while we occupy the convenient position of a neutral benevolent observer, righteously dismayed at the horrors going on ‘down there’. [...] Finally, there is the reverse racism which celebrates the exotic authenticity of the Balkan Other, as in the notion of the Serbs who, in contrast to inhibited, anaemic Western Europeans, still exhibit a prodigious lust for life—this last form of racism plays a crucial role in the success of Emir Kusturica’s films in the West.”22 The quoted material above represents Žižek’s secondary and tertiary extensions of racist ideology. The first level is the more conventionally recognized level of hatred and absolute “unabashed rejection of the Balkan Other...”23 The second level, then, that which Žižek refers to as racism “to the second power” is foundational to the first—at least in many cases. It becomes the rational explanation for the “unabashed rejection” of the Balkans. Surprisingly, Žižek does not remark on the prevalent term ‘balkanization’ (German: Balkanisierung; French: balcanisation; Italian: balcanizzare; etc), to indicate the (largely negative) division of a nation into smaller regions and communities which are usually hostile to one another. This entails representing the Balkans as the historical effluence of a failed moment in nation-planning and less of a naturally determined cultural or racial identity. The interdependence of the primary and the secondary forms of racism is rather obvious. It is, however, a largely different matter to discuss the exoticizing of the Balkan Other by the west as an extension of the rejection of that Other. That is not to suggest that exoticism is not a form of racism, uniquely tied to the project of colonialization. Indeed, Shohat and Stam’s work suggests the opposite. For Shohat and Stam the ‘Eurocentric’ camera was bound to the project of empire and “the ‘spatially-mobilized visuality’ of the I/eye of empire spiraled outward around the globe, creating visceral, kinetic sense of imperial travel and conquest, transforming European spectators into armchair conquistadors…”24 And, as I mentioned above, the evidence presented by Hobsbawm that the west actually subsumed ideals of the other within its mainframe ideological structure can easily be converted to the consumption of the other culture purely on the grounds of consumer ideology and psychology rather than actual communicative exchange. The consumption of another culture through travel, food, and raw cultural products (products that are really made specifically for consumption in the West), is the byproduct of nineteenth

13 century instrumental reason and instrumental action and is bound up with colonialism. The exotic culture is capitalized, and this capitalization plays into the cultural power structures in the west. Thus exoticism is one more method of colonization, this time driven purely by the desire of consumption and the free market. However, Kusturica’s success in the west is perhaps not the best example of this exoticism. Indeed, his films, specifically Underground and While My Father Was Away on Business, tend to reflect a European education and understanding of film aesthetics. They are tailor made for European art houses. A better way of approaching this exoticism of the ‘east’ is to look at the border films from western European cinemas, e.g. Im Juli (In July [2003] ). In Akin’s film the exotic and untamed / untamable quality of the Eastern European countries becomes an aspect of the emotional self-education of the main character, reaffirms his beliefs in love, wonder, and the stability of Western society. The beauty of Im Juli, directed by Turkish- German Fatih Akin, is that Turkey is the point of synthesis for the narrative; the final moment of realization happens in a stable, modern, and beautiful Turkish society. Turkey, still negotiating its move into the EU, is shown by Akin as more stable, modern, efficient and humanized than some of those countries that are already part of the EU. The questions over ‘human rights issues’ often cited by EU politicians are inverted, and those questions are turned on the EU itself.25 So, for Akin, Eastern Europe is a foil on which to play off his subtle elevation and filmic modernization / demystification of Turkish society—Turkey is more European than the Eastern Europeans themselves! Thus this exoticism can work to expose a certain primitive quality, a quality that is often attached to, entwined with and inextricable from the very concept of exoticism.26 And this primitivism can be worked into a positive viewpoint on the object society or a negative viewpoint, and even both at the same time. For Akin, after all, it is within the ‘primitive’ setting, a border region on the very edges of modernity itself, that Daniel (played affectively by Moritz Bleibtreu of Lola rennt fame) comes to understand himself—but only after experiencing the negative, anti-modern aspects of this ‘wild east’. They are only proved negative within a certain ideological framework. The Eastern Europeans in Im Juli are, above all, free from the common restraints of capital because they exist in a nether region of pre-capital, where the ultimate expression of capital, i.e. the monetary unit, has little value.

14 Though it may seem contradictory for Žižek to cling to some idealized form of Christianity in the face of such racialization, and especially given the religious history of his own nation, such a move is valid for a moral absolutist on his level. This is due to the nature of his two main critical matrices, Marxism and Lacanianism. Žižek is intent on fighting globalization, an admittedly loosing battle. Given the lost cause, he desires to shift the fight to the monolithic hegemony that he sees rapidly coming to power. Thus the new mode of seeing Europe as a ‘necessary evil, a second pole of power in the global hegemony...’ But we must speak of ideologies in the plural, rather than a pan-theistic ideology in the vein of Žižek.27 We can also not conflate all media into the Ideological State Apparatus. This abandons the functional reality in cinema of the profit motive and the ritualistic nature of cinema going. The functional, performative nature of cinema going, of movie production and distribution is why I feel that the cinema is a cognitive map (to use Jameson’s terminology) of the development of European identity(ies). It is the continuation of this deep discourse on Europe, one which brings forward the paradoxes inherent in such identity formulation in a manner that either recuperates them or leaves them exposed. This can be viewed as the ethical, the deontological (dealing with one’s ‘duty’), or cultural eidos —but its representation, complete with the contortions and contradictions inherent in narrative, may point to the politico-social unconscious and allow us to see eidetically the spirit of Europe through the pragmatic lens of criticism. To say that movies ‘bilden nach’ the public to itself, is not to say they copy a homogeneous unity, but rather to say that they highlight the basic contradictions that compose a society, and, more precisely, that they engage the historical imaginary of a society as an eidos or ‘form’. I do not see films as mimetic windows onto a certain world as it really is, but onto a world as it is perceived. European cinema is a window, then, onto Europe’s eidos, which it at the same time determines in a dialectical fashion. Europe sees itself on the screen not as a singular identity, but as manifold. While often this apparent plurality belies a shockingly homogeneous worldview—an updated bourgeois historical imaginary—sometimes its contradictions splinter in ways productive of more fundamental reflections on possible change, or certainly on the continuing and fractious presence of those smoothed-over contradictions.

15 EUROPEAN CINEMA—A METHODOLOGICAL OVERVIEW As to the relative strength of the European cinema, much has been written. According to many, its shining moments are to be found in the small budget, ‘personal’ films, films which have little chance of being made inside the large network of studios and distribution that is American cinema. Wendy Everett has long commented on the overall vibrancy of European cinema. Her early work, and that of other scholars such as Ian Aitkin, Duncan Petrie and David Gilespie, written shortly after the end of Communism, offers a contrast to the general fears which arose around the growing centralization of European cinema production following the fall of the Wall.28 For German Cinema, the term ‘postwall cinema’ is gradually being worked through as shorthand for a transnational or ‘cosmopolitan’ cinema.29 However, in line with another perspective, and complicating matters Randall Halle writes: “In considering transnational cinema, one cannot ignore the question of national cinema.”30 It is, indeed, this essential difficulty which informs part of this dissertation. The film industry is an excellent resource for viewing Europe as bound together by a common interest and common culture.31 However, this is not a dissertation on the film industry as much as one on the discursive and cultural origins of films, which, taken as a whole or individually, present a certain concrete and at times doxatic view of Europe as a unified cultural and economic field. Indeed, Luisa Rivi has already in my view established the existence of a specifically new pan-European cinema from the points of view of production and distribution.32 My interest is in probing the social, ethical and moral relationships between the development of the European consciousness and the European cinema. In other words, how does the European cinema portray Europe and its citizens? The first chapter is by far the most historical of what follows. In that chapter I present the development of cinema in Europe, both in contrast to Hollywood and in its own right. One of the unifying discourses at the root of the European film industry is the conflict with Hollywood and early American distribution. As Marc Silberman says of the early period of conflict between America and Europe, “after it had conquered the international market in the mid-1920s, the [American] studios were even more aggressive in buying or co-opting talent from Europe. Thus the American cinema represents not so much the Other but rather a successful integration of its own cultural ‘others’ into a new amalgam.”33 A unifying transnational principle against America was not vocalized nor actively pursued as such. Indeed, for the most part, early distribution with

16 its monopolizing tendencies was, at its heart, completely mindless and rapacious rather than cognitively cultural. The Pathé Brothers ruled distribution and German companies fought as much or more against them (sometimes with American capital) as with them. However, this struggle did generate an essentially different understanding of the medium between the two markets, as Silberman says: “While the European proponents consider the cinema to be an artistic medium with claims to the same kind of government support and protection accorded to literature, theater, opera, museums and historical architecture, their American adversaries insist on film as a commodity that moves within market structures of investment and amortization.”34 This process slowly developed into national protectionism during the two wars—though, as many scholars have pointed out, such protectionism was less realistic than idealistic. On the level of production and production funds, the early European system was very much a transnational one, bringing together French, Italians, Germans, Danes and so forth into one collective, money-generating process. In this confluence of capital, the focal point was the transnational narrative, that discursive point at which the Europeans could engage with the narrative in all of its bourgeois trappings. The grand narrative film seemed to have one function, which was specifically alluded to by Pathé, i.e. to attract a middle-class clientele, and attract them not with slapstick but with national and international literature and drama reflected onto the screen.35 It must be pointed out that the centers of all of this action are Berlin, Paris, London and other modern cultural capitals in Europe. This is partly due to a lack of historical materials and data, a lack which some film historians are in the process of filling in.36 However, the tradition is to associate modernity with the city, going as far back as Georg Simmel in Germany and his sociological musings on the manifold new impulses produced by the visually, aurally, sensorially stimulating modern city.37 Moreover, there is also an obvious strong association between modernity and cinema.38 One of my deep interests in this first chapter is to work to revisit the notion of transnational cinema, from the perspective of production, and reiterate that it is not a new and unique feature of post-socialist European cinema. It is the unfortunate tendency in some criticism of European films to see the hand of MEDIA, the grant-making branch of the European Union for cinema and other media, as a moderating and debasing one. Such a limited and myopic view of European cinema and its history leads inevitably to the broad-side attacks against recent European cinema as “pudding” (meaning lacking substance or ‘bite’) and the premature

17 conclusions that if something is MEDIA funded it must, almost by definition, be tasteless or ‘pudding.’ Even the Council of Europe has addressed a desire to prevent the production of these ‘Europuddings.’39 It is necessary, in my opinion, to included such films as L’Auberge espagnole and Enemy at the Gates (in spite of their possible ‘pudding quality’) in any discussion of European identity, because each one of these has a hand in playing into the discourse on Europe. The problem that arises for European production, as Angus Finney has suggested, is “the issue of cultural specificity and creative integrity: how can these tenets be upheld when placed next to a project’s financing demands and various partner’s needs? Too often the strength and vision of a project are forced to give way to wider compromises designed to suit the needs of different partners.”40 This fact leads Finney to argue for a co-financing model of production rather than the co- production model currently in place.41 While this may prove to be a difficulty in securing funding, it does not necessarily determine the Europeanness of the narrative generated. For, as Paul Hainsworth suggests, a European cinema would be one that promoted a pan-European identity or consciousness, rather than one that is simply determined by the source of funding.42 This is where I see the function of the European public sphere. As I work out in this first chapter, the European public sphere retains the legitimating functions of the bourgeois public sphere bound up not so much in actual continual iteration of such a sphere, but in the presence of the historical imaginary of such a sphere. In the second chapter I discuss this discourse on Europe as it develops in films which deal with the borders of Europe. Iain Chambers, in his Migrancy, Culture, Identity, suggests that there is an essential instability between the local and the transnational.43 Because of this unstable interplay there is a “need for a mode of thinking that is neither fixed nor stable…”44 The instability and interplay which Chambers sees is similar, yet strikingly different, from the transnational flows of Appadurai.45 One could still imagine this interplay in the sublated internal borders of contemporary Europe; but the transnational flow of immigration in cinematic narratives is undeniable.46 And, following Mark Betz, the transnational (in the form of economic cooperation in Europe) and the corresponding questioning of national identity have been core aspects of European cinema since early postwar films.47 Morever, directors like Akin break free of what Angelika Fenner calls “the static Manichean figure of oppressor and oppressed” which has distinguished much European narrative on minorities in the past.48

18 As Adrian Favell suggests the question of belonging is a determinant one in postnational Europe.49 However, inherent in this notion of belonging is the conterminous one of borders. The question of borders is a central problematic to the universalizing process of the European Union.50 Borders are those things which evaporate in the universalizing discourse on nation, national culture, and ideology, but which reappear in capital and intersubjective communication.51 It is impossible to propose a ‘national cinema’ without proposing at the same time a certain limit or border for such a nationhood.52 While one focus of my dissertation is to loosen these strict borders which continue to haunt discourses on national cinemas, I am also at the same time forced to recognize, along with the films themselves, a certain limit within the cultural and social fields of Europe. This recognition has many forms and, rather than offer a theoretical delimitation, I examine how the cinema approaches the ‘border question’ in all of its contradictory splendor in order to show how the continual presence of the border is constitutive of identities and capitalist social relations in the new Europe. In doing this, many European films are intent on the notion of globalization and the globalized market, what Ulrich Beck has called the “World Risk Society.”53 As Schindler and Koepnick write: “though we have no reason to celebrate the hybridity and multiplicity of globalized identity formations today as an automatic sign of resistance, noncompliance, or emancipation, the global gaze is one for which national, cultural, or ethnic borders no longer provide singular or essential parameters of analysis.”54 And yet, as Laclau’s work suggests, the emancipations offered by the global society are complex and still, even on the cusp of Nussbaum’s moral cosmopolitan universalism, essentially differentiating.55 This obsession over the global society is an obvious reflection of nationalistic tendencies, a reflection which can be seen in the hesitancy to admit Turkey into the Union. It is an ontological hesitancy, one which informs the formation and development of the political sphere; but it is also a hesitancy which raises certain epistemological and deontological issues and concerns—who are we and how do we ‘know’ us? What is the duty of universalism and the universalizing narratives of Europe— how do we perform this dance of safety and risk? Protection and openness? These discourses which inform the public sphere at its very foundations are reflected or, to use Christian von Ehrenfels’s more accurate terminology from his Ästhetik, replicated (nachgebildet) in many ways in European cinema.

19 It is with this interest that I approach, not specifically the development of transnationalism or postnationalism, but the foundational concept of nationalism through the work of Benjamin Anderson. This allows me to look at just how the feelings of nationalism could develop within the public sphere, bound to a public discourse on the European Union and transform into feelings of transnationalism. What is the relationship between the two, and how can one justify any relationship whatsoever, when it is founded on exclusionary principles? How can exclusion take place without actually developing in discourse? Answers of sorts, varied though they may be, are given by several films which I examine: Fatih Akin’s Im Juli, Tom Tykwer’s Der Krieger und die Kaiserin, and Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu. The end result is to highlight the fact that the development of the European public sphere is determined historically by the development of nationalism and national public spheres, thus a process of inclusion/exclusion which is determinant and determined, an unending and yet self-masking dialectic—a fact which different European films use to different substantive effects. Akin’s film juxtaposes the rational west with the wild east and, in so doing, exposes the sometimes nonsensical divisions which continue to engender the European Union; Tykwer’s film suppresses a social message in his film, but highlights a disconnection between an ‘old’ Hollywood and Hollywood style and a new Germany that is, in many ways, more modern and edgy; and Haneke’s film, as with many of his films, exposes the disjointed quality of the bourgeois public sphere in its historicized remnants, pulling at it until it dissolves—not ‘revealing truth’ but the absence thereof. The former two films relate to the idealized nation as imagined community, while the latter explores a certain functional realization of nation in the lives of social actants, and at the same time represents “an imperfect Europe.”56 These first two chapters establish a general methodological framework. The remaining chapters deal more with the material itself through this methodological lens. In these chapters I focus on several films with the intention of linking them to the larger discourse on Europe, the European public sphere, and questions of European identity. The third chapter approaches the history of Europe through the lens of some historically important European films. I look at several films from the perspective of crisis, a crisis which Jan Patočka placed at the center of his phenomenological conception of history.57 From my perspective this crisis is in the problematization of a normative discourse. The fourth chapter deals with representations of the family, especially from the perspective of individualization (as

20 understood by Ulrich Beck), its formulation in seventies cinema and its reformulation in contemporary Europe. In this chapter I note the tendency in non-critical European cinema to move towards a particular form of ideological individualism, that which is seen as self-generated and not related to the real network of relations within which individualism develops as a functional aspect of the social state. The fifth and final chapter approaches the representation of urbanity and the city firstly and then its formulation in narratives dealing with immigration and racial relations. It is, indeed, in the face of this relationship that Europe is currently defining itself. I look mainly at Jeunet’s Amélie, which presents a Paris which is a product of the very desire for the consumption of Paris, and Kassovitz’s La Haine, which presents a split city, divided by the desire for normativity and deeper social forces which isolate populations. Europe is composed of many ideas of itself. There are many personalities in this one giant entity, each vying to be heard, each scrambling to find attention. I examine in the following pages is the manner in which European films address these various personalities, and in the process make and bildet nach the space where Europe thinks itself. In so doing, these films represent Europe as the more or less happy continuation of the bourgeois public sphere. Some, in contrast, critique this public sphere in its assumed universality, and in this way suggest Europe is and should be something else.

21 CHAPTER 1

THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN CINEMA AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

One central principle of my general thesis is that the development of the European Cinema is bound together with the historical development of the European public sphere. Looking at the history of the film industry reveals the oftentimes exasperatingly non-artistic tendencies which are at the root of much film art. In my context, however, it reminds us that film is an industry and develops out of industry—which is not to say that film should only be seen as industry. I suggest that the various historical-cultural confluences which informed and continue to inform early cinema, also engendered the development of a European public sphere. I also argue that the tendency to obsess over the national origination of a film or even an industry is, from the point of view of the industry itself, specious. Movies were not made for the nation, so much as for a community of consumers; though they are perhaps offered up as representative of the national industrial acumen. So in this first chapter I will examine the historical development of the European film industry from both a national and transnational perspective. And though it may seem as though I conflate those two perspectives in what follows, the historical confluences of film capital suggest that early cinematic audiences were not composed of national audiences so much as ‘class’-ed audiences, a class consciousness of sorts, which did not transcend so much as subtend national boundaries and cultural differences.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF (TRANS)NATIONAL CINEMA PRODUCTION IN EUROPE The history of the European Union is to be found, on one level, in shared history (especially on the level of empires—e.g. both Germany and France claim Charlemagne / Karl der Grosse as a national emblem), the propinquity (and contiguity, in many cases) of the nation-states, the social interconnection (immigration); and, on another, in the shared commerce and economics of the European continent. In order for the Union to form as anything other than a simple set of interrelated trade treaties and pan-European economic ties / corporations, the potential for a

22 European identity has to be present as a potential in and of itself. The development of the EU as a political organization is to be found in the massive destruction of World War II, but the development of a potential for interstate identity formation can be seen as going back to pan- European Christian discourse and the centuries-old, shared politics of Europe. In the introduction I sketched two discursive formations for Europe as a cultural concept in the modern (postnational?) world: 1) Europe versus the (post)colonized ‘other’ (literally in the case of the ‘Boxer Revolution,’ against which all major European states fought as one, slandering each other only after the fact) and 2) Europe as a potential expression of second-pole politics in the contemporary political age. Here I map one aspect of globalized capital and economic interests in Europe. I concentrate here briefly on the historical confluence between the ‘national’ cinemas of Europe, the development of ‘nationalized’ cinemas and the importance of film d’art in approaching the European bourgeois public sphere for legitimation. I then use this as a framework for discussing postwar Europe and European identity in the postwar cinema. This leads to two broad conceptions of the transnational in contemporary film criticism: 1) films made with transnational capital, and 2) films that are ‘globalized’ in theme and essence, thus a ‘transnational’ narrative. In order to see the distinction one could look at a recent article on Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), in which Christina Klein describes the transnational cinema as a discursive field filled with aesthetic potential.58 Her use of the concept comes from the field of cultural criticism and sociology that understands transnationalism as an aspect of a globalized culture. For example, Aihwa Ong in Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality has understood the term to refer to “the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space,” demonstrative of ‘globalization.’59 Arjun Appadurai also speaks of globalization as a “series of transnational flows.”60 Thus, for critics who use the term in this manner, often conflating ‘transnational’ with ‘exilic’ cinema, the concept is relatively fluid. On the other side are those who see a transnational cinema as defined by the transnational system of funding, especially that on the level of contemporary Europe. Hester Baer’s and Ryan Long’s recent article on Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2002) is evidence of this train of thought.61 Baer and Long (referring to Žižek ) pose the question as to whether there is an essential relationship between the display of chance onscreen and transnational funding. In such an understanding of the transnational cinema, the cinema itself as an aesthetic object does not

23 necessarily have to have ‘transnational appeal’, but is instead defined by the system of transnational funding that points to the more obvious presence of global capital. This latter is also the vein through which a large portion of the critical discussions of the European cinema flow. Whether the two conceptions of “transnational” are necessarily compatible or incompatible is an open question. That is why it is necessary to reconfigure the discussion to parse-out the relationship between transnational funding and transnational narrative. To begin with we can show how transnational funding and distribution is something that defines the cinema in perhaps unique ways since its inception. Unlike some artistic media, the technological roots of the cinema are perfectly traceable. Firstly, the cinema is by its nature a technological invention, dependent on the creation of photography and the invention (and patenting) of (several) cameras and projectors. Regarding the historical roots of cinema, Jean Mitry suggests “l’histoire du cinéma est incompréhensible si l’on n’envisage pas les conditions économiques, sociales, et industrielles qui ont présidé à son évolution.”62 The relationship between the cinema and the nations of Europe is made ambiguous, however, due to these very same economic, social and industrial conditions. Contemporary films in Europe are rarely made with funding from a single community or nation—they are indeed ‘transnational.’ This is not a situation unique to the present, ‘globalized’ world, though. The early spread of cinema throughout the European continent is due largely to one man, Charles Pathé during the period of the Jahrmarktkino.63 Early on, Pathé was able to secure a distribution monopoly over the European market by working exclusive deals with early theaters, selling projectors and film together, offering special prices, and keeping prices low. In order to cut down on distribution costs, Pathé decided early on to set up production studios in countries outside of France. Thanks to the tireless effort of the multilingual German, Poppert, Pathé opened in 1902 film distribution points in England and Germany; within the following four years Pathé had distribution sites in Austria, Russia, Italy, Spain, America, Belgium, Holland, Hungary, Poland, the Balkans, the Middle-East, and even Singapore and Calcutta.64 The process of this expansion included exclusive distribution rights to Pathé films and oftentimes American films in the cities within which Pathé had offices. Pathé continued to build his monopoly by producing his own cameras, constructing production studios in several other cities throughout Europe, most notably Italy (Film d’Art Italiano), Russia (Pathé-Russe) and London (Pathé-Britannia), attempting to produce his own film stock, and negotiating with the

24 German Agfa for a new and cheaper source of film stock in order to break free of the monopoly established by Eastman-Kodak.65 In 1908 Pathé established the S.C.A.G.L. (La Société Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettre) whose mission it was to increase the interest of the bourgeoisie in the cinema by bringing classical literature and myths to the screen. Pathé was responding in this case to the success of the first Film d’Art production, L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, 1908), which, while not being a box office smash, introduced the cinema to a particular demographic after which cinema makers had been pining for years—the bourgeoisie.66 Albert Capellani, who had just directed Cendrillon (Cinderella 1907) for Pathé, was chosen as artistic director for S.C.A.G.L. and oversaw such film d’art productions as Salome (1908), Guillaume Tell (William Tell, 1908), the four installments of Les Misérables (1911) and the very successful Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre- Dame, 1913).67 The early European cinema period was characterized by the Jahrmarktkino, or “Carnival Cinema,” i.e. by distribution to carnival sites and impermanent theaters and an interest in the technology of the cinema as the focal point for the audience.68 In many cases the technology itself was on display more so than the films. The pan-European spread of carnivals meant that the cinema quickly made it to all parts of Europe, and all parts of Europe saw the same short, narrative films and news reels. This early collectivization of experience birthed a particular viewing public, a public who formed new relationships with the world at large. The carnival distribution was slowly eroded, however, by the contractual relationships both Pathé and Gaumont were able to secure so that their technicians presented the films and operated the cameras; then came the slow and inevitable transition, as Toeplitz and Mitry both describe it, to permanent theaters wherein a different type of film was able to be shown—the literary epic. The demographics of the public remained largely the same in spite of this. Toeplitz ascribes a particular causal relationship between the establishment of permanent theaters and the rise of narrative, bourgeois cinema; however, he offers the caveat that many films shown in European cinemas continued the slapstick, lowbrow tradition of the Jahrmarktkino: “Vor dem ersten Weltkrieg gab es im französischen Film einen großen Teil der Produktion, worin die guten Traditionen des Jahrmarktfilms weiterlebten. [...] Der Humor in [Jean] Durands Filmen fußt oft auf dem Zusammentreffen von so unwahrscheinlichen und phantastischen Situationen, von denen nicht einmal Méliès zu träumen gewagt hatte.”69 The

25 grand narrative film, on the other hand, seemed to have one function, that alluded to by Pathé specifically, i.e. to attract a middle-class clientele, and attract them not with slapstick but with national and international literature and drama reflected onto the screen.70 What is important about this attraction was not the national source of income generated but rather the obvious international box office numbers. That is to say that these films were not made to be consumed by a national public alone, but by an international public sphere, i.e. a literary bourgeois public sphere similar in structure to that defined by Jürgen Habermas.71 It is almost as if they were made both to legitimate the cinema in the eyes of the bourgeoisie (and in Germany this meant dealing with one of the earliest censor boards), but also as a means of advertising the particular national culture to the world. This move towards legitimation in the eyes of the national and international bourgeoisie is a step that defines early cinema spectatorship, according to Miriam Hansen.72 What develops is a two tiered system of film d’art and ‘lower’ forms of cinema, the one working to legitimate cinema as an art form and source for bourgeois ideology and the other a reliable source of income with very little overhead. Neither was apparently particularly exclusive in terms of audience. Up to this point, the historical evidence has painted the picture of a distributed system of cinema production with little national overtones other than that of funding and profit. In order to understand the relationship between the nation and cinema, we can look at one of the most deeply researched cinemas, namely that of Germany. In the case of Germany, a ‘national’ system of film d’art production did not develop until shortly before WWI, though they were to become one of the mainstays in narrative, European cinema producers during the inter-war period. Georges Sadoul mentions no less than 51 smalltime film production companies in Germany prior to 1911.73 For the most part, however, up until 1911, the cinemas in Berlin were filled with French (Pathé, Gaumont), Danish (Nordisk) or Italian (Cines, Itala Film) productions.74 German production was mostly limited to newsreel items, the ‘stars’ being the German royal family.75 Pathé had established distribution centers early on through Poppert’s connections with Germany; but it was Oskar Messter who opened the first film factory in Berlin in 1896 to compete with Lumière films. Even with Messter’s masterful command of the ‘national’ German cinema, his company and Skladanowski’s Deutsches Bioscop produced less than half of the films seen on German screens; the bulk of ‘German’ film production came from German branches of Pathé,

26 Gaumont and Éclair and the American run Deutsches Biograph.76 Messter continued, however, to build a monopoly in the German film and distribution market thanks in part to the rising tensions between Germany and the rest of Europe; and he eventually formed Hansa film distribution company in 1914. Messter’s production company’s mainstay product was newsreel material of Kaiser Wilhelm and the royal family, but he also created some ‘fictional’ films and developed a star in Henny Porten.77 Mainly, though, Messter was a technical master and famously produced the first camera specifically designed for aerial photography during World War I. It was not until Danish expatriate Stellan Rye’s very successful film Der Student von Prague (The Student of Prague, 1913) that the German film industry developed an international film d’art component—Student was the first world-wide film d’art success for Deutsches Bioscop (est. 1899).78 The production of Student in Germany was preceded by Oskar Messter founding the Autoren Film company in 1911, meant to compete with Pathé’s S.C.A.G.L., thus introducing the German ‘literary’ narrative to German screens.79 The quality of Messter’s productions, however, was not up to par with that of the Italians, the Danes and the French and, thanks at least in part to the distribution monopoly of Pathé and Nordisk, Messter had little access to worldwide distribution.80 In order to break the distribution monopoly in Germany, a German industrialist named Von Schack established the Film Industrie Anonym Gesellschaft (F.I.A.G) in 1910; it failed in 1912 because of negotiations with Eastman-Kodak that would have injured A.G.F.A.’s position in the German market. However, F.I.A.G. did incite Paul Davidson, who had by then built an 800-seat theater at Berlin, Alexanderplatz (the Union Theater), to form Union-Film in 1910.81 As Jean Mitry writes, Paul Davidson “tentait d’unir plusieurs petits producteurs en vue de constituer une firme unique et puissante.”82 Davidson’s coup was the signing of Asta Nielsen, one of the first worldwide stars of the cinema. Most of Nielsen’s films with the director Urban Gad in Germany were co-productions between Deutsches Bioscop and Davidson’s P.A.G.U. (aka Union-Film). Bioscop and Union-Film later joined forces under the guidance of Erich Pommer in a bid to compete with Messter’s Autoren Film and it is this combination, under the artistic direction of Hans Heinz Ewers, that brought about Der Student von Prague.83 With the success of a narrative seen to be ‘German’ in essence, and a lead actor who was a well-known stage actor in Germany (Paul Wegener), Deutsches Bioscop would go on to

27 produce many more films based on German Romantic literature and myth throughout the war. Indeed, the presence of Pathé films in Germany and the lack of German films in France, as detailed by Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk, indicates a certain denationalized public sphere of the cinema, or an audience exposed to non-national products and films d’art that were ‘foreign’ more often than ‘national’ films.84 That is to say that the reality of German life and German political and social events could be found in the cinema of Messter and other newsreel and docudrama masters, but the imaginary of the ‘German Volk’ was nowhere represented. The prominence of French films in Germany during the heated political events of the early part of the 1910s, led to openly jingoistic publications against Pathé, as for example this opinion piece published in the Ostasiatischer in 1913: The Pathé Frères, leader in the field of film production, greatly promotes French interests. Pathé films are shown in all big cities around the globe, they glorify French institutions, inventions, the army, the navy, and, in order to secure a market also in English-speaking parts of the world, they do no hesitate to praise the brother-in-arms across the channel [...] while on purpose ignoring events in Germany altogether.85 Pathé was portrayed as ‘taking sides,’ and furthering a French worldview, coincidentally just as the production of German Autorenfilme was beginning and the outbreak of war was on the political horizon. Pathé films and others were ‘nationalized’ by the German press as being particularly representative of French technology and the French economy, while there was little on the German cinema market to represent the German economy and German technology. It is really within this dynamic of war that the concept of a national cinema begins to take precedence over cinema as a field of ‘universal’ symbolic reference. The production of films, when tied to the national economy and star system, was more important for the development of jingoistic nationalism than the particular type of narrative shown or filmic style employed. Evidence of this is to be found in the example of Pommer’s (through Décla studios, which he also headed) detective films based on a Sherlock Holmes-type character named Stuart Webbs and directed by Joe May (Julius Otto Mandl). These films have really very little to do with German culture, literature, or history; the main character has an obviously British name, and even Mandl’s name change indicates a certain reverence for a budding Hollywood and American culture. However, as Mitry says, Joe May “était encore le seul metteur en scène connu du public allemand.”86 And while films such as Student may have been seen by critics as specifically

28 German, such films d’art were made, on an economic scale, for European distribution more so than national distribution, i.e. on the scale of the Italian Quo vadis? and other box-office smash hits. This indicates a deep structural relationship between what is traditionally seen as national cinema and the reality of transnational spectatorship. The success of films d’art in bringing in the middle-class and educated classes while continuing to appeal to the ‘proletariat’ was a crucial feature of film d’art, much more so than bringing in a specifically national audience. As the Joe May films demonstrate, however, the films d’art, though acclaimed as examples of national production and as being representative of some essential national quality, were not always the most economically successful and nationally influential. What this does also demonstrate is that the films d’art were influential in broadcasting a national identity to the rest of the world, and were preconditioned to reimburse the filmmakers through transnational viewership on this very basis. As Marc Silberman has pointed out, this history of European and American conflict in the cinema develops a particularly different concept of film in the two economic and political spheres: “While the European proponents consider the cinema to be an artistic medium with claims to the same kind of government support and protection accorded to literature, theater, opera, museums and historical architecture, their American adversaries insist on film as a commodity that moves within market structures of investment and amortization.”87 In the context of Britain, though, Peter Miskell has noted that Hollywood’s output in its ‘golden age’ was in some ways determined by the growing British market and the shrinking foreign markets.88 This certainly indicates a complex and interdependent relationship. And Randall Halle has recently demonstrated that what he calls “national ensemble of production” in Germany at last gave way in the 1990s to “transnational ensembles” of production.89 Though Chantal Akerman has voiced concern about the construction of “a monolithic European Cinema,”90 this process has strengthened European cinema’s global position in audiovisual production. But what does this growing reliance on transnational production, this new Film Europe as Higson and Maltby would have it,91 and a European market mean for the development of a European consciousness?

29 THE BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE, NATIONALISM, AND THE EARLY EUROPEAN CINEMA I am attempting to set up a certain series of vectors that will allow me to formulate a systematic examination of Europe as a set of divided nation-states and, at the same time, a unified cultural field. The growing movement towards the “transnational ensembles of production” in Europe raises several questions for film studies: how can one explain the persistence of the national in film studies, especially of different cinematic traditions in Europe? And what is the relationship between cinema as a national aesthetic object (not simply as an object of consumption) and as a European aesthetic object? Has Europe replaced the fetish that was the nation? Or is there something altogether different? One of the vectors in my analysis, as can be seen in the case of German film production, is the relationship between political nationalism and film as a national industry with transnational interests. Some nations traditionally aimed to curb the transnational appeal of the cinema, but only in relationship to import and not to export. Aided by anti-French sentiment, for example, a sentiment that was voiced in campaigns against French cinema in Germany, Oskar Messter fought to establish a film propaganda arm of the military, as Martin Koeber points out: “In August 1916 he wrote the memorandum ‘Film as a Political Medium,’ where he pointed out the lack of pro-German film propaganda in neutral countries...”92 Perhaps as a consequence, the German military high command helped establish Ufa shortly thereafter. This step highlights the purported structural relationship between the cinema and nationality. However, as Kessler and Lenk point out, the renaming of French companies in Germany, the associations formed between French firms and German ones (completely financed by the French; e.g. Gaumont’s ‘Deutsche Gaumont Gesellschaft,’ and Éclair’s ‘Deutsche Éclair,’ which finally became ‘Décla,’ run by Erich Pommer) and the ‘in house’ production of films from ‘German’ studios significantly blurred the lines for the German audience. Moreover, foreign companies continued to dominate (apparently) German cinemas in spite of open nationalist aggression towards them. This indicates an empirical divide between production level ideology (profit margins) and spectator ideology. There is little in the French narrative structure, personages, stories, and so forth, that specifically signals a nationality or national identity per se, and the viewers and critics of Germany relied merely on the non-national funding structure— much to the joy of their own film production companies—as a source for criticism. It was, in

30 fact, World War I, the ultimate expression of national protectionism, that finally broke the French stranglehold on the European film market and turned cinemas back in towards the nations that produced them. In the face of the reality of transnational spectatorship of films d’art, the suggestion of a national cinema is often limited to the postulation of a national system of cinema production. What seems to clearly signal a relationship between the national spectator and a ‘national’ film is either a question of the national auteur or a supposed national system of production. The latter is, however, as demonstrated by Kessler and Lenk, extremely tenuous and indeterminate in terms of spectatorship. That said, one can never rule out a nationalist cinema, i.e. a specific and fore- grounded nationalist discourse within the diegesis. Contradictorily, a ‘national cinema’ develops oftentimes, as with the German cinema, by producing a transnational-projective cinema, i.e. a cinema meant to be consumed by a transnational audience. The success of the Italian Cinema and the German Cinema in the twenties, sixties and seventies was dependent in large part on the international success of individual films. These films were on the whole not very successful in the nation, though they are oftentimes seen to represent something deeply unique and politically important about the nation. Yet, whereas Susan Hayward states that “if problems arise in defining the nation […], it is surely because of its imagined status,”93 it seems that the same problems are too easily answered by turning simply and perfunctorily to the nation’s imagined and comfortable status. Indeed, the critical films of France (Godard), Italy (Passolini), Germany (Fassbinder), Belgium (Jan Bucquoy), films which have been canonized as very much objects of nations, would not seem to be easy candidates for such a “consentuality” necessary for the imagined nation.94 One must recognize in this process the dialectical projective nature of nationalism, the quality recognized by Balibar, as an inherent aspect of the process of nation—almost as the national facade. As Luisa Rivi suggests, “various elements […] disrupt the fiction of a national cinema as self-contained…”95 We must take into account the projective quality of national cinemas, perhaps by understanding them as (disrupted) national imaginaries, which would bring us in line with both Thomas Elsaesser and Benedict Anderson. But, essentially, we must remember that this imaginary is particularly projective and, unlike the print media mentioned by Anderson, transnational in appeal and funding.

31 Due to this indeterminacy, this loose relationship between nation and cinema, it is valid to shift the discussion of cinema in Europe to European cinema as a specific field of reference. Not only is this a valid categorical transference, it is also one encouraged by contemporary world conditions for the cinema. In other words, without a firm field of nationally delimited reference, any discussion of a national cinema that is not immanently derived takes on the essentialist quality of nationalist discourse. That is to say that it is all but impossible to distinguish between the language of the narrative and the ‘cultural value’ of such a narrative for a specific nation or ‘people’. That is not to say that it is impossible to establish some limits to a ‘national cinema’ but that it is impossible to empirically define such limits to the extent that they become an essential category from which a film cannot be said to stray. National production (even nationalized production) does not equal national reduction. It is more accurate to speak of specifically national narratives, especially those tied inextricably to historical events, than a delimited and homogeneous national cinema per se. Such a categorization is destined to become indistinct, however, given the fact that European history is oftentimes used in Hollywood films, e.g. Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), as a reflection of something less than European—in much the same way as Russian and German history were used as a source for the Hollywood-esque story in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Enemy at the Gates (2001), one of the great European cinema flops. In order to be able to move this discussion out of an infinite causa causans loop it is necessary to create some empirical distinction between the national cinema and the transnational cinema. ‘European cinema’ could be said to be the composite structure of a spatially contiguous series of cinematic productions coinciding with the sub-continent of Europe, if we follow the path I suggest above. This is to say that any film produced in a European country could be said, by nature of its relationship to the economic field of the nation and the political field of an integrated EU, to be a ‘European’ production. However, this does nothing other than set up a broad and artificial distinction that continues and builds upon a deeper nationalistic distinction. I have already pointed out how this nationalistic distinction, even in the nationalized system of the Weimar years in Germany, is inherently unstable when speaking of discourse. Susan Hayward, in her work on French cinema, suggests that “in the writing of a national cinema there are two fundamental yet crucial axes of reflection to be considered. First, how is the national enunciated? In other words, what are the texts and what meanings do they mobilize?

32 And, second, how to enunciate the national? That is, what typologies must be traced into a cartography of the national?”96 As Hayward points out, the search for the national in cinema is a search for a discourse on the national. Rather than finding geographic borders for the national cinema, Hayward seeks discursive borders, a reflection of national identity within the narrative itself. This is a potentially dangerous and essentialist task, however, without some framework within which to find an empirical reflection of this ethereal discourse. There is also the continuing ambiguity of the transnational, an inherent aspect of the French nouvelle vague, the New German Cinema and even Italian neo-realism. Moreover, as Mark Betz points out, the national cinemas of the sixties and seventies in Europe, when considering the structure of funding, were oftentimes anything but ‘national’; and the co-produced nature of these films informs a basic anxiety in these narratives over the European Union.97 Not a single one of these art-house cinemas would have survived (except for perhaps neo-realism) without the international (especially American) art-house crowd. The Möbius strip continues. In order to speak of a national cinema, it is clear that one must first delimit the ‘nation.’ As I have pointed out, the physical borders of the nation-state are of no use, here. The historically contentious nature of such borders makes them all but useless in the discussion of nationality, an ‘ambiguous identity’ to follow Etienne Balibar. A more useful critical model in this situation is that of the public sphere. The discursive nature of the public sphere, not delimited to a specific region or location (i.e. not ‘physically’ present at all), makes for an excellent pattern recognizer when looking at the national cinema. In this model the national cinema is that cinema that specifically addresses the national public sphere in an unambiguous manner, while not necessarily delimiting itself to the national audience, of course, but recognizing the historical construction of the national public sphere. Schloendorff’s Stille nach dem Schuss (Legends of Rita, 2001) is an excellent example here. The close relationship between Schloendorff’s narrative and European history is one that Schloendorff does not seek to overcome. In order to understand the political experiences of the terrorist ‘Rita’ and the political and social ‘message’ of the film, the viewer must have some understanding of the historical context of the fictionalized events. The national cinema reiterates and reconstructs a national narrative by connecting with the public sphere in an ambiguous fashion, and filtering that public sphere experience (historical and actual) onto the screen in a manner which the nation and History recognizes. This relationship is always, however, one of

33 gradations. It is also one that is never completely delimited to the nation-state but stretches to the limits of the discursive community of the public sphere. Thus this relationship is only ever loose and unbound, a hypothetical structure the interstices of which can reproduce the sense of ‘nation’ associated with the national narrative cinema. When Habermas began the discussion of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) in critical theory he already had some form of a European sphere in mind, a sphere coextensively related to the production of ‘mass media’ serials and journals in the core European states and the colonial extensions.98 In Habermas’s model, the bourgeois public sphere, a sphere inherently defined by a specific discursive potential, is actuated by print media in the form of literature, literary journals and news. This might seem necessarily to link the public sphere to national vernaculars. The nation and the public sphere, however, while linked traditionally, do not necessarily need to be bound inextricably if one follows Habermas’s model.99 This is to say that language is only important as a functional mode (parole) of communication and does not necessarily delimit the public sphere within a specific nation. There are many things that can delimit the public sphere, but language is not largely one of them.100 What is important for the public sphere, specifically the bourgeois public sphere, is the transnational nature of such a sphere, a sphere of ‘shared- values.’ While this language of ‘shared-values’ can be contentious in many situations, the ‘inter’- nationality of the public sphere as a set of relational values in contemporary Europe is made apparent in the empirical evidence of the Eurobarometer.101 It is clear that most Europeans, while dubious in large part about the political function of the EU, think of themselves as ‘Europeans,’ as an overarching concept linking national identities across borders. The evidence presented by Emanuele Castano also points out the nature of ‘shared values’ in the psychological formation of the European community, thus allowing for the theoretical close-association between the Euro-national and the European public sphere.102 It is then safe to suggest that the formation of the European public sphere as a space for both political and social discourse is already a nascent reality. Print media has another historical function outside of formulating the bourgeois public sphere. According to Benedict Anderson, it is also one of the foundational structures of the nation-state community. Print was a condition for the creation of nationalistic solidarity and the nation-state as an imagined (which is not to say unreal) community due to the normalization of temporality across space engendered by print discourse. In establishing a concept of simultaneity

34 crucial to this formulation, Anderson borrows from Walter Benjamin : “What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, and idea of ‘homogeneous, empty-time,’ in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguration and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.”103 This orientation of communal experience across a larger spatial plane, that of the nation, is what informs the members of the community about their own relationship to the larger national public sphere. And it is, crucially, an orientation of experience, a synchronization of the public into a homogeneous communicative plane. What delimits this plane, for Anderson, is not simply the lingua. Rather, it is the orientation of the nation as a reflection of the nation—regardless of whether it is actually a reflection or not. It is within this ‘reflection’ (or self-reflection) that the concept of the national imaginary lies. The notion of organized communal experience is important to Anderson’s figuration. As Marc Redfield points out, Anderson sees the transitory quality of news as demonstrative of a particularly powerful type of national imagining; “a commodity that expires within twenty-four hours or less, the newspaper summons its reader to a ‘mass ceremony’ predicated on the simultaneous participation of uncountable other readers elsewhere.”104 This community of readers feels connections to the other readers through the act of sharing an organized experience, if somewhat vicariously. The powerful sense of community could be said to derive in part from this very feeling of shared experience. The organized experience also, for Anderson, helped coordinate the already stratified social order in three specific ways: 1) “unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars” were created; 2) there was then “a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation;” and 3) it finally created “languages of power,” or specific vernaculars that reflected the printed language, and thus more closely resembled the ‘national imaginary’ itself.105 The organization of experience within the linguistic borders of the nation, organized around the stratification of society and the continuation of a centralized linguistic culture, is what signals the birth of nationalism for Anderson. And, as I said above, the development of newspapers and journals also signals the development, for Habermas, of the bourgeois public sphere. However, for the bourgeois public sphere, the media does not so much signal the organization of experience, but the mediation of opinion and criticism, the mediation of the

35 public sphere discourse into a field of experience. The bourgeois public sphere, after all, had the specific function of criticizing the state, mediating between the state and society, and as such depended on the media. This changed, for Habermas, with the commercialization of the media, the orientation of newspapers and journals towards consumption rather than criticism, to entertainment rather than condemnation. In such a form the media no longer served the public sphere. This necessarily entailed the fragmentation of the bourgeois public sphere and the devolution of rational-critical public sphere discourse. The market forces driving the media literally converted them into vehicles of consumption rather than criticism and thus reflected the fragmentation of society and labor, the categorization and isolation of intellectuals, the pushing of the opinion page to the side, or deeper into the pages of the paper. It is important to consider, then, if this dissolution coincides with the development of pan-national forms of print media intended for consumption, if there then might be some deep-structure relationship between consumption, which is experiential and nationally formative according to Anderson, and the national imaginary. And if this national organization of experience might then belie or even prohibit an active public sphere. In other words, does nationalism come about through a contraction and organization of public sphere discourse? The dissolution of the public sphere will prove to be contentious on many levels for many critics following Habermas. One of the main criticisms, though, is that Habermas seems to laud the almost utopian nature of the idealized bourgeois public sphere, then dedicates many pages to its dissolution, while offering no hope for the further discussion of the public sphere. This sphere, for Habermas, is something moribund at best, an empty shell of its former potential. Nancy Fraser has leveled this criticism at Habermas, with the specific intention of detailing the survival of the public sphere, though significantly modified from its former self.106 Fraser draws on the work of Joan Landes, Mary Ryan and Geoff Eley who each contend that Habermas’s notion of the public sphere was idealized to an extreme: “they argue that, despite the rhetoric of publicity and accessibility, the official public sphere rested on, indeed was importantly constituted by, a number of significant exclusions.”107 These exclusions included but were by no means limited to gender, race, and class. The dichotomy between the bourgeois public sphere and the coexisting publics marginalized by public sphere discourse, underscores a crucial point that Habermas makes about the bourgeois public sphere, namely that it was grounded in the vocalized belief that it was the public sphere, driven by rationality and reason. When Eley states

36 that the “public sphere was always constituted by conflict,”108 the stress should fall on the constitution of the public sphere as a space of communicative political and social exchange. Habermas limits his claims to the bourgeois experience, and specifically the claims of the experience to be the central, normative experience in society, the moderating voice within the state, the organizing factor of all social experience. It is at this point that the concept of the hegemonic social public sphere develops in Eley, and this concept is of some specific interest for my discussion here. The creation of subaltern counterpublics that “invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs,”109 can only take place meaningfully in a hegemonic free society. Thus the discussion of the hegemonic features of ‘free’ society is crucial to understanding the nature of counterdiscourses within such a society. As Gramsci makes clear, the hegemony is dependent on a certain homogeneous notion of society. This notion of homogeneity is also reflected in Luisa Rivi who reminds us that “the national is not a unified fiction; it is a fiction, but one that incorporates otherness at the very moment that it is presumed to be homogeneous for ideological, critical, and marketing reasons.”110 The genesis of the bourgeois public sphere seems dependent on this unifying discourse as well, i.e. the presentation of a space of non-conflictual conflict. It is this very space that Habermas describes. And for all the criticism leveled against this idealized space, it can really be nothing other than idealized. It cannot exist, as Eley, Landes and Fraser rightfully point out, as a unified field of reference. It must continually represent itself thus, however, and it is this representation of unity that then ties in to the homogeneous, empty-time of the national imaginary. The crucial difference between the bourgeois and the post-bourgeois public sphere, for Habermas, is that this unified notion, this pan-social understanding subtended as it were by rationality and reasoning, is eroded by the democratic construction of the market and the orientation of the media to mass consumption and profit. However, the unifying, hegemonic processes of homogeneous, empty-time continue in the iteration and reiteration of the state. The creation of national consciousness is not at all at odds with the development of the bourgeois public sphere; it is dependent on it but quickly transcends it. The dialectical relationship between the national imaginary and the public sphere, in which they twist and turn about each other, being of the same metal as it were but strikingly different possibilities and demeanors, is conspicuous and should be remarked upon. Both are

37 imaginary; or better, both are bound to concrete social discourse, or intersubjectivity, as imaginative extrapolations. Yet I cannot help but see one as a utopian version of another—i.e. the public sphere as a utopian and non-exclusive form of the national imaginary. The public sphere appears as the new postnational fetish, in many ways, in the shadow of national fetishism.111 Are they then simply qualitatively different social formulations, or is there a quantitative difference? Another factor arises at this juncture, and one that I have only briefly touched on— namely the mediation of the public sphere to itself. This is the one link between the creation of the bourgeois public sphere, the counter publics of Fraser, and the notion of homogeneous, empty-time suggested by Anderson. The existence of the nation or the public sphere can only ever be one, in fact, through mediation. One can never know all of the other members of one’s extended, national community, but, as Anderson points out, “he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.”112 This confidence comes through the mediation of such scenes of labor, such concepts of unity, in the news, television, documentaries and literature. The fabric of the public sphere is also dependent on mediation. Fraser makes clear that the formulation of counter publics is a process intimately related to the circulation of counterdiscourses both outside and through the media. As such, there is an inevitable aspect of consumption in the processes of the public sphere. One must consume the discourses and counterdiscourses, a process that is considered to be willful, voluntary, and thus the tracking of consumption too often becomes confused with the tracking of the public will.113 The only relationship between them, though, is in truth imaginary.

THE PUBLIC SPHERES OF PRODUCTION I have argued so far that the development and proliferation of the public sphere is not inherently dependent on language and that the European public sphere is already a nascent reality. This also entails, however, in keeping with the arguments of Fraser and Eley that such a public sphere is hegemonic in nature. The question that I am concerned with is of just what discourse this hegemony consists and how this hegemony of the European public sphere is related to national discourse—especially concerning the European cinema. I have also bound the public sphere and the Andersonian development of nationalism through the fact of mediation. With the historical

38 development of the cinema addressed above, the loose relationship between the cinema and the nation, and the notion of consumption and the public sphere, I have hopefully sufficiently argued that the cinema as a mode of production has coincidental interaction with the nation, yet is not dependent upon it, is in fact always potentially transnational. To find the way out of the Möbius strip described above, the direction is clearly the European public sphere. The European Cinema is that cinema that reflects the European public sphere in some specific fashion, mapping political and social Europe, so to speak, onto the screen. The historical evidence suggests that the pan-European and nationalized production systems in Europe were dependent in some fashion on an international audience, or were at least coupled to the international audience. However, the massive success of such small budget and ‘regional’ films such as Max Linder’s Max et le mari jaloux makes the production of large budget and high risk films along the lines of Cabiria, seem, from an economic standpoint, unnecessary. There was no specifically economic need for big budget films, especially since they carried such a high risk, other than the (often minimal) possibility of perpetual rentals, reruns, festival showings and so forth. Here Miriam Hansen points out a crucial aspect of the early cinema, American and European, that helps explain the possible necessity of big budget, ‘classical’, epic productions that tied into literature, theater, and even high culture music (e.g. Camille Saint-Saëns’ scoring of L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise). In Babel and Babylon, Hansen suggests that the cinema turned towards traditional ‘high’ culture—the production of literary narratives, grand historical epics, and ‘artistic’ films—in order to avoid the threats of censorship, and the accusations of perversion and licentiousness coming from conservative community leaders. The cinema sought to legitimate itself, according to Hansen, by turning towards the literary and artistic ‘remnants’ of the bourgeois public sphere. In his examination of the bourgeois public sphere, Habermas suggested that the commercialization of the media brought about the dissolution of the political and critical function of the bourgeois public sphere. The literary trappings of such a sphere still existed, however, marginalized and commercialized though they may have been. It is at this point that Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge take up the bourgeois public sphere, in its devolution, and outline a continuing presence for such a sphere. In their model, suggested in Public Sphere and Experience114, the postbourgeois public sphere is the composite form of the public spheres of production, the remnant of the bourgeois public sphere, and the proletariat public sphere. In this

39 model, the public spheres of production, which orient and fashion public sphere experience, are fused with the bourgeois public sphere, inextricably linked, yet in a fashion they do not make explicitly clear. The proletariat public sphere is a discursive space, not intended to be homogeneous, wherein forms of social and political resistance can and do form, something that Fraser, and Hansen, draw out in the form of subaltern public spheres. In essence, Negt and Kluge begin outlining the hegemonic structure of modern society. However, whereas in normal Marxist terminology this hegemony would involve a specific class on top of the hegemony, Negt and Kluge lean towards the ruling form of the public spheres of production. For their model, these spheres of production determine, regulate, and orient public sphere experience to an inordinate extent—the factory owners controlling political and social experience and thus the hegemony in general. Yet these public spheres of production are also extensions of or embroiled in the legitimating remnants of the bourgeois public sphere. This fact supports Hansen’s conclusion that the cinema as a public sphere of production legitimated itself by turning to the literary, musical and artistic trappings of the bourgeois public sphere. For Negt and Kluge, it was coextensive to such a public sphere to begin with. Yet the bourgeois public sphere also, importantly, represented itself as the public sphere, a point that allows for the criticism aimed at it by Fraser, Eley and others. Thus in the dissolution of the bourgeois public sphere, the public spheres of production (those that Habermas see as bringing about the final dissolution of the bourgeois public sphere), inherit this pan-public sphere perception, becoming the unifying field of reference. The raw economics and emptiness of this sphere, however, especially as it is aimed not at dialogics but consumption and entertainment, cannot bear the discursive spirit of the bourgeois public sphere. The emptiness and openness of the public spheres of production cannot themselves reproduce the discursive unity of the bourgeois public sphere which was fundamentally a sphere of critical political and social discourse. To do so would be to threaten the consumptive nature of such a sphere. Thus the public spheres of production assimilated the model of the bourgeois public sphere, the pan- human, pan-social, pan-national quality and linked it with raw economic consumption. Consumption was bound through them to the pan-social and pan-human—was universalized. The mask of unity, borrowed from the bourgeois public sphere, i.e. the myth of a single public sphere discourse, fits the public spheres of production perfectly, especially since all political and social critical discourse is marginalized, capitalized and oriented towards a small minority of

40 academia. However, the political and social rational-critical element of the bourgeois public sphere is slowly, inexorably drained away. Instead, populist political elements arise within the public spheres of production, reined in by the necessity of consumption itself. The end result is the creation of a mainstream culture oriented by normatizing forces within the socio-economic field of reference. Normativity itself, as a process of social and political negotiation, determines the mainstream. It is the process of negotiation, assimilation, etc. that regulates the public sphere in the shadow of the public spheres of production. The bourgeois public sphere, seeing itself as the public sphere, representing the public sphere discourse and functioning as a mediator between society and state, possessed, itself, a normalizing function. Because it determined public sphere discourse it determined the nature of the public sphere in the grand historical mode. As Fraser points out, though, this was a myth generated by the bourgeois public sphere. The normative function of the bourgeois public sphere derived from its ostensibly critical function. Because it was the critical organ of both state and society, the bourgeois public sphere assumed the rational position of normative body, orienting the economy, society and the representative state. Habermas sees the dissolution of this critical function with the dissolution of the bourgeois public sphere, overrun as it was by its own medium. The capitalization of the media, equals, for Habermas, the bureaucratization and colonialization of the lifeworld, and consequently the disjunction of lifeworld and political sphere.115 Thus the critical function itself is ‘colonized’ by the public spheres of production. In a sense, with the rise of the public spheres of production, the public sphere as rational critical discourse is subsumed and marginalized. However, the crucial ideological function of the bourgeois public sphere, the concept of unity and normativity, survives in some fashion in the form of the public spheres of production. These spheres, the capitalized media themselves, formulate a unified field of public sphere discourse, seemingly open and reasonable, but oriented around the twin poles of entertainment and information, i.e. consumption and the production of functional citizens. In other words, the dissolution of the rational critical function of the bourgeois public sphere left a palpable trace. The subsumption of the bourgeois public sphere into the public spheres of production left the historical remnants of the bourgeois public sphere, literature, theater, music and the growing ‘art’ of cinema. These remnants retain the ‘critical’ function ascribed to them by the bourgeois public sphere, while integrating into the apolitical public

41 spheres of production. The bourgeois public sphere did not dissolve; rather, it entered a new, abstract mode, representing itself and its other(s) through the public spheres of production. To borrow terminology from Thomas Elsaesser,116 the public spheres of production, seeking legitimacy in the eyes of the bourgeois public sphere and the state, produced the ‘historical imaginary’ of the bourgeois public sphere, integrating the history of the ‘people’ into the public sphere discourse, continuing the process of nationalization, and marginalizing other spheres in the same fashion as the bourgeois public sphere itself. Thus the mainstream process of normativity continued in the historical shadow of the universalizing bourgeois public sphere. Notions of ‘quality’ (Warner Brothers’ claim to fifty years of ‘quality’ notwithstanding) are simply marketing schemes tying into the shadow of the bourgeois public sphere. The public sphere aspect of the lifeworld is ‘colonized’ by the public spheres of production, which in turn reproduce the imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere in a non-dialogic form. Let me return here to the interesting postulation of axiological globalism and universalism raised by Todorov and explored in the European context in the introduction. For Todorov, the empirical, colonizing vein of European discourse composed the world according to, and in reference to the European social and religious sphere. The writings of Montaigne indicate a particular ‘axiological globalism’ or the view of the world specifically through the lens of European history. With the advent of industrial relations, however, this view changed and the axiological globalism of colonialism was replaced by ethical universalism, or the appeal to a transcendental ‘right’ and ‘truth’ that is apparent and appropriate for all races, creeds, societies and states, and that was not structurally (in an obvert sense) related to the history of Europe and European society. While aspects of this theory are possibly contentious, the existence and reality of a changed perspective in the nineteenth century is not simply limited to Todorov and the history of industry, but can also be traced through Habermas to the capitalization of the media, the dissolution of the rational-critical bourgeois public sphere and the colonization of the lifeworld. What does this mean for Europe today? Well, in the linkage between the public spheres of production and the bourgeois public sphere develops the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere. This historical imaginary is reproduced in the public spheres of production as historical truth and allegorical reality. It is also representative of the history of the nation. The linkage draws on a coterminous affinity between the public spheres of production and the

42 bourgeois public sphere, i.e. the concept of universality—for the public spheres of production it is the universality of consumption; for the bourgeois public sphere it is the ethical universality of human existence in democratic society. Whether such a linkage can only come about with the colonization of the lifeworld is unclear, but they are linked in contemporary society to an inordinate degree. It is perhaps no accident that the colonization of Africa and Asia, the attempted colonization of Western Europe and the eventual colonization of Eastern Europe preceded and were coexistent with the development of the EU as a political, economic and social community. The economics of the EU itself is a remnant of colonial thinking—economic exploitation through reduction of trade barriers. Thus France has an equal right to Germany’s steel as it did to the fruit from Guadeloupe and the ore from its African colonies. The links between colonial thinking and economic integration go right up the EU chain. What is also obvious, however, is that the return (or continuation) of universalism ties into the political mission of the bourgeois public sphere, the representation of unity in the face of the state, unity of opinion, unity of consumption, unity of ethical momentum. Thus this ethical universalism is an aspect of the bourgeois public sphere and is traced into, moralizes, and legitimates the public spheres of production, legitimates the cinema, by supplying narratives of ‘humanity’ that derive from a transcendent notion of humanity, something ethically superior to the human political and social field, superior to the lifeworld itself. One could say that the separation of the lifeworld from its political integration within the state, about which Habermas has written so much, opens the space of ethical universalism in the imaginary of the public spheres of production, and this imaginary is represented in the cinematic narratives of Europe. The development of a secure space, economic, social, and political security, a very real political option in the post-revolutionary era in Europe, has a mainstream quality reminiscent of bourgeois public sphere discourse. However, the mainstream is formed through the processes of normatization, processes that develop within and without the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere. Normativity arises in the intersubjective field of reference and is then reflected into the public spheres of production. The public spheres of production, bound up as they are with the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere, practicing and reiterating such a sphere, then reproduce the antagonistic relationship between the marginalized publics (the subaltern publics or counterpublics), and the ‘mainstream’ public. These counterpublics, bound by the experience organizing nature of the public spheres of production, view the public sphere

43 in this same antagonistic manner and willingly take up the position of resistance offered by the public sphere. This is reflected (as reality and as imaginary) in the publics’ imaginary (the public spheres of production) as the ‘state’ of the public sphere and reiterated through generations aiming for resistance. While this is on one had the trace of the disconnection between lifeworld and political sphere, it also is reiterated as the legitimate space for the ‘marginalized’ publics— publics that are marginalized by the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere and whose marginality is reiterated in the public spheres of production, and willingly assumed by the publics themselves intent on offering resistance. In other words, the counterpublics play into the structure of the bourgeois public sphere by taking up the position offered by such a sphere in the first place. This strategy does not guarantee the continuing dominance of the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere due to the nature of normativity (the process of intersubjective negotiation), but the marginalization of the counterpublics to a violent ‘counter’ position in society and in the publics’ imaginary, postpones the transference of legitimacy. In the European context, this connection between public spheres of production and the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere has taken on new significance. If we look closely at the historical context of what Habermas considers to be the dissolution of the bourgeois public sphere and, with it, the eradication and marginalization of rational critical discourse aimed at both state and society, we see with it the colonization of the lifeworld by the public spheres of production. This process can be seen as a particular atrophy of the nationalist project, the ossification of political and social borders, and the formation of a significant national market. With the advent of the EU, the eradication of ‘real, existing socialism’ and the internationalization of the political and social field in Europe, the question of the pan-European public sphere takes on new and critical significance. The space for rational critical debate is reopened and democratized by the desire for a populist adherence to the European Union.

CONCLUSION: POSTNATIONAL EUROPE AND ETIENNE BALIBAR Politically, European postnationalism is a reality. The years following the Second World War saw the devolution of nationalistic discourse, the turn towards transnational political systems, and the widespread banning of certain nationalistic emblems, racist speech, and so forth. It is all but forbidden throughout Europe (mostly through social taboo) to display nationalist symbols—

44 except at international sporting events, of course. In this context, postnationalism becomes simple shorthand for describing the lack of open, emotional and ‘excessive’ nationalistic feelings throughout Europe, and the specific marginalization of nationalist political parties and social movements. However, the question of whether a new political space has opened in Europe that transcends nationalistic and protectionist considerations, a space wherein the political and social good of the European society can be considered in all of its facets, i.e. a rebirth of the political space once inhabited by the bourgeois public sphere, is very much undecided. Addressing this question appears to be the purpose of three distinct critical discourses on Europe—that of Jürgen Habermas, that of Etienne Balibar and that of Slavoj Žižek. Each of these philosophers, while representing distinctly different models for European society, seem to agree on one crucial aspect—the European project represents not so much the economic stabilization of Europe as a market, as much as it represents the shifting of borders within Europe and the establishment of new borders, social, political and economic. The nature of these borders proves contentious. In the following chapter I will concentrate on the ‘imaginary’ border between Hollywood and Europe. Here I wish to introduce the concept of postnationalism as outlined by Habermas, and the shifting ideological borders of class and racism within Europe as explored in depth by Etienne Balibar, in order to explore the specific nature of the European public sphere in the contemporary context of the EU. The dynamic between these models of Europe will allow me to outline the nature of the European public sphere, the reflection of which helps establish to some narrow extent the mainstream European cinema. That said, the question of the existence of postnationalism is far from transparent. The concept also bears idealistic overtones, as though it is the wishful, critical construction of a political sphere rather than the description of a real, existing sphere. The crucial fact for Habermas, one particular proponent of the notion of postnationalism, is that the politics of Europe is in the process of transcending national considerations, especially on the level of economic competition and ethical consumption. For Habermas, the concept of the postnational is linked inextricably to the processes of globalization. These processes are generally economic and informational, expanding networks of capital and means of transference of capital. The

45 postnational represents the political and social dimension of this process and ties into the political cosmopolitanism that Habermas willingly espouses. In relation to the nation-state, Habermas writes: “by expanding the parameters for the implementation of human rights and democracy, the nation-state made possible a new, more abstract for of social integration beyond borders of ancestry and dialect.” 117 The postnational constellation, as Habermas calls it, being the social and political aspect of this process of essentially economic integration, is the extension of this process of nationalization. “Today we are faced with the task of carrying on this process with a further abstractive step. A process of democratic will-formation that can cross national borders needs a unified context, and this in turn requires the development of a European public sphere and a common European political culture. In a postnational communicative context of this sort, an awareness of collective membership needs to emerge from the background of an already existing fabric of interests.”118 Thus the processes of the European Union involve the development of a European public sphere. In order to generate a political public opinion that is, itself, postnational a particular discourse must develop in which the focal point is not the nation but the inter-nation. Now, as I have argued, the development of the European public sphere is a nascent reality. Yet, the political move towards a unified political European public sphere, that is one that engages in rational, critical debate seems far off on the horizon. This is one criticism aimed at Habermas’s concept of the postnational, that it is cosmopolitan and idealistic. One reason for this far-off horizon is that this public sphere has not realized (may never realize) its own political and social potential. In other words, it is a sphere designed by and revealed in the public spheres of production, an economic sphere, a sphere of consumption, the experience of which is mediated by consumption rather than rational-critical debate. This insight will carry on into following chapters as a crucial, subtending discourse for the development of the critical, European cinema. Balibar’s consideration of the postnational is much less oriented towards the development of a discourse that transcends the nation-state, but rather the functional-ideological relationship between the nation-state, in the postnational era, and its citizenry. I will explain in greater detail Balibar’s position on this issue of the ‘transnational citizen’ in the following chapters. At this point, I simply want to differentiate between Balibar’s model of Europe and that of Habermas. This differentiation will prove to be the space within which one can discover the critical mode of the European cinema, as a cinema of Europe rather than a cinema within Europe.

46 Balibar does not bring into issue the pragmatic and realized development of a post- national or transnational citizenship in Europe; “the issue,” he writes, “is to decide what kind of status and rights (civil, political and social, to follow a famous tripartition that retains its relevance) the inhabitants of this new political entity would individually and collectively enjoy.”119 For Balibar, the question centers on the very concept of citizenship in this historical border region between the nation-state and the inter-nation. How is the traditional function of the citizen to survive and eventually transcend the borders of the nation? And, more importantly, should the traditional model of citizenship, one based in the older form of the nation-state, be the default model of citizenship for the new, global society? The potential also exists in the new Europe for the development of a “European apartheid,” involving the “rampant repression of ‘alien’ communities of immigrants (with specific modalities progressively unified under the Schengen Agreemen Convention); a diffusion among European nations of openly racist outbursts (neo-fascist or ‘populist’ propaganda and activities, pogroms, expulsions on a massive scale); and a seemingly contradictory combination of nationalist exclusivism and ‘Western’ communitarian-ism.”120 The nascent development of such a system, for Balibar, is simply a reiteration of nation-state policies and politics and nationalism as an ideological structure, the great word of warning Balibar has for the utopianism involved in discussions of the EU. In Politics and the Other Scene, Balibar characterizes a critical issue for the sake of my argument: ‘ambiguous universality.’121 His historical construction of three “points of view on the question of universality” and the application of this concept to the contemporary political sphere offers the final connection I have attempted to construct here between the European public sphere and the historical remnants of the bourgeois public sphere. After all, as I have suggested, one of the obvious strong discursive features of the bourgeois public sphere was the ability and necessity of it representing itself as the single public sphere mediating between state and society. This was a criticism aimed at Habermas’s elaboration of the bourgeois public sphere, but, as I suggested above, this may have been a crucial feature of the bourgeois public sphere, without which it would not have born the historical political weight that it did. Thus, as the bourgeois public sphere generated a particular discursive feature of universality, so Balibar sees a strong, central discourse on the question of universality in contemporary political and social cultures throughout Europe.

47 Firstly, there is “universality as reality.” This represents the very real, globalization of information, and a globalized understanding of the ‘human condition.’ It is now physically possible to know, instantaneously, what the members of the G8 discuss in St. Petersburg, or the wartime terror millions feel at the Israeli assaults on Lebanon. Balibar describes this spatial and temporal contraction as an “interdependency between the various ‘units’ which, together, build what we call the world...”122 This interdependency transcends the basic concepts of economic/political interdependency and moves into the social, even the intersubjective field of reference, so that “a certain threshold was crossed, which made it [the process] irreversible (we might also say: which made it impossible to achieve any proper ‘delinking’, or to imagine and return to ‘autarky’ within the world system)...”123 The impossibility of achieving a ‘delinking’ has been a constituting factor of the development of the EU, a condition oriented towards preventing the return to a militarized Germany in Europe, and continues to be the strongest argument against ‘Euroskeptics’. What Balibar opens, though, is the possibility that this ‘real universality’ makes “utopian figures of universality obsolete,” and, importantly, that this universality signals the very real possibility of the Hobbesian ‘war against all’ politics, the impossibility of a centralized control system to the complexity of the globalized political sphere, the transnational inscription of a ‘generalized minority status’, the growing ambiguity between the national and the supra-national (thus the possibility that internal divisions or ‘apartheid’ will no longer be clearly demarcated), the emergence of “a world ‘underclass’.”124 The second view of universalism offered by Balibar is what he terms “universality as fiction,” or a “fictive universality,” by which he does not mean that “it does not exist, that it is a mere possibility, a ghost or an idea as opposed to the world of facts.”125 By ‘fictive’ Balibar simply means that which is constructed by the institutions of society and the state. In the context of my argument this institutional structure includes by necessity the public spheres of production. These spheres do not generate this fictive universality and the universal field of individuals that represents it, and to which it is represented, but it reproduces the image of such a universality— often by structuring the psychological narrative arc that explains the unexplainable. The reproduction of the fictive universality, then, is then business of the public spheres of production and is linked inextricably (and often fallaciously) with consumption as an economic indicator. The critical discourse to which Balibar turns to explain this universal generation of individuality is Hegel’s dialectic understanding of the relationship between religious universality

48 and the universality of civic, pluralistic and non-sectarian society. For Hegel, society necessarily progresses from religious universality to political universality (which Balibar maintains is fictive by its nature, being dictated by the (re)iterations of the state hegemony). However, as I have pointed out above, this ‘progress’ is clearly not so much forward-looking as continually synchronous. It is in the interest of the Catholic Church in Europe to understand the universal quality of the European public sphere, in order to present itself as subtending it. But, as Balibar points out, “what Hegel is [essentially] concerned with is the intrinsic relationship between the construction of hegemony, or total ideology, and autonomous individuality, or the person.”126 This plays into the relationship between the public spheres of production and the spectator, because the nature of being a ‘person’ or ‘citizen’ in the modern nation-state (as both Ulrich Beck and Habermas point out) is based in consumption (both of economic goods and the ‘services’ of the state) and the consumption of the citizenry promotes the economic growth of society.127 Thus the fictive universality of the individual is a supporting ideological framework for the public spheres of production. The interconnection between this ideology and the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere will be taken up in the remaining chapters. Balibar also points out that “ ‘total’ ideologies are intrinsically connected with the recognition (and before that, the institution) of the individual as a relatively autonomous entity: not one that is absolutely free from particular identities and memberships, but one which is never reducible to them, which ideally and practically [...] transcends the limitations and qualifications of particular identities and memberships.”128 I see this as being an important ideological function of the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere. It reproduces the concept of individuality and links it inextricably, in the postbourgeois public sphere, with economic consumption. This concept of individuality is the basis for the fictive universality of Balibar, which finds this ideological function with that of the public spheres of production. There is a discourse about Europe existing in a ‘real, actually existing’ European public sphere. The discourse of a unified Europe is not something recent but has a certain historical actuality, so to speak; it is a reoccurring, fundamental rallying cry for political and social movements. As Tony Judt points out, the consistent insistence of the social and political opposition movements in the Eastern Bloc in ’88 and ’89 was ‘a return to Europe’.129 This was not meant to be a physical return, not even so much a cry of recognition; it was the desire to return to the normative field of social and political relations that the European political sphere

49 was developing. Thus it is a discourse on the concept of a unified cultural field, a European cultural field that has as much to do with the history of Europe as it may have to do with the future. As sociological evidence shows, there is a real, existing public sphere in Europe, a space wherein a European identity is forming, building international associations, and displacing the borders of Europe into new territory. This displacement is more than economical; as Emanuele Castano has suggested about the economic formation of the European Union: “it soon became clear that people would not participate in such an arid [economic] conception of the community, and that economic benefits needed to be defined within a system of values.”130 The ‘system of values’ spoken of by Castano could not be located in the figure of the pan-European market, but had to be reflected into a value system that could be seen to be European. Whether this process is to be seen as positive (Habermas) or with caution (Balibar) remains to be seen. However, the nature of this sphere is still inextricably bound up with the processes of consumption, organized by the public spheres of production, and linked to the concepts of universality that stem, to some extent, from the reiterations, or the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere. The rational-critical function of this sphere, one that seeks to transcend base consumption, has yet to emerge. It is the subject of the next few chapters, however, to examine the role of the cinema in this process. The history of the European cinema suggests that the process of the development of the public sphere has long existed in the economic realm of cinema funding structures. The narrative development of ‘national cinemas’ was as much dependent on the international spectator as it was on the innate ‘national-ness’ of the narrative structure. The evidence offered by Thomas Elsaesser supports this supposition. The development of a ‘mainstream’ European cinema, tied up to the dynamic between the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere and the public spheres of production is a crucial crystallizing moment in the formulation of the European public sphere. It also allows the reconfiguration of the national public sphere with the dissolution (or revaluation) of the bourgeois public sphere and the advent of the public spheres of production. In such a formulation, I suggest, one can see the absorption of the bourgeois public sphere by the creation of the historical imaginary of such a sphere. The cohesive quality of this sphere reflects

50 the universalizing processes seen by Balibar, and, strangely prefigures Balibar’s own universalizing tendencies. For the sake of postulating a European identity, it is then useful to tie the concept of the public sphere and that of the imagined community together into an interdependent relationship, such that the national imaginary (wherein the ideological processes of ‘identity formation’ could be said to lie) and the public sphere interweave and support each other. The media in and of itself does not compose either the national imaginary or public sphere, but mediates them and thus makes both possible. The temporal immediacy or simultaneity reflected in the media becomes a cornerstone of the national imaginary, transcending the conflictual nature of the public sphere and binding the national sphere, while also loosely binding the European sphere.131 It must be remembered that, for Negt and Kluge, the public sphere is not simply a means of communication and critical discussion, it mediates and determines a certain horizon of experience in modern society. Within this public sphere, the public spheres of production can be said to mediate experience in ‘homogeneous, cross-time,’ and thus become a determining factor in the formulation of the national imaginary. Yet, the public sphere of production, which for Negt and Kluge mediates all public sphere communication and functions on the principle of maximized profit, is still embroiled in the bourgeois public sphere and continues to look to that sphere for legitimation. In Miriam Hansen’s account of early American cinema as an alternative public sphere for women, for example, she finds that the cinema was forced to engage with the historical, ossified bourgeois public sphere as ‘transcendental principle’ of decency, in order to legitimate its entertainment value and prevent censorship.132 Yet, if the bourgeois public sphere has been emptied of all radical potential by the development of the public spheres of production, to what do these spheres of production turn in order to seek legitimation if not an historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere? Thus the structural transformation of the bourgeois public sphere and the indefinite differentiation between it and the public spheres of production, suggests the evolution of a particular and cohesive ‘historical imaginary’ of the bourgeois public sphere which itself informs the public spheres of production and helps determine the political content of the ‘mainstream’ cinema. Moreover, the dissolution of the bourgeois public sphere seen by Habermas parallels the creation of an historical imaginary of that sphere in the cinema. This socio-political function still has resonance today in the many film awards for ‘artistic’ films throughout Europe, indeed

51 throughout the world. One possible reason for such a resonance is that the legitimating function of the bourgeois public sphere continues to this day in European politics. If we take the intertext of cinema and identify it as the space of the historical imaginary, being a composite of two discursive planes with an almost infinite range of confluences, we can then examine a ‘mainstream’ and discursive eddies, and we can formulate the relationship between the public sphere as historical field of identity formation and the coextensive historical imaginary as both reflecting and inflecting the public sphere as intersubjective space. This is compounded by the relationship between the public spheres of production and the national imaginary mentioned above. As Kluge suggests through Hansen, the affinity between the experiences on the screen and the experiences in the heads of the (national and European) audience opens a dialectical sphere of difference, a social-ontological field wherein the historical imaginary itself is the essential ‘trace’ of such a moment. It is this mode of the bourgeois public sphere as normative ideal that the critical cinema in Europe directly approaches.

52 CHAPTER 2

TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE (CINEMATIC) BORDERS OF EUROPE: INTERSUBJECTIVITY, THE PUBLIC SPHERE, AND THE CINEMA

Européen: celui qui a la nostalgie de l’Europe. –Milan Kundera (1995)

Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. –Albert Camus (1957)

In a recent film Jean-Luc Godard, remarking on the situation in Palestine, said that “the Jews became the stuff of fiction. The Palestinians of documentary.”133 This pithy quote, typical of Godard’s usual enigmatic discourse, highlights succinctly one manner in which cinema works to construct a people—or rather a social understanding of a people. Cinema has the power to construct social worlds, intersubjective landscapes, and as I postulated in the previous chapter, public spheres themselves. So how does it go about doing such a thing? I suggest that, when looking at European cinema, we can see the development of new borders, borders which are informed by the films produced within them, and which then go to determine a certain locus or central point for the development of the public sphere discourse which it engenders. So, on top of binding itself with remnants of the universalist public sphere of the bourgeoisie, a process which really informs the mode of production, films also produce localizations, limits to the collective interpretation of the homogeneous empty time. But what are we to make of these borders which are there and yet not there, present and yet absent? How does the sublation of these borders affect Gellner’s famous postulation of nationalism as “primarily a principle which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent.”134 Indeed, while a theorist such as Eric Hobsbawm would prefer not to assume an a priori definition of the nation,135 the historicized physical presence of the borders must play into the nation whether positively or negatively.

53 The problematic of ‘borders’ has recently emerged in literature on the political importance of the European Union in the ‘age of globalization.’ Critics such a Slavoj Žižek would have Europe represent a third pole of world politics, eschewing borders while also becoming itself a bordered region, and balancing the growing neoliberalized markets of the east and the imperial march of American culture. Jürgen Habermas and others point towards the more cosmopolitan orientation of Europe in its ‘postnational’ phase. While Etienne Balibar points out the continuing presence of borders within the European public sphere that belie the idealization of these very same concepts of postnationalism and which mask deeper divisions of race and class beneath concepts of universalism. In terms of my argument I see European cinema bridging these various concepts of Europe, including each in various forms and with various approaches while promoting a normatization of European culture, both openly and not so. Mainstream European cinema performs a critical function of pointing out the new borders of Europe, while also offering commentary on contemporary political problematics of European expansion, an expansion that is ‘always already’ economic in orientation but, when presented with the ‘borders’ of Europe, is problematized by questions of political, social and moral normativity. I see certain films, especially Fatih Akin’s cinema, as representing a ‘bridge’ into the truly ‘foreign’ to Europe, specifically Turkey, in a manner that contrasts it to regions whose entry into the Union is all but guaranteed.136 In this manner, Akin and other filmmakers map out the borders of Europe, and even criticize them, by creating a ‘national narrative’ and outlining the borders of a community which is etched in the synchronous time of consumption. Other films, films which fit into a ‘critical counterdiscourse’ tend to highlight the continual presence of internal borders which are masked by the ‘universal access’ to consumption while also pointing out the very structural conditions of reception that are conditioned by the public spheres of production. In this chapter I examine the ‘borders’ of the European cinema in their economic, social and predominately discursive meanings. That is not to say, however, that I seek out some essential ‘Europeanness’ within the cinema that I then conveniently find in several films. Rather, I look at how the European Cinema positions America and Hollywood cinema in a system of tropic images meant to differentiate European cinema from Hollywood, on the one hand; and how the European cinema represents the non-European with varying effects on the other. The consequence of this positioning is the establishment of discursive borders of Europe.

54 TOWARDS A THEORY OF BORDERS To begin I would like to discuss the concept of borders from a purely theoretical perspective. In order to construct a typology for borders as it is emerging in political and critical theory one can easily distinguish three overlapping, integrated categories: 1) the physical borders of the bureaucratic state, still present even in Europe, delimiting things such as national language and so forth; 2) the ‘imagined borders’ based on the work of Anderson, which are localized around the physical borders of the state, but work towards the construction of community and mediate the transition between community and state; and 3) discursive borders, which originate in discourse, and are not limited to the borders of the state so much as to the borders of interested parties, communities, nationalities, conglomerates, economies and so forth. On the level of cartography, the official, meaning-generating construction of the imagined community, the contemporary map of Europe is directly related to the realignment of states following the defeat of the Axis powers. Contemporary Europe is eternally bound, socially, politically, and culturally to World War II. Luisa Rivi suggests a polycentric geopolitical configuration of Europe and that in cinema “these principles find a direct application and produce new configurations of Europe.”137 While, as Andreas Huyssen has suggested, the reality and horror of the Holocaust has become a part of the modern historical imaginary, it is a historical imaginary that is generated by and in Europe. So, while Huyssen sees the Holocaust film as distributing the trauma of the Holocaust across the global community,138 this fact centers (western) Europe as the source of ultimate horror and evil in many cinematic narratives.139 Moreover Europe becomes the successive source of ultimate reconstruction, recovery and post- fascist social success. And this construction is always a composite of destruction, resistance, heroism, sacrifice and horror within a framework of Europe. In Holocaust, Schindler’s List, and even Heimat, the torture and mass murder of the Jews (a mostly nameless mass—dehumanized by the machinations of the camera in such a fashion as to shift this dehumanizing action to the German actors) demonstrates ultimately not simply the horror but the post-horror, the rebirth of characters into a newly purified world. In this mainstream representation of the Holocaust, the horror and the enormity of the depoliticized actions of the German soldiers is not normally a central theme. What is truly at issue is the passing through the horror, surviving, returning to the air, ending the torment. After all, the murder of six million Jews becomes the Holocaust in all of its historical import only through its

55 eventual end. And this end is projected onto the screen again and again as a visual and emotional marker of some historical phase shift. The historical shift is also localized in Europe, and brings the lessons of world history, just as in the Renaissance, back to Europe—arguably the locus of Western history. And this narrative also reiterates the reemergence of the European Phoenix from its own ashes. The second major realignment in recent memory, and one that continues to determine European discourse on many levels, is the dissolution of ‘real, existing socialism.’ The icon of that period, the iron curtain, i.e. the former division of Europe into east and west, signifies one of the most influential borders, physical and mental, in recent European history. To the politically oriented cinema of la nouvelle vague and the New German Cinema especially, the ‘real, existing socialism’ of the east was a sort of Schlaraffenland, a utopian dream-world of otherness which stood in opposition to the outright, militant capitalism of the west. The thematic interrelationship between Volker Schloendorff’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katherina Blum (1973) and Stille nach dem Schuss (2002) highlights the continual presence of die Mauer (The Wall) in German cinema. Indeed, the eschato-teleological orientation of both historical materialism and market liberalism, throughout the cold war, was the ‘clash of civilizations’ for the twentieth century, a clash that resulted not in a cataclysm but the slow erosion of ideology in general. The so-called ‘post-ideological’ vacuum that followed did not so much see the proclamation of victory, hosannas trumpeting to the heavens, but rather a continuation of ‘business as usual’ capitalism, the encroachment of industries into the unspoiled regions exposed to the west, the final movement into the ‘late capitalism’ of Ernst Mandel. That is to say that in spite of the verbal proclamations of the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama), in reality the churning processes of capitalism simply entered another stage; the beginning of a truly global consumer society. These two historical events help to determine the cartographical limitations of Europe—a place that is at one moment fluid and at the other historically ossified. In Germany Chancellors of the Cold War continually decried the split of their country into two, calling for the rapprochement of the two Germanys and the reunification of das Volk. Europe lived divided and this division is clear in Cold War European literature and cinema. It is no wonder that the German word for the period of reunification is die Wende, a word whose etymological richness (it can mean, rebound, reversal, or tacking about) suggests a course correction on the Sonderweg.

56 Such historical moments inform the imagined borders of Europe by offering a collective memory bank to which to reach for narrativization. The ‘imagined borders’ are more loosely defined than their physical representatives in space. As such they are related to the propagation of the nation as community. Central to the concept of the ‘imagined’ community, for Anderson, is ‘homogeneous, empty-time.’ This really means the ossification (as Hegel and Jamison would say: “the spirit is a bone”) of mass experience, the very evanescence of whose data (newspapers, magazines, etc) reiterates the interwoven nature of the imagined community. For Anderson this concept of communal time is related to the act of reading the newspaper, hebdomodaires or magazines; however, any manner of reiterative acts within the state, from renewing a driver’s license to going to the bank, reinforces this communal feeling, the essence of ‘homogeneous, empty-time.’ In other words the functions of identification that are controlled by the state tend to present themselves as a unified and uniform field of experience across the social spectrum. In the transnational situation of the EU, the reiterative functions of the state (acts that go towards reiterating the power and ubiquity of the state) are transferred to a larger community across many levels, and the monopoly of the nation-state is yielded in the construction of this larger community. This develops a different type of imaginary border. The physical representations of these borders, bound up continually with the metasocial ‘truth’ of the imagined borders, have all but disappeared, thus dislocating the imagined border from a real, existing one and shifting it to a distant and political edge. The passport control of the train from France to Germany is no longer a passport control, a police action reinforcing the sovereignty of the controlling nation, but is a confirmation of European identity, a reiteration and affirmation of transnational legality. Thus the imagined borders in the European interior begin to shift from the physical to the discursive, as the former borders become regional distinctions. Imagined borders continue, though, to bridge the discourse of the functionalist state and the actual ossified boundaries of the state, making for an interesting juxtaposition. They act as the infinitesimal median between the reality of politically (brutally) determined borders and the actual discourse of the state on/through/for its sovereignty, being the ‘metaphysical’ medium within which the discourse of the state and society is inscribed (in the Derridean notion of écriture). It is important to remember, however, that Anderson remarks on two fundamental temporal processes in the development of the nation (‘nation’ here to be understood as a

57 coextensive split between Wallerstein’s ‘peoplehood’ and the structural constituents of the state) and nationalism. The first is the concept of the cotemporaneous moment of collective experience, figured in the Benjaminian formulation of ‘homogeneous, empty time.’140 The second is a duration, a historical-discursive formulation that determines a certain experiential vocabulary for the community. Anderson mentions the Muslims’ experience of Mecca in this light: “It is not simply that in the minds of Christians, Muslims, or Hindus the city of Rome, Mecca, or Benares were the centers of sacred geographies, but that their centrality was experienced and ‘realized’ (in the stagecraft sense) by the constant flow of pilgrims moving towards them from remote and otherwise unrelated localities. [...] The strange physical juxtaposition of Malays, Persians, Indians, Berbers and Turks in Mecca is something incomprehensible without an idea of that community [the Muslim community] in some form.”141 That is to say that the process of the pilgrimage involves and is to some extent an experiential language in and of itself drawing the disparate members of the religious community together. This connection comes from a diachronic temporality of experience rather than the homogeneous, empty time of modernity. This historical, linear time, the basis for religious ‘traditions’ and dependent on a metaphysical causality, seems very closely related to what Benjamin names ‘Messianic’ time rather than the ‘shock’ of modern homogeneous, empty time.142 Anderson brings in this historical function in his chapter on the ‘Creole Pioneers,’ structurally connecting the meaning-generating powers and the infrastructure of budding states to the flow of pilgrims from “otherwise unrelated localities,” to religious centers.143 What Anderson does not point out, though, is that this flow, this religious relationship is intimately bound up with the Benjaminian concept of Messianic time, in that the formulation of relationships within these loose-knit communities is dependent on what is perceived to be a historic force, a Messianic force; in other words the glue of the religious community as Anderson represents it is, in fact, the (according to Auerbach) ‘medieval’ understanding of time as “a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present”144 and one that is inextricably linked to a certain teleology. The historical mode of the pilgrimage, as a representation of historical cultural accretion more so than a metaphysical movement, exposes members of a community to a broader base of possible members, whose relationship to them is confirmed not in language (parole) so much as in functional and religious intercourse (langue).

58 The same could be said, using the same paradigm, about the functional relationships between nation-states, in that the leader of a state has a counterpart in other states around the world, and so forth down the totem pole. In other words, the structural relationship for this communal understanding is already laid out in late capitalism and is intimately linked to the capitalistic mode of state structuration so that modern states are but models of a single, idealistic state. This manner of transnational intersubjective relationship (i.e. between ‘equal’ members of disparate states) does not seem to parallel the nationalistic qualities of the citizen, especially in that no president would be willing to die for other presidents. Such relationships are, however, related to what Anderson calls ‘journeys of the imagination.’ They are indicative of the primordial matter of the imagined community so to speak. What Anderson does not fully draw out, however, is the intimate connection between what amounts to a ‘double-teleology’ (i.e. the teleological binding of past and future into a simultaneous present) of the pilgrimage and its reflection in the functional processes of the state and its operatives. Thus, in the pilgrimage, the teleology of reaching the goal is bound to the transcendental / transhistorical teleology of the religious community. It would seem that this same double-teleology, or two intimately related teleological phases, can be found in the functional processes of the operatives of the liberal state. Thus, by extension, while the temporaneous ‘homogeneous, empty time’ is crucial for the foundations of the nation-state through the reiteration of the transverse time of the citizenry, there seems to be an inextricable functional role for materialist, Messianic time as well, a time that (religiously) is bound up with the evangelical potential of time, playing out this march to the end of days (peaceful coexistence in the shadow of the capitalistic future) while masking a structural affinity with corporations (instrumental reasoning oriented towards normatively-driven problem solving as can be seen idealized in Bismark’s bureaucracy) and the oligarchic economy.145 Discursive borders are the most ambiguous and simultaneously the most concrete of the borders. They are those which allow the ‘we’ of the local political Greens, to become the transnational ‘we’ of the European Greens. They are discursive in that they are verbal, calls to action, rhetorical devices. This category describes the linguistic/idealistic divisions between and within communities, groups, classes, and so forth. As such it is the realm of the iteration of the imagined community and the public sphere. I think a distinct categorization of these borders must be effected, however, because of the tendency of public sphere theory (which I will discuss

59 below) to homogenize the individual’s relationship to particular public discourses. Understanding the discourse as a category in and of itself, distinct from engendering subjectivities, so to speak, is crucial to working out the political function of the cinematic commodity. As the discursive borders map the imaginary limits of the community, they also map the very potential of discourse itself within the community (and over and above the community) and help set normative definitions to the limits of such discourse as well as access to such discourse. The limits of these borders only reveal themselves diachronically through ‘ruptures’ within the discourse and between discourses, ruptures that are prefigured within the community but not realized until after the ‘moment’ of the rupture. That is not to say that there are not ruptures and or gaps between discourses within the community (i.e. synchronic and coetaneous ruptures), only that ruptures and changes within the discourse that are diachronic and that seemingly alter the discourse or discursive border are always prefigured synchronically within the bounds of the society on some level (normally outside the discursive border of the community). As I mentioned above, the state seems to have a teleological function bound up with the concept of Benjaminian Messianic time in Benedict Anderson. I link this function to the continuity functions of the state on a pragmatic level and the historical imaginary on a discursive level—the historical imaginary knits itself into the normativity of national-narrative in a specific fashion that I will discuss in Chapter 3 on the function of the cinema in the historical narrative of Europe. These borders are also inextricably linked to the continuity of the public sphere and discourse through/in tradition. The process of rupturing this assumed historical continuity can open two branches or eddies of discourse—the ideological and the pragmatic. The ideological discourse postulates the existence of the ‘rupture’ as a violent change, or attempt at change, and reconstructs the continuity of the public sphere and the community / state in relationship to the rupture as ideological event. Oftentimes the change proffered by the ideological discourse is itself purely discursive / fictional and little related to real events. In this case the rupture is elevated to an ideological call to action, converted to a symbol for some larger, historical force that is portrayed as either interrupting the teleology of the state or carrying it closer to completion. The pragmatic discourse sutures the supposed ‘rupture’ into the continuity of the public sphere as an aspect of the events of the public sphere or community itself, normally positioning the rupture as a natural outcome of the processes of the system but still teleologically

60 oriented. These borders are also a part of the world-system of borders rather than limited to the nation-state. Habermas is not blind to these discursive borders. In his discussion of postnational will- formation and the pressures of globalization on the nation-state, Habermas recognizes the divisions that run through Western societies in the face of immigration and growing ethnic communities in Europe.146 The historical nature of the nationalistic power structure must then be reconsidered to allow for the inclusion of ethnic minorities and the generation of a ‘constitutional patriotism’ to supplant nationalism. Thus Habermas sees the public sphere as in reality bordered and filled with internal borders mediating inclusion and discursive interaction; he differs from many in seeing this as essentially changeable through the actions of the public sphere itself and its nature of inclusion: “Inclusion means that a collective political existence keeps itself open for the inclusion of citizens from every background, without enclosing these others into the uniformity of a homogenous community.”147 This postnational constellation, for Habermas, represents the denationalized political structures of nation-states, specifically the public sphere and its liberating potential, or potential for generating normative and political changes in society. Balibar and others have been critical of this mode of political theory, signaled by Habermas, Rorty and others, i.e. of the potential inherent in open access and denationalized public spheres. For Balibar, the answer is in ‘democratizing’ citizenship and “thus ‘making right’ and civilizing the state and politics.”148 While Habermas’s model may indicate a utopian ideal in political philosophy, it does highlight the real existence within ‘real existing’ society of internal delimiting discursive borders. There is also the gamble Habermas recognizes in the construction of the European public sphere that such discursive borders normalized in nationalist discourse will flow into a public sphere that is composed of nationalized public spheres that are simply oriented towards a postnational constellation, while retaining their inherent normative-driven exclusions and delimitations. Etienne Balibar remarks that the discourse on borders in Europe throughout the conflict in the Balkans of the nineties is strongly demonstrative of the structural relationship between discourse and the ‘imagined’ community. This question of ‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’ (which Balibar admittedly borrows from Wallerstein) is in many ways a paradigm for the dual concept of Europe as political entity and cultural imagined space within discourse. For example, the political Europe (EU) can and does define itself by a process of admission and exclusion—that is

61 to say through deciding to allow nations to enter or to deny them admission. Politically this is related to an economic pragmatics (stability of the applicant-country’s economy in order to prevent a destabilization of the economic EU) and a social pragmatics (stability of the political society of the applicant-nation). An eighty thousand page document of laws lays out all of the requirements for admission. However, both of these categories of decisions are also tied up with the imagined cultural space of Europe. This is what informs much political discourse on the application of Turkey to the EU. Giscard d’Estaing, former French President and main political operative in the failed attempt to draft a European Constitution (also known as the European Treaty), has stated on many occasions that Turkey is ‘non-European,’ a conclusion he bases not only on Turkey’s precarious geographic position but also on its problematical cultural and historical relationship to a Christian European historical / cultural sphere.149 Such a political discourse constructs borders in the public sphere when referring to Turkey which distance that country from ‘European’ culture.150 Not only does this discourse inform the construction and reiteration of the imagined community and the imagined borders, but it also builds ‘interior’ borders, or borders that are unique to political discourse such that the very attempt at normalizing relations with Turkey in order to work towards its admission is bound to this previously established discursive border.151 Politicians must transgress this border and risk ‘betraying’ their community in these situations thus demonstrating the power of something that seems insubstantial. The economic variation of the discursive border acts on many levels as a mediator between the political and the social. Using the framework offered by Habermas of the social- state in the origins of the nation-state, where the public sphere mediated between society and the state, we could easily re-inscribe this according to current trends wherein the economic discursive border on a transnational scale mediates between the political (decisions made in support of the economic foundations of the EU) and the social (decisions made within society to support one or more decisions by politicians through the act of consumption or denial of consumption). The rational critical function of the bourgeois public sphere has been converted to a more democratized and highly complex system of economic criticism, with the medium of criticism controlled not by those critiquing but by those in need of criticism.

62 EUROPEAN CINEMA AND THE BORDERS OF EUROPE Contemporary European cinema—as it works itself into an aesthetic and thematic constellation of self-referentiality formulating the mainstream figure of European subjectivity, informed by European history but not overwhelmed by it—also works to construct a border region on either side. This construction is contained within the ideological bounds of many European films, offering a confirmation in some cases and subtle reconfiguration in other cases of pre-established borders. One example of how this process works is the rather curious example of Turkish-German director Fatih Akin and his ‘European’ romantic comedy, Im Juli (In July, 2000). While this romantic narrative, the classic tale of a transcendent, fate-driven love between a young, hip, Caucasian and German couple, is on the whole rather banal; in the context of both the expanding European Union and émigré filmmaking the story speaks volumes. It was a mostly nationally produced film, receiving funding from FilmFernsehFonds Bayern and Filmförderung Hamburg, and produced by Wüste Film Produktion. However, the narrative is filled with images, characters, and music that highlights the pan-European commodity market, the creation of a consuming youth public (ein Publikum in Habermas’s terms) with the effect of contracting the European public sphere into a representation of commodity access, clique culture, and the ‘traveling European’ subjectivity—again specifically associated with a young public. The film does an excellent job of tying into this specific discourse (commodity discourse) on one level; and moreover the narrative as a whole also importantly links Turkey and Europe into a common, modern field of reference. In this fashion the film builds socio-cultural bridges between these public spheres and brings the otherness of Turkey into a closer, intersubjective relationship to Europe, especially in contrast to the ‘frontier land’ of Romania and Bulgaria. The plot is that of a fairly straightforward romantic comedy, with all of the usual traits involved in such a narrative arc: the emotional ‘enlightenment’ of the main character, the postponement of desire, the paradigm of the hunt as metaphor for the modern sexual ‘wooing’ of the female, and the final (re)union of would-be lovers in the dénouement. Akin reconfigures this paradigm in some interesting ways, however, that speak to both the relationship between Turkish immigrants and German culture, and on another level Europe and Turkey relations in a general sense.

63 Curiously, though, the main love-interests in the film are both young, white Germans. The teacher Daniel (Moritz Bleibtreu of Lola rennt fame), obviously not in control of his students or his life, meets and falls instantly in love with a young Turkish girl, Melek, who is to travel to Turkey the day after they meet. After she leaves for Turkey, Daniel decides on a whim to break with his tradition of remaining in Hamburg for the Ferien (vacation) and makes for Turkey in a borrowed car. Along the way he picks up Juli, who has fallen in love with him, and whom he has spurned (however unwittingly) for the sake of Melek. They travel as far as Bayern before the car breaks down, then hitch a ride with several colorful characters on their trip through the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and finally into Turkey. Daniel is robbed of his wallet with all of his identification; he is separated from Juli, and finally reunites with Melek only to discover that she is in love with someone else. Of course, Daniel discovers that he is in love with Juli and goes to meet her in Istanbul, on the Bosporus Strait, exactly at the division between Europe and Asia. This master narrative is told partially by Daniel to a young Turkish-German, Isa, who has found Daniel on the side of a Bulgarian road. Daniel’s story to Isa details his falling in love, traveling through the former Eastern Bloc, being kidnapped, robbed, and attacked by drug dealers before finally finding his way to Bulgaria. The narrative then picks up halfway through the film with the end of the trip, Isa and Daniel in the car together, to Turkey. The final scene sees the four characters, all finally united on the screen, mounting into Isa’s car and making their way back to Germany to complete the circle. The visual positioning of the border region of Europe becomes important for Im Juli. The film opens with the title, in bold red font, wavering on the screen, completely filling the space, all letters of equal size. The sound of wind blowing is the only sound until a punctuation mark, a period, explodes onto the screen with a thud, and the wavering letters are frozen in place. All of these together give the opening the accent of a Leone ‘Spaghetti Western.’ The opening shot adds to this impression when we are shown a highway (we are told in Bulgaria), wavering in the heat of the sun. The still, desolate landscape—across which the Hollywood-indoctrinated viewer would expect to see a tumbleweed blow at any moment—is broken only by the sound of the wind and the sight of a car coming slowly through the wavering heat towards the camera. This opening scene clearly encodes ‘Bulgaria’ as a frontier of sorts, a wilderness, miming the use of the California and Arizona deserts in contemporary Hollywood films or the flatlands

64 of southern Italy in Leone’s westerns. This is also the only real image the film gives of Bulgaria and one that is highlighted by a location title. It is then almost over-laden with this association with the frontier, a border region on the edges of civilization. In fact the question of borders, both their porous nature in the modern, European context and the relationship between the transition of borders and the self-actualization, self-discovery of the main character, is central to the overarching themes of the film. On the level of the psychologizing narrative, Daniel’s character develops in association with his relationship to the imagined and real borders of each country into which he is thrown. On the level of suturing the European viewer into the film, these borders become a subtle reconfiguration of Europe’s eastern border into a primitive frontier-land which separates (authentic) modern country (Turkey) from (commodity-driven) modernity (Europe).152 As a product of this border region as frontier and the elevation of Turkey to status of narrative synthesis (the spatial embodiment of the unification of lovers—the ‘New York’ for Akin’s cinema), there is another, deeper synthesis that takes place. It is within this synthesis that the construction of a young, European identity can be found. The introduction of the title character, Juli, is surrounded by a certain commodity-structure constellation of ‘authentic’ South American jewelry, clothing, and folk items. Daniel comes walking through the small, open-air market where Juli works. She calls him to her table and introduces the fairly common ‘postmodern’ theme of reason/science v. emotion/myth by selling him a ring with a (supposedly) Mayan representation of the sun. This ring is to bring him luck, so she claims, and he believes it does when he sees Melek, also wearing the emblem of the sun on her shirt, and becomes enamored. While this is a fairly trite narrative function, it does tap into a theme that is becoming more prominent in European narratives, i.e. the transcendent quality of fate driving a teleological narrative. This scene figures prominently in structuring a method of decoding for the European audience, a decoding that constructs a synthetic subjectivity for Europe as an ideal form— specifically the synthesis of South and Central America (as commodity form, of course) and Eastern Europe. These are the imagined borders for the films subjectivity. As such, the young Europeans in the film (and both Isa and Melek have been reclaimed for this ‘honor’ by the film) become a physical manifestation of this cultural synthesis. The European subject can then transcend these regional interests in its synthesis, can decode global capital and form

65 intersubjective communities that are truly postnational in scale, based in a postnationality born in relationship to the now idealized global capital.153 This is the figuration of the ‘postnational constellation’ within the commodity structure, within the confines of and driven by the interests of the public spheres of production, because it links this public sphere as idealized space (for consumption) with a real existing public (Publikum). It also inscribes the European subject with the power to transcend the baser forces of modernity and rework it as he or she sees fit. It is a mask, of course, for consumption. Only in the act of consumption, and not work, can this European subjectivity, a synthesis of East and West in the form of the self-actualized modern lover, transcend modernity. The truly subtle beauty of Im Juli is that Akin performs this act of transcendence in the narrative coding on both the Europeans (Daniel and Juli) and the young Turks (Isa and Melek), thus bringing Turkey into discursive Europe in one deft maneuver. Akin reworks the borders of the nascent European public sphere to bind these spheres and set them ‘over and against’ the frontier region of the former eastern bloc countries. The conflict arises in the fact that this flies in the face of real economic and political forces working around this film, elevating the narrative themes to an imaginary alone. By the time this dissertation will be finished both Romania and Bulgaria will have joined the EU, having passed the probationary period, while Turkey has not even reached the first stage in spite of years of negotiations. In Akin’s film (and this is no less true, though figured differently, in his Head On [Gegen die Wand, 2004]), this real political distance between Turkey and Europe is contracted and sublated within the European subjectivity itself, enfolded in the commodity structure of the film and its narrative. In spite of the innate nostalgia for the mythical homeland on the part of Akin, the portrayal of Turkey does not bear the weight of inscription in the same fashion as does Romania and Bulgaria. By ‘inscription’ I mean the particular strategies the film employs in order to formulate a composite of the Eastern frontier land of Europe, through titles, comically overacted characters (Akin, himself overplays a Romanian border guard), and the fact that Daniel is tricked into outrageous situations by the natives of these frontier lands, robbed by them, drugged by them and beaten by them, while he is able to extricate himself from the Turkish prison in the face of very understanding Turkish guards. The lands of Romania and Bulgaria become characters in the film, they are told; while Turkey disappears into the comfortable background of state functions, social gatherings (cafés) and landscape—it is shown.

66 What this film is able to do is to etch this synthetic European subjectivity with the newly inscribed tortoise-shell borderlines of an idealized European public sphere. On the theoretical level of the discussion of borders Akin’s film makes for an interesting heuristic. Following my discussion of Hansen and Fraser in the previous chapter, this is clearly not the creation of a public sphere. Rather, this film fits into a particular decoding of the idealized European sphere that allows for the exposition of a particular, meaning-inscribing subjectivity. What this film also does is establish the ideological filter for this decoding that situates the idealized European subjectivity as a synthesis of east and west, young, and as recognizing in the end the sympathetic qualities of Turkey. As such, the film introduces counterdiscourses which play into the mainstream public (especially as this is a mainstream film). Instead of questioning the European subjectivity and its qualities of synthesis, self- actualization, and self-realization in the face of the eastern other (and the Turkish ‘same’), in this film Akin embroils Turkey into the hegemonic structure of the nascent European public sphere by seeking to restructure a particular horizon of experience within this sphere. This act of bringing Turkey and the Turkish ‘subjectivity’ into line with the European ideal is played out through the narrative and formal coding surrounding Daniel’s infatuation with Melek. Not only does Akin perform a straight-forward foregrounding of the themes of the exotic other and the western infatuation with this exoticism in the figure of Melek, but he also plays it off of the more chthonic overtones of Central American religions (or the imaginary of such religions) as sympathetic to and bound up with Juli’s own feminine fatalism. In this sense the film binds and constrains Juli’s sexuality through mystification, and through the construction of a chthonic link to the ‘transcendental subjectivity’ of fate; thus as Teresa de Lauretis would say, the film “binds her (in) sexuality.”154 She is wrapped up in the subsumption (sublation) of her sexuality through the film’s mystification of her as a product of narrative teleology. Her sexuality and her desire drive the arc of the narrative but only in and through the very filmic absence or transformation of such desire. At the same time, however, her Doppelgänger, Melek, is composed in a very different way by the film. She is introduced through a slow-motion, medium-long shot, as she walks towards the camera, her body slowly filling the screen (in a way that directly reconfigures the introduction of Juli, as she sees Daniel walking towards her in the street). Not only does this presentation of the sexual other play into the dominant cinema’s portrayal of (female) sexuality

67 as contained, yet otherworldly, it also serves the narrative function of highlighting Daniel’s sudden infatuation. Juli’s infatuation has been returned but to the wrong object (Melek), thus the matching of the shots (Juli falling for Daniel; Daniel falling for Melek). In a later shot, as Daniel and Melek sit on the fire-lit beach of Hamburg, Melek hears music. The song is obviously Turkish, because she sings in Turkish, but the chords, scales and fingering are strongly reminiscent of Flamenco music—Flamenco music’s associations with Zigeuner (Gypsies) adds to the themes of exoticism and travel throughout the film. Once Melek begins singing, she is shown in a close-up, profile shot, her face limned by the soft light of the fire, and the figure taking up the left-hand half of the screen, allowing the right-hand side to reveal the slow revolution of both Melek and camera, locked into an inexorable unity. Melek pans with the camera. This shot almost breaks the suture developed with the viewer; but it falls short as we come to Daniel in the slow pan—afterwards we see a very usual shot-reverse shot sequence between the two. For this moment, though, Melek is able to control both the auratic field and the visual field with her presence, and not only is her sexuality bound by the conversion into music of sexual desire, non-desiring desire, but her existence in the narrative is encoded as exotic. The fact that she leaves less than twenty minutes into the film fixes this encoding and leads to the eventual decoding of Daniel’s understanding of her as exotic and the infatuation that arises because of it. As she becomes a full character later in the film, with the reunion between her and Daniel, only then does Daniel realize (with the European viewer) the coextensive relationship between the exotic and simple infatuation established by the narrative coding—a relationship that is bound to her as character. This does not, however, negate the introduction of Turkey to the European public sphere on the part of Akin; in fact it facilitates it as the introduction of a non- exotic, non-other Turkey—a modern and ‘European’ Turkey—through the ‘normalized’ reorientation or Aufhebung of Melek’s exoticism. While Akin’s narrative encoding acts to reformulate old, or effect new, political discursive borders within the public sphere and enfold Turkey into the discursive fold of ‘modernity’ (on the level of cultural hegemony rather than economic or technological sophistication), the film also reiterates a particular European subjectivity, which is generated by the public spheres of production as an ideal consumer. The narrative arc of the psychological and emotional ‘sophistication’ of Daniel plays on the well-established theme of emotion over reason,

68 not as some deep-structured political or social statement, but as a natural progression of the repressed consumer into consumer society. At no point does Akin question the nature of the experience-orienting public spheres of production. Rather, he links his characters to the form of social resistance that devolved from political modernist filmmaking, that is resistance within commodified society (society of consumption) and through new subjective interrelationships with commodities (the cinema). Rather than offering a uniquely configured narrative space as a form of critique of the hegemonic discursive constellations of the European public sphere, Akin reworks these borders in such a manner as to remain within the mainstream hegemony, within the formulaic nature of the public spheres of production, and he uses the prefigured ideological configurations of such a sphere to go about it. The problem, of course, with this reading is that this manipulation on the part of Akin is apolitical and does little to properly reclaim Turkey as a modernized socio- cultural and political sphere distinct from the European hegemony within political discourse. This film offers no critique of the hegemony of the European public sphere because it does not expose this hegemony nor the ideological functions of the public spheres of production that orient the mass experience of and within such a hegemony. It remains completely sutured in a transcendent fashion that reflects its own narrative device of ‘fate’; the lovers are fated to come together, a telos which is revealed from the introduction of Juli and through the configuration of slow zoom onto her enamored face matched with her pov-shot of Daniel—framed in a long- distance shot—walking towards the camera, extras in the shot scattering in various directions around him. The film follows this teleology and the narrative becomes the exposition of Daniel’s ‘emotional development,’ as he moves from infatuation to ‘true’ love. Any question of a message on the inverted relationship between infatuation and mature sexual love is also lacking; Daniel is ‘fated’ to love Juli. Juli is connected to this message by her sexuality (she knows fate), and her ‘womanly intuition.’ Akin thus offers no critique or reconfiguration of the romantic-comedy genre; but he does employ this genre with all of its ideological trappings as a means of reconfiguring (narratively) the ‘space’ of Europe (to employ Rosalind Galt’s language). This brings me to a methodological consideration. There are two general directions for the discussion of the configuration of borders in the narrative. The first is as I have attempted with Akin’s film above. In my examination I pointed out the nature of the narrative to reconfigure the political and social constellations that construct the nascent European public

69 sphere through the manipulation of the borders within the hegemonic structure. The second is that employed by Rosalind Galt in her examination of the on-screen space of several European films in relationship to the geopolitical space of Europe. Rosalind Galt has recently suggested that von Trier’s Zentropa (1991) explores the spatialization and simultaneous projection of disparate European discourses on the filmic screen itself.155 The filmic trope that delivers this effect is that of back projection, wherein the filmic narrative space is made shallow to forward the spectacle. For Galt, “a radical deconstruction of European unity can be discerned” in this technique, “in which the ambivalent identifications and impossible location of ‘Europe’ seep into the very form of the image.”156 One of the results of such diegetic texturing, according to Galt, “is lack of identification, so that the spectator is distanced from the mechanisms of classical narrative absorption.”157 Thus the filmic image itself can be seen as the space wherein the composition of European ‘identity’ is exposed as a composite structure of discourse involving disorientation and Verfremdung. This composition on the screen parallels the model of discursive borders I presented above, as though these very borders are being mapped onto von Trier’s screen but as a composite image rather than spatially distinct ‘areas’. Another manner of this mapping, however, takes place in the construction of America and Hollywood as an idealized imaginary, a commodity space displaced from the ‘real’ and offered in critical juxtaposition to the reality of the European narrative. Cédric Klapitsch’s in other ways uninspiring movie about drug addiction, Good Old Daze (Le péril jaune, 1994), offers an example of the influence of American culture on 1970s French society. While the story of a young man’s slow descent into drug addiction is handled well, with little in the way of superficial moralizing, the striking feature of the film is the (re)creation of an American culture, 70s rock culture, in the context of the French education system. The young, middle class children who become embroiled in this culture, experimenting with drugs while listening to American and British rock hits, have little connection to the commodity item as a whole, so that the celebration of this music as a form of cultural resistance plays into the very deep disconnection between the American driven rock scene and French society. This ‘American scene’ is also inextricable from its relationship to drug culture (the ‘yellow peril’ of the original French title referring to Tomasi’s (Romain Duris) eventual addiction to heroin). So American culture is seen as positive while offering pleasure and ‘release’ through consumer society (the consumption of music, food, drugs, etc) and negative when tied to its drug-laden legacy. The fact that these young students

70 continue into their lives by moving into normatively driven, middle-class positions in society (except for Tomasi of course) adds to the ineffectual nature of that (imagined) resistance they thought they had discovered in the American commodity form. This construction of a ‘commodity’ that is America and the associations of American music with strong emotions can be found throughout mainstream European cinema. The mainstream normally does not seek through its narrative, social, or historical coding to confront America, however, in any way. When in Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior (Der Krieger und die Kaiserin, 2000) Steini (Walter Rudolph) puts on the Brenda Lee song, “I’m Sorry” (1960), this makes no statement on the seeming omnipresence of American culture in European society. It is not the omnipresence of pornography seen in Wenders’s An American Friend, nor the ironic use of American genre styles in Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy;” nor the well-known opening lines of Fellini’s dedication to his home city, Roma: “He has written from America [...] They eat everything out of cans over there.” Tykwer simply uses this song to highlight Steini’s own maniacal egotism. He does not understand that this song makes no statement, is devoid of meaning in the modern European society; thus he does not understand that his actions (his attempt at apology) are coded as pathetic for the viewer. The framing of the turntable as he slowly places the needle not only calls forward nostalgic images for a modernized, digital society, but also connects this archaic technology, archaic message, and archaic ‘modernity’ (as commodity system) with the character of Steini (a member of the asylum’s more emotionally unstable inhabitants), a character the viewer already understands as unstable. The connection highlights the superficiality of the song, of this American import, in the structuration of its meaning in the European context. Later, as Sissi (Run Lola Run star Franka Potente) watches the German version of de Sica’s Miracle in Milan (Miracolo a Milano, 1951) on television, the contraction of past and present, color and black and white, old commodity and new commodity, and reality and fantasy is fore-grounded by the film. On one level, the narrative coding of the film ties into the fantastic nature of de Sica’s ‘neorealist’ narrative (a narrative which is anything but neorealist). Peter Bondanello writing of the film states: “the film attacks the very definition of neorealism canonized in the essays of André Bazin.”158 The fantastic narrative of de Sica’s film, ascribed to both the narrative and the ‘American’ style special effects created by veteran Ned Mann, draws points of similarity to the ‘fantastic’ nature of Sissi’s love for her savior, Bodo (Benno

71 Fürmann). The impossibility of Toto reaching for the sun and bringing it to his lover in de Sica’s film parallels both Sissi’s unrealistic feelings about romance and her own mystical belief in fate. Visual coding in Tykwer’s film, however, highlights the framed black and white screen of the television, the American style special effect of the rising sun, and the sense of fantasy that such a scene brings. Bondanella again: “De Sica goes beyond Rossellini’s suggestive treatment of the camera’s relationship to reality and concentrates upon the place of the imagination itself [...]. The entire film is thus an extended metaphor, a hymn to the role of illusion and fantasy in art, as well as in life...”159 Visually, Tykwer highlights this function of de Sica’s narrative and special effects (and as such he parallels Jeunet’s use of Hopper paintings to design the set for Delicatessen—i.e. the creation of an unreal world based on the American imaginary). As such, the ‘message’ of de Sica’s film is left dangling in the frothy waters of intertextuality. Bondanella continues describing de Sica’s film by explaining, “it is not merely a frivolous entertainment. De Sica tells us that the human impulse to creativity in the work of art [...] is capable of transcending social problems but not of resolving them.”160 It is this social message that is lacking in Tykwer’s film and, indeed, contorted by it. Tykwer turns to the relationship between man and nature, women and the chthonic/transcendental in the film, and ascribes a deep power of redemption to the woman—not on the level of the social but on the level of the psychological. The disturbing image of Bodo split into two, competing egos at the end of the film, and the final ostracizing of his ‘crying’ self seems to highlight the necessity in contemporary European society of turning away from the social, turning away from the past itself (both personal and social Vergangenheitsbewältigung) and continuing into the future as a ‘purified’ and redeemed soul. These examples suggest that the American influence on European society, mass production and the European public spheres of production has itself been sublated and subsumed into the contestational origins of the European public sphere. This practice of turning American commodities into representations of an idealized, archaic space, an outdated ‘modernity’ subsumes the continuing and continual political, social and economic interference taking place between America and Europe. The direct exploration of the ‘American border’ of Europe that took place in the sixties and seventies, in films such as Godard’s Le Weekend, Wenders’s The American Friend, and Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, just to name a few, is supplanted largely in contemporary European cinema by the manner of contracting this

72 influence, transferring it into an idealized past and finally sublating it. Europe does not imagine itself in relationship to other nations (or the two superpowers of the latter half of the 20th century), but is turning in on itself as a source of something autochthonous, or /European/ . In such a movement the critique of the public spheres of production cannot and does not take place on any significant level, and the bulk of European cinema remains frozen within the commodified structure—a commodified structure it borrowed from its early competition with Hollywood. Thus the border system of the European public sphere, a system that is in its enfant stages, malleable yet tendentious can be affected by Akin’s reconfiguration and reclamation of Turkey for the European public sphere, but the historio-hegemonic nature of this sphere, a nature that derives from its structural affinity with the nationalized bourgeois public spheres, is rarely called into question by mainstream directors. The idealized European sphere is based in open access. However, the knowledge necessary to function critically within this sphere is mediated, as is the sphere itself, by the public spheres of production. The horizon of experience spoken of in Negt and Kluge is the delimitation of the knowledge of the practicing subject; and this horizon is run through with imaginary and discursive borders, themselves also a function of the dynamic between mediation and production. In the case of the mainstream European cinema, the very roots of a postnational subjectivity is emerging. It is postnational, though, not due to the critical- philosophical consideration of postnationality (Habermas) but to the positioning of such a subjectivity within the demographics of commodified modernity. That means that postnationality for the mainstream European cinema is inscribed by the public spheres of production and is thus oriented around the act of consumption—highlighting emotional (libidinal impulses) over reason, masking the commodification of society, and so forth. This is not necessarily an intentional movement on the part of any single member of the European production system, but is based in the basic elevation of film as commodity over film as aesthetics, a position that the European cinema is forced to take in the face of Hollywood competition and the eradication of the art cinema market.

73 FICTIVE ETHNICITIES IN EUROPEAN CINEMA When Étienne Balibar speaks of the “movement of borders from the ‘edge’ to the ‘center’ of public space,”161 in Europe, across the transnational sphere, one aspect of this shift is clearly discursive. It is also closely related, in Balibar, to the genetic tendencies he witnesses in the nation-state form. Balibar is not referring to a definite national sphere. Rather, this shift is pan- European and even global in its reach. Yet, the thematic arc of his work suggests that this transnational move is merely an extension of tendencies inherent to the nation-state system. The specific ‘movement’ to which Balibar is referring is the willful development of communities within the borders of nation-states defined by an internal exclusion, that is the “reproduction of ‘ethnic borders’ within urban neighborhoods of the great ‘world cities’ that accompany the migration and concentration of populations from the whole world, and whose complexity explodes the far-too-reductive idea of ‘communitarianism’ or ‘ghettos.’”162 Borders, for Balibar, are “no longer ‘lines:’ instead they are detention zones and filtering systems;” and they are systems the existence of which seems to indicate the generation of a “global apartheid” centered around the controlled movement of labor and the poor across (real) borders.163 This represents the ideological extension of the borders to which Balibar referred in his essay “The Nation Form: History and Ideology.” In this essay he wrote that “external frontiers have to be imagined constantly as a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been—and always will be—at home.”164 And along the same lines in Politics and the Other Scene, Balibar calls nationalism essentially projective.165 This manner of projection is related to the very concept of the nation-state (as an imagined community rather than a functional system), for Balibar, and generates the global space for internal exclusion within these ‘detention zones’ and ‘filtering systems.’ On the level of borders, then, Balibar’s model clearly sees the generation of ‘imagined borders’ within the public sphere of Europe, lines of demarcation between the internal and the external within the bounds of the nation-state itself. The question becomes how does one affect the ‘projective’ quality of the nationalist or redirect this ‘projection’? One possibility, and one espoused by Habermas, is the creation and institutionalization on a cosmopolitan scale of the critical public sphere. The criticism from Balibar is that such a public sphere has an inevitable normative vector such that the mapping of the nationalist imagined

74 community is (for the worse) superimposed on the public sphere even in its ‘postnational’ form, i.e. its pan-European or even pan-world form. This is not, of course, a radical, postmodern, anti- normative critique, merely the rejection of the possibility of a stable critical public sphere with the power to regenerate itself ‘universally’ in its subjects outside of the bounds of ‘fictive ethnicity.’ As he says elsewhere: “it is always the practical confrontation with the different modalities of exclusion (social, and thus political, for the two notions have never truly been separate) that constitutes the founding moment of citizenship....”166 This dialectical movement of exclusion and inclusion defines the immigrants experience within Europe. In films such as Akin’s Gegen die Wand (2005) this process is represented not as a political discourse on the development of identity within the context of the state, but as a deeper question of the social and emotional which is cast as a crisis within intersubjectivity. Whereas political modern cinema of the seventies tended to present crises in intersubjectivity within the context of the state and socio-moral normativity, Akin represents this crisis in his Turkish characters outside of the reflection of identity in the mirror of the state. Immigration is a transhistorical substance and not part of the characters immediate experiences. The immigrant, as in Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), is politically ‘same’, being European citizens, while socially and emotionally ‘other’. This also represents a specific trope of marginalization, however; the danger being that the immigrant experience and that of their children within the problematic of socio- cultural ‘integration’ is reduced to a function of narrative, the marginalization of ‘outcast’ characters, a marginalization that works itself out as the film progresses. For Akin, this ‘working out’ takes place not in Europe, but in Turkey, again elevating this social space to compete with the social space of Germany on the screen. For Kassovitz, this ‘working out’ takes place within the context of the ‘real’ city of Paris, surrounded by Parisian visual artifacts (e.g. the Eiffel Tower).167 This has the effect of contrasting the two spaces as non-contiguous, distinct. The relationship to immigration is not in specific difficulties with state immigration services, but in the location of the youth within the banlieue. The generation of a ‘fictive ethnicity’ can be seen as particularly exposed in both Kassovitz and Akin in a manner that is related to the ability of the characters to move within different and disparate social and cultural spaces. Yet in Kassovitz, as in Jean-François Ricochet’s Ma 6-t va crack-er, these “filtering zones” have produced integrated communities whose very social cohesion, and malfeasance, comes from their relationships to the processes of social inclusion and exclusion:

75 inclusion within the political entity of Europe while excluded from social progression and the idealized social narrative of the bourgeois public spheres of production. Balibar does see a function for the public sphere. However, it must be remembered that the public sphere, in his work, is merely a constituent part, through the separation of the public and the private spheres, of political discourse. The very division of such spheres generates a vacuum, which is then filled by politics. He does not ascribe, specifically or generally, to either sphere the rational-critical potential seen by Habermas.168 In Balibar’s model, any construction of a ‘public sphere’ in the Habermasian sense would seem inextricably bound to and determined by the notion of the ‘fictive ethnicity’—an ethnicity that is generated not in fiction or through fiction but as fiction and thus bound up with the Andersonian notion of the ‘imagined community’ and distinctly oriented around a single discourse.169 Thus regardless of the rational- critical function of the public sphere in its ‘idealized’ form the normativity of this fictive identity (modeled on the inclusion / exclusion dynamic) would seem to prefigure any criticism generated within it. While this model of ‘internal exclusion’ and ‘fictive ethnicity’ do not solve the problematic developed by the close association of commodity production and cultural production, it does allow us to map the divisions within the public sphere on a different level, on the transnational level, and one that is an extension, to this point, of European ‘fictive ethnicity’ onto the larger transnational public sphere. It also repositions the problematic so that the vectors of projection (nationalism projecting itself onto the other) is reversed—a nation ‘projects’ (distributes) a particular cultural product (the cinema) onto the world as an interface or representative of an essential (but fictive) nature that is then to be associated with the ‘fictive ethnicity’ of the imagined community. UFA’s productions were more essentially ‘German’ commodities than representations of some Germanic essence, to follow Elsaesser.170 As such they develop a historical imaginary for the German people, surely, but more importantly a historical imaginary of the German people on the level of international reception. The Weimar cinema ‘advertised’ Germanic narratives, social situations, and a ‘fictive’ Weltanschauung to the world market. Habermas’s model of the public sphere is oriented around the pragmatics of the modern socioeconomic system. He also, as Balibar later, sees a particular deterministic relationship between the private (and intimate) sphere and the public sphere. It is this division that I would like to map as another ‘border’ under consideration. That is to say that the constitution of what is

76 essentially idealized in societies as borderless (read universal), the public sphere, involves in its inception a definite if somewhat ambiguous demarcation of the public from the private. This construction is seen by Habermas as a ‘performance’ of sorts: “Subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented towards an audience (Publikum).”171 This ‘audience’ is the basic structural component for the creation of the modern public sphere. But it is not a division in the construction of politics, rather in the construction of the public sphere itself, a sphere of discursive potential in its idealized form and associated with and supported and propagated by historical ‘bourgeois’ institutions. One criticism of Habermas’s model can be found in the rejection of the universalizing characteristics of the public sphere, a feature that Habermas saw as being essential to its existence and authority. As Nancy Fraser points out, “scholars like Joan Landes, Mary Ryan, and Geoff Eley contend that Habermas’s account idealizes the liberal public sphere. They argue that, despite the rhetoric of publicity and accessibility, the official public sphere rested on, indeed was importantly constituted by, a number of significant exclusions.”172 What Fraser ends up suggesting, while still being critical of Habermas’s model, is that these exclusions were discursive and imagined in nature. They were woven into the discourse of the public sphere and tied into the question of legitimacy. As Goeff Eley states: “The public sphere in its classical liberal/bourgeois guise was partial and narrowly based…, and was constituted from a field of conflict, contested meanings, and exclusion.”173 Films such as Kassovitz’s La Haine and Akin’s Gegen die Wand represent the seeming potential of European cinema to produce ‘counterdiscourses’ to the mainstream representations of European normativity. They manage this, however, by turning to narrative models and generic certainties. While both films generate contradictions within the narratives, breaking free from the generic tendencies which they establish, they do not address the structures of production, the public spheres of production, which generate the very pre-established experiential horizons which these ‘counterdiscourses’ seek to address. That is to say that the inherited limit within the ‘counterdiscourse’ is in its assumptive representation of the very discourse which it seeks to ‘counter.’ While the historical evidence seems damning for Habermas’s model, the dynamic that Habermas lays out is a sort of ‘fiction’ of universality, an expressed belief in the universal function of the public sphere that was constituent to the bourgeois institutions of such a sphere. So, while some are critical of the delimitation of the public sphere, and others have remarked on

77 the necessity of exclusion as a process in the development of the public sphere, I do not think on the face of it that this is an adequate criticism of Habermas’s model. Indeed, the ‘fictive’ (and this is not a term used by Habermas) nature of the universality of the public sphere is supported by Balibar’s concept of ‘fictive ethnicity,’ Anderson’s ‘imagined community,’ and Wallerstein’s174 discussions of universality in relationship to the bourgeoisie. It seems that such a concept of universality as fiction and performance runs through Habermas’s model and is essential to it. As he writes: “the public sphere of civil society stood or fell with the principle of universal access. A public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete; it was not a public sphere at all.”175 Thus the idealized public sphere projected itself as universal into the future institutional construction of the state, and this was a necessary structural move, for Habermas. The fact that this idealized sphere was actualized by a literary private and intimate sphere was coincidental to its development: “The process in which the state-governed public sphere was appropriated by the public of private people making use of their reason and was established as a sphere of criticism of public authority was one of functionally converting the public sphere in the world of letters already equipped with institutions of the public and with forums for discussion.”176 The importance of the projection of universality, essentially a ‘fictive’ universality based in the bourgeois class structure and a universality that is aimed into the ‘shadow of the future’ (and is necessarily inclusive of it), is indispensable to contemporary delimitations of citizenship throughout Europe, which Balibar decries, because it bases inclusion in the public sphere not in the reasoning abilities of the subjects, but in the dynamic of commodity relationships and private interests; and it binds this dynamic to the nature of citizenship—a reality Habermas allows for in his model. The borders of class, based not in ‘imaginary’ relationships so much as in economic census information, are the earliest of divisions running through the very idealized structure of the discursive public sphere. This is not a division based in discourse, but in the social (sexual) and economic, borders that were early demarcations for the ‘universal’ public sphere. These divisions within the public sphere are also causally related, in Habermas’s model, to the divisions and interrelationships established between the intimate, the private and the public in the pre-constitutional states of Europe. The process of the idealization and universalization of the bourgeois public sphere, a process that sublates (through exclusion) the contestational dynamic of its inception and

78 produces the historical trace of unity, continuity, and social ‘progress’ is, as Geoff Eley suggests, a process of Gramscian hegemony. To describe the totality involved in the concept of the hegemony, Eley turns to Raymond Williams’s concise and insightful description: …in effect a saturation of the whole process of living—not only of political or economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense. Hegemony is then not only the articulate upper level of “ideology,” nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as “manipulation” or “indoctrination.” It is the whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our sense and assignments of energy, or shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world.177 This description of hegemony describes the processes of the public sphere. Through this filter we can see the totalizing and universalizing tendencies of the bourgeois public sphere and, importantly, the ability for such a sphere to construct hegemonic relations within its own bounds among its various ‘counterpublics’ (Fraser). Hegemony, as Eley reminds us, is not the social or political oppression and manipulation of the masses by some oligarchy; rather, it is the very fabric of modern democratic society that holds together the complete intersubjective horizon of experience. In such an understanding of hegemony there can be no outside, no ‘other’ to the hegemonic system within the bounds of that system. It cannot think itself into a new form. Thus, the contestational dynamic of its inception, pointed out by Fraser and Eley, is the early praxis of the sublation of such contestation; and it is also the theoretical trace of the problem-solving, instrumental action that Habermas sees as constitutive of modern society. This sublation through the structural processes of economic stabilization, media colonization, and the progressive construction of a bourgeois historical imaginary allows for the possibility of the construction of ‘homogeneous, empty-time,’ and, indeed, seems prerequisite to it; it also, at the same time, constructs the basis for the ‘fictive ethnicity’ of the nation-state through the normative processes of the innate exclusion/inclusion dynamic, a dynamic that is structurally related to the economic and medial fabric of the public sphere and also the imaginative postulation of the possibility and limits of such a sphere. It is impossible to separate the two. This complex process ‘overdetermines’ (Althusser) the construction of citizenship and

79 demarcates borders within the public sphere. This process also produces the potential for the reification of the public sphere, the concretization of what is, essentially, an empty category filled only through discourse. Geoff Eley’s critique of Habermas’s model offers a valuable insight into the relationship between the bourgeois public sphere and the structuration of modern liberal society that supercedes the ideal quality of Habermas’s model. Eley, through his elaboration on the hegemonic nature of the public sphere, allows for a particular space that the study of the relationship between the cinema (as aesthetic object) and the public sphere (as critical, discursive function). In the context of borders, this also allows us to reposition this question within the totalizing concept of hegemony, which hegemonic structure is conditional to the continual sublation of contestation and the reconfiguration of such contestation into vectors of continuity. The European cinema, as ideological figure within the pan-European hegemony (again, in the purely Gramscian meaning of a politico-social form transcendent to manipulation and oppression), is in a unique position of construction and critique. But the vectors informing this cinema must be outlined in order to reach the full understanding of the hegemonic nature (which can also be seen represented in Derrida’s ‘il n’y a pas de hors texte’—‘il n’y a pas de hors hegemonie’ ), an understanding, which the work of Negt and Kluge may help bring about. The production of a ‘fictive ethnicity’ which is bound to the ‘fictive’ production of the public sphere can be seen in European representations of the ‘internal other’ of immigration. What films such as Akin’s and Kassovitz’s accomplish, or seek to accomplish, is the reorientation of the idealized bounds of this ‘fictive identity.’ They do not address the nature of the inclusion exclusion dynamic which prefigures European hegemony, and as such continue to mask the very real context of the immigration experience. More recent films, such as Winterbottom’s In This World (2005), Stephen Frear’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002), and Ruth Mader’s Struggle (2003) attempt to represent these processes, but at no point do they question the manner in which even these processes are mediated by the public spheres of production. As such they become ‘counterdiscourses’ that inherit the structural conditions ascribed by hegemony as part and parcel of the ‘doxa’ of modern society.

80 “HORS TEXTE:” UNITY, HOMOGENEITY, CONTINUITY AND HANEKE’S CINEMA The development in Europe of a complex system of contracting and expanding borders can be seen reflected in the imaginary and discursive borders informing, constituting, and delimiting the European public sphere. The push of the historical imaginary within this public sphere offers a sense of historical continuity to these borders. In the next chapter I will discuss this relationship between history, European cinema, and the developing European public sphere. As a means of conclusion to this chapter, though, I would like to discuss the nature of this continuity as it plays out in relationship to the imaginary and discursive borders within the public sphere, and how Michael Haneke’s cinema addresses this continuity, confronts it, and highlights not the unity and homogeneity of such a sphere but the heterogeneity of society’s experience(s), and the ruptures between and within these borders. Habermas and Negt & Kluge both agree that the bourgeois family structure and familial unit is the ethical and moral cynosure of the bourgeois public sphere and as such is the central unit for the legitimization of such a project. It is the unit, the very traditional structure of which defined the structural limitations and exclusions of the bourgeois public sphere since its instigation. Michael Haneke’s films explore this legitimating sphere and the starkly moral- traditionalist stance inherent in Austrian discourse. Because of this, he is often called the ‘deicer’ of the frozen Austrian psyche. His characters tend to be emotionally inhibited, to such a point that even the end of society itself, e.g. in Time of the Wolf (Temp du Loup, 2003) does not evoke simple emotional responses. His early films with their objective portrayal of tense, emotional, and incredibly violent moments have in many ways inspired the objectivist movement in Austrian cinema today (e.g. Seidl’s Dog Days [2001] and Mader’s Struggle [2003] ), a movement whose roots in the television industry mirrors Haneke’s own beginnings in television. For Code Unknown the case is no different. At the heart of Funny Games, Benny’s Video (1992) and other earlier Haneke films is a desire to exploit the emotions of the audience, to overtly examine and overdetermine the audience’s desires to control moments of violence through abstraction and scientific examination. In a manner that would later be borrowed by von Trier in Dancer in the Dark, Haneke’s camera does not revel in violence. Instead it seems shocked by it, frozen in a gaze of awe and horror. This shocked camera / observer, not identical to the audience but identified with the audience, is also present in the first shot of Code Unknown and reemerges occasionally throughout the film.

81 Haneke’s traditional concern with objective representations of violence as a pure construct is absent from Code Unknown, but it is an absence that signals the ghostly presence of the void. With every turn and edit Haneke reminds the viewer of that violent potential he has explored in his other films. In a similar manner Code Unknown is prefaced by an extended scene that sets this same violent emotional tone. In this scene a small school of very young, hearing- impaired students is playing a game of charades. However, instead of the common categories with which most are familiar, these children are seemingly seeking to express pure emotional states as a form of charades. In the very first shot of the film, a part of the preface, the viewer is confronted with a small child, retreating with an expression of angst, slowly turning to fear, as she backs away from the camera. All the while the child stares into the lens and the camera seems to force her, almost malevolently, to remain within the frame. As the child retreats away from the lens, opening the room into a three-dimensional space, the camera stands unwavering, gazing at the subject in a manner that is somehow sexualized and debasing. The lack of movement or edit and the reaction of the child to the presence of the camera acts to distance the viewer from the scene by remarking on the scopic obsessions of the audience. This Verfremdungseffekt is a technique employed more than once in the film, i.e. as a direct moment of the gaze of the objectified actor ‘penetrating’ the screen and inveigling the deferred viewer/camera momentarily in the action. While the moment is not as formally established as that of Funny Games, where the actor literally addresses an audience through the camera, the look does establish a thematic connection to the earlier film for the viewer, and increases the potential of violence that characterized Funny Games and Benny’s Video. This trope is repeated throughout Code Unknown, as Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche), while screen-testing for a thriller, is told to look specifically at the camera. In this case, the diegetic camera doubles as the extra-diegetic camera. What is interesting about each of these moments is Haneke’s technique of weaving this intra-diegetic moment back into the narrative world. In each case, there is a reason in the narrative for the direct look at the camera. This has the effect of suturing the extra-diegetic camera into the narrative, and making the viewer cognizant of that camera’s presence as physical absence. When Anne looks into the camera, the game of acting weaves into the narrative and reveals the tendentious nature of each edit, each cut, each moment of acting; Anne is not looking at the audience per se but at the camera as the object of the audience’s observation, the camera as

82 narrative-constructing machine. In the case of the child in the ‘preface,’ the game is revealed as the actress uncurls from her fearful pose, smiles artlessly, opens herself honestly to the camera, and a 180-degree edit reveals the true objects of her gaze, i.e. the other students. A silent exchange then takes place between the children, all of whom are hearing-impaired, as they try to guess what the first girl was attempting to mimic. The guesses seem incredibly unreal at first— one child guesses ‘prison,’ another guesses ‘hiding,’ and another ‘sad’—because all of the guesses so clearly miss the mark. The exchange broadens as the guesses become more obscure and none of the child-players match the emotion, to the point that the focus of the discussion almost seems to be shifting within the group. The children who are guessing are not attempting to really guess what the first child sought to express, but are rather mapping their own emotions onto the game, and simultaneously onto the narrative. The result is the assumption that this meeting is a meeting of the traumatized and that the filmic narrative is a trauma narrative. Indeed, the children are put into such a position by Haneke’s framing, as though they are working through a trauma through playacting. Haneke’s revealing of the diegesis as inclusive of the ‘narrating’ camera also exposes the role of the constituting-viewer and, to some extent, exposes the processes of constitutive spectatorship. Just as Haneke reveals the role of the viewer, he also pulls the viewer into the construction of the represented public sphere, i.e. the historical imaginary, exposed as the film progresses. The loose-knit narrative space of the film becomes representative of the loose-knit construct of public sphere discourse in Europe. The deep ambiguity of this filmic preface is its most striking and lasting impression and one that also helps determine the viewing mode for the film. There is no deep formal connection drawn between this group of children and the main characters of the screenplay. Thus they seem stranded by the film, at first. The fact that it is a preface, truncated before the last child guesses, before the answer is revealed, and interrupted by a silent, black screen with the credit for Michael Haneke as director and scenarist, expands this sense of isolation and frames the diegesis in a specific fashion. As the narrative moves from focal point to focal point, each shift is indicated by a black-screen edit, a device that reinforces the message of social isolation driving the film. This temporal expansion of the narrative space to follow the disconnected narratives of the characters is itself revelatory. The truncated conversation involved in the children’s game makes the audience aware of its desire for some communicative moment that it could regard as

83 complete and authentic. The fabric of communicative exchange is revealed, in other words, in its absence. After the preface, the opening shot (Haneke avoids a classic establishing-shot of any sort) portrays the four main narrative lines, represented by the (seemingly) key figures of each, as they overlap in the most public of Parisian spaces, the street. The shot is continuous, about ten minutes long, and completely without edits. The confluence of people, the accidental meeting of Anne and Jean (Alexandre Hamidi), the flâneur nature of the tracking camera, all indicate a particular ‘publicness’—particularly in the German meaning of Öffentlichkeit—in the scene. The camera tracks along the street, sliding along perpendicular to the action and pinning the action to the sidewalk and storefronts. There seems also to be a clear intertext in this shot linking Haneke’s camera to that of Godard in Weekend (1967). The relationship opens up particularly for Haneke an ‘apocalyptic’ mode to the scene as, within the intertextual overlay, Godard’s tracking shot—demonstrating the dissolution of society in its original context—inflects that same apocalyptic meaning on Haneke’s film. Whereas in Weekend a particular relationship between modern man and his infernal machines is represented, in the street scene from Code Unknown the people are stripped of machines, exposed to the apocalyptic moment of disintegrating communication. Indeed this absence of machines implicates the human in the disintegration of the communicative plane, rather than the machines that humans design. This is compounded by the various interruptions within the all but insubstantial intersubjective exchange between Anne and Jean. At one point, Anne even leaves the conversation and the scene to enter a bakery, stranding Jean in the street, in the frame, as he looks for something to keep him occupied. The only point at which she engages with Jean fully is to defend him from his assailant, Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke); yet this moment is determined by the emotional aftermath of the incident, thus structured outside of an intersubjective exchange in the classical sense,178 and truncated diegetically by the shift in narrative focus from Anne and Jean to Amadou and the police (Marc Duret). As the narrative quickly and smoothly shifts to Amadou, the theme of communication is again preeminent. Amadou cannot explain his actions to the police, just as he could not explain them to Anne, not for lack of evidence but through a desire to establish a mode of consensus building, an extra-emotional moment for formulating a rational-critical linguistic space. As much as he struggles to do so, as much as he struggles to frame his actions, he is confronted by the

84 presence of a non-communicative other. The filmic narrative tumbles along at this point, rushes upon the viewer, as Amadou exits the frame (the camera follows Jean as he tries to escape, indignant), in order to prevent Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu) from sidling away unnoticed, then returns to capture Jean in the name of ‘justice.’179 Amadou seems to be trying to hold everyone in the frame, prevent them from scattering and the narrative from moving on; though, he is finally unable. This scene generates a definite sense of Amadou’s impotence in the face of the narrative inertia. Jean feels that by leaving the scene (the scene of conflict) he can reenter a private sphere distinct and sacred, delimited from the public sphere by consumerism itself. The narrative cannot even prevent this, and the camera is left trying to piece together the scene without breaking up the diegetic space by editing. In this manner, the filmic narrative also clearly reflects a grander narrative at this point, the socialized narrative of normativity and normative social relations. The history (historical imaginary) of Amadou’s relational position in Parisian society is made evident, and parallels the public sphere imaginary of the audience. Thus the audience clearly understands why Amadou cannot explain himself, yet is unable to rewind (unlike the killers in Funny Games who can rewind the action within the filmic narrative) to the beginning of the extra-filmic narrative, i.e. the narrative of normative social-ontology. The audience becomes complicit in Amadou’s social impotence as part of the diegetically constitutive audience. It is within this confluence of public sphere dynamics (extra-filmic narrative) and filmic narrative, that the meaning of the scene is made apparent. The difficulty inherent in discussions of publics and counterpublics, as seen in Doxtader’s insightful examination of the middle (Mittel), is a certain tendency towards the monolithic ascription of public and counterpublic to actual parts of society. This becomes specifically difficult in a pan-European, internationalized or postnational public sphere, because of the determinate relationship of conflicting national-ideological processes.180 The mainstream polyglot community is not becoming polyglot simply linguistically, but ideologically as well. The development of counterpublics within such a framework is a discursive development more so than a matter of physical association. That is to say that the model described by Negt & Kluge, i.e. a collection of particular agents, joined by matters of identity in a struggle with a public sphere that prescribes social experience, overly determines the counterpublics as monolithic in form and in resistance. These counterpublics exist simply as modes of resistance.

85 Such an overdetermination parallels the presence-of-absence in the form of the polyglot and economically independent European citizen. Within this framework of monolithic counterpublics, Haneke demonstrates the apparent interstices between publics. Haneke highlights the differences between these publics, between his characters, not as intersubjective differences, but artificial distinctions. Rosalind Galt has recently suggested that von Trier’s Zentropa (1991) explores the spatialization and simultaneous projection of disparate European discourses on the filmic screen itself.181 The filmic trope that delivers this effect is that of back projection, wherein the filmic narrative space is made shallow to forward the spectacle. For Galt, “a radical deconstruction of European unity can be discerned” in this technique, “in which the ambivalent identifications and impossible location of ‘Europe’ seep into the very form of the image.”182 One of the results of such diegetic texturing, according to Galt, “is lack of identification, so that the spectator is distanced from the mechanisms of classical narrative absorption.”183 Unlike von Trier’s use of back projection (a technique also used to great effect in Michael Verhoeven’s The White Rose [1982] and The Nasty Girl [1990]), Haneke does not strive for a simultaneous disintegration of the filmic image and diegesis, but seeks to disintegrate the narrative arc by framing each edit with black-screen. The effect is similar, then, to von Trier’s visual representation of the disparate European discourses, but only through the parallel of spatial and temporal distanciation. Galt describes the diegetic space in von Trier’s film as a “nonspace that is narratively meaningful yet unlocatable.”184 In Code Unknown the diegesis loses narrative cohesion, not through the foregrounding of cinematic spectacle, but through the temporal disintegration of the narrative into indistinct ‘acts’ separated from each other by black screen. Discourse is also often truncated by these edits, further isolating the characters ‘connected’ by the narrative. In Code Unknown the publics, represented by the characters, exist in relationship neither to each other nor to anything we could call a realized European public sphere, but rather to the historical imaginary of such a sphere. The fact that Amadou’s father (Djibril Kouyaté) leaves France to return to Mali is important in this vein. Not only does the camera open up a new social space in the figure of Mali—the taxicab entering bodily into a new social field of reference and intersubjectivity, thus setting up a temporary and unrealized contrast between the European and African public spheres—but the fact that the father returns to Mali also demonstrates the outside of the universalizing claims of the European historical imaginary. Mali is a new historical

86 imaginary, a different public sphere, distinct from that of Europe. Amadou has been integrated into Europe but at the same time has become segmented into a determining relationship with the very historical imaginary that distances him from meaningful public discourse. The historical imaginary is a silent vector of force for the public sphere, generating the determinant normativity of such a sphere from the depths of an imagined coherent history. As such, Amadou cannot escape this imagined history, the “colonization of the consciousness” so to speak that is ingrained in the European historical imaginary. The confluence of nationalism as simultaneity in ‘homogeneous, empty-time’ and public sphere as discourse in time, is mapped in contemporary Europe through the neoliberal historical imaginary, and defines discursive access to the public sphere to some real extent. The intersubjective field of rational communicative exchange, the paragon of the bourgeois public sphere, dissipates in Code Unknown. Even within the nuclear family, represented here by the almost coextensive interrelationship between Jean, Georges (Thierry Nuvic) and their father (Sepp Bierbichler), the processes of communication necessary to an invigorated public sphere dynamics is absent and seemingly impossible. The artificial distinction and dis-integration of the private from the public, spoken of by Habermas as a defining characteristic of the postliterary public sphere, is also exposed by Haneke.185 Habermas sees the privatized commercial interests, i.e. the development of the mainstream news media, the consequential rise of the culture industry and the commodification of news and culture, as heralding the structural transformation of the bourgeois public sphere (Öffentlichkeit). This commodification enwraps the public sphere and commerce in a complex problematic form, the end result of which obscures the division between private and public.186 Thus in the nineteenth century the “dialectic of a progressive ‘societalization’ of the state simultaneously with an increasing ‘state-ification’ of society gradually destroyed the basis of the bourgeois public sphere—the separation of state and society.”187 The historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere, i.e. as a space for rational-critical debate, is faulted in this film, distanced by the (socially unrecognized) restructuration of such a sphere in the postliberal world; and Haneke exposes the very aporias of communication itself in the public sphere. Since Haneke does not turn the attention of the viewer towards spectacle, as von Trier does, his critique takes on immanent qualities. His camera records objective reality, seemingly. However, he also continually implicates the viewer in the construction of the

87 narrative as reality, in a manner that is similar to Godard, if much more subtle. This effectively sutures the viewer not into the narrative, as a classical narrative might do, but into the discursive processes of the public spheres of production. The viewer is revealed in this deterritorialized space as implicit to the absolutely essential discursive function of the public spheres of production. A figure for the deterritorialization of speech in Code Unknown is that of the hearing- impaired children. The children are shown three times in the film. The first is the narrative. The next two times the children are shown in the film they are performing in a drum corps. The demonstration of their talent, the construction of unified rhythm without being able to fully hear the essence of the rhythm, is demonstrative of Haneke’s message. As the movie progresses, the viewer comes to realize a certain thematic potential the children represent in the narrative. Their extra-parole acts of communication are contrasted to the attempts of communication by the speaking characters. However, this moral is something that is never vocalized, fully realized, or presented for the audience per se. Rather, the moral mode is imagistic and extra-linguistic, transcending the necessarily linguistically determined public sphere. Thus the emotive quality of their sign language comes to represent an extra-linguistic and yet authentic mode of intersubjectivity that is never realized by the speaking, normative characters in the film. Haneke demonstrates that a social-ontology, a praxis for social being, that is based on the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere and its staid and determinate antipodes of counter- publics, in order to formulate a public sphere of intersubjective social praxis, is simply reiterating the social stratification and territorialization inherent in the traditional spheres. The recognition of their presence does not guarantee by logical extension the necessary eradication of such distinctions, but exposes the artificial processes of their construction. We can speak of the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere in terms of Balibar’s re-inscription of ‘apartheid’. In such a move it must be remembered that apartheid was a system originally intended to ‘preserve’ the autochthonous culture. Could we not also suggest that the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere in European society qua polyglot citizenry moving into the neoliberal Lebenswelt is really the foundation for a system of ‘immanent’ apartheid, and one that alienates the European non-citizen discursively (or rather prescribes a particular social and discursive function for the ‘citizen’) just as Balibar sees them alienated from EU politics? Such a structuration could resituate the cinema of the bourgeois

88 public sphere into a critical position. In order to do so, however, the processes of consumption that define the modern bourgeois public sphere must be criticized. Haneke manages this. The ideological critique Haneke offers on the act of viewing is also and at the same time an ideological critique of the act of consumption itself in the modern world economy. The viewer becomes alienated from the diegesis in a manner than reflects modern processes of social alienation, i.e. through the act of consumption. While this may certainly be the case, it is sure that the expansion of the EU is one of modernization or rather entails the equivocation of modernization and economic expansion. The processes of modernization, in the current EU context, are also simultaneously processes of market neoliberalization.188 This neoliberal market develops a neoliberal subjectivity, the functioning and consuming citizen. The modernization on the level of identification develops a binary between neoliberal consumption and socialized consumption, and between functionality and non-functionality. There are two requirements for the European citizen in the neoliberalized worldview: functionality (which is inherently related to communicability, efficacy, and so forth), and consumption. These two become interdependent, of course, in neoliberalism, wherein society qua market is supported by consumption, and consumption is permitted by functionality. This problematic develops socially in the structure of the public sphere, which is girded by the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere. It thus delineates the social-ontology developing in Europe, one whose defining characteristics become consumption and functionality. Haneke begins to take apart this homogenous sphere, revealing the actuality of non-functionality within the shadow of the utopian historical imaginary. As communication breaks down, for his characters, intersubjective exchanges become emotional outbursts (Anne throwing herself at Georges after a particularly heated argument; Amadou grabbing Jean in the street; the father (Bierbichler) slaughtering his milk-cows silently, without affectation). The potential inherent in public sphere exchanges also suffers—the public sphere is after all a particular political- discursive strata of the European social-ontology, a social-ontology based in intersubjective exchanges, and it is these exchanges that Haneke sees damaged in neoliberal society. Thus the social-ontology of the EU is structured on the screen as disconnected, distraught, and violent. In reference to the EU, Étienne Balibar asks: “the true question is whether we in the West are seeking to invent new forms of European solidarity, of communication among peoples with the aim of formulating common objectives, or whether we will continue to treat the problems of

89 ‘European equilibrium’ by means of force, market logic, propaganda, and formal diplomacy.”189 Haneke’s answer to this is to point out the nature of the idealized bourgeois public sphere in the EU, disconnected by consumption and modernity. There is no ‘formulation of common objectives’ in society without a firm set of established criteria (norms), and pragmatic communication that can deal with the inherent aporia of language. To return to Habermas, he suggests that “a process of democratic will-formation that can cross national borders needs a unified context, and this in turn requires the development of a European public sphere and a common European political culture. In a postnational communicative context of this sort, an awareness of collective membership needs to emerge from the background of an already existing fabric of interests.”190 In this sense, to ask the question posed by Balibar, “where can the European dēmos be found?” The dēmos much be localized in the audience/ consumer dynamic, and extracted from the illusory discursive function of the historical imaginary. Only then can a democratic polity or ‘fabric of interests’ be formed that is inclusive rather than exclusive. Haneke shows this by pulling at the loose threads of the European bourgeois public sphere and pointing out the oftentimes chaotic and at other times subtle ways in which it unravels.

90 CHAPTER 3

GAPS BETWEEN THE PRESENT AND THE PAST: THE INTERSTITIAL HISTORY OF EUROPE

The development of the European cinema has been at once an economic and a cultural process. It has occurred in relation to a broader discourse on what it means to be European. It has also required production level assistance from local and pan-European entities and what amounts to European sponsorship for distribution and production as. In both ways European cinemas since WWI have been a part of arguments over Europeanness and the role of the states or other entities in sustaining it.191 Just as the construction of the European cinema has a historical vector, so does the European public sphere. And the history of the public sphere is a history that is bound inexorably to the development of nationalism as Habermas points out. However, this development cannot simply be seen as a historical progression or homogenous movement through some abstract historical ether. Rather, the linking points between the public sphere and nationalism are manifold and invariably complex. This complexity figures into the reemergence of nationalism as a valid political ideology in the writings of Cheah and Chatterjee, a means of formulating social and political cohesion, points of real social resistance to the homogenizing forces of capitalism.192 I would also like to suggest that the development of the public sphere and the history of such are intensely intersubjective moments. My premise is that it is very difficult to suggest empirically that history has some ontic force within it that is not born psychologically within the reconstitution of history in the sphere of intersubjective exchange. It is valid in my opinion to bind this question of intersubjective history (a matter of exchange and negotiation), the public sphere, and nationalism with Bhabha’s work on the national narrative in the (re)generation of the nation as discursive principle. There is also the Marxist problem of history; whether to consider it some ontic force pushing societies into a (in)definite future; or whether the question of ‘progress’ as Benjamin suggested should be deeply criticized and distrusted, masking as it tends to do real social forces beneath non-specific, generally mythic narrative. As a means of expressing how a critical

91 counter-discourse can be said to produce actual social change, I suggest that Jan Patočka’s phenomenological model of history is applicable.193 In his model, history only develops as a vector within a social problematic, a means of explaining the causal nature of the problematic. For Patočka, history and things, “have no meaning for themselves, rather, their meaning requires that someone ‘have a sense’ for them: thus meaning is not originally lodged in what is but in that openness, in that understanding for them; an understanding, though, which is a process, a movement which is no different from the movement at the core of our life.”194 The procedural nature of this understanding is born out in the intersubjective (re)constitution of history rather than what one might call its ideological constitution. This is what Patočka refers to as “the problematic nature of all meaningfulness… What, though, is the significance of this problematic nature if not that our very openness for things and for others warns us that we should not yield to the inclination to absolutize particular ways of understanding meaning and the meaningfulness appropriate to them?”195 The truly historical always blossoms from a problematic, pointing out as it does the irrationality of causality, or the bound relationship between causality as a conceptual framework and ideological-rational systems. As Patočka writes; “history differs from prehistoric humanity by the shaking of accepted meaning.”196 The ‘historical’ film, if we follow this model of history, is a film or discourse within a film that problematizes some normative (or ideological) historical process, just as “history is nothing other than the shaken certitude of pre-given meaning.”197 The discourse that is engendered by such a problematization is then the beginning of truly historical discourse. Thus Kurosawa’s Rashamon would prove an excellent example of the process of this problematization. The ‘normatization’ of the discourse to produce an answer to the problematic is the very root of the development of a social historical imaginary. We could categorize eight general phases of European cinema, viz. Early, First World War, between war, Second World War, Postwar, New Wave, Postwall, and Contemporary (the latter two being still controversial, of course). In each phase history is dealt with in distinctly different ways. In the postwall/contemporary cinema, with which I am concerned the problematic of history informs the parallel (re)construction of the European public sphere as that point wherein it normatizes into the ideological narrative of history. This normatization sublates (hebt auf) the problematic (and its inherent contradictions), and such a process always runs the risk of abrogating the responsibility of history. It also seems essential that the construction and

92 propagation of the problematic of history, i.e. in Patočka’s terminology the emergence of the prehistorical humanity into history, is always intersubjective, discursive, and not limited to the dialectical subject.

CASE STUDY 1 The American Friend: The Political Modern Subject and History In 1996 Marc Silberman wrote on the Germanness of German cinema in the journal Film History. His thesis is that German identity “is the product of an ongoing struggle between local culture(s) and global pressure(s),” a sound one to be sure.198 However, in support of his thesis Silberman offers only the deeply rooted cinema of the Weimar period, a cinema whose traditional emplacement in film programs across the States is used as a type of shorthand or icon for all German cinema. While I certainly agree with his thesis—his work supports my understanding of ‘national’ cinema as essentially projective raised in a previous chapter—the historical limitations on his sample make it difficult to offer this as evidence in support of a continuing national cinema. It does raise an interesting point, however, and that is the presence of a tradition to which an industry such as the film industry looks to support its own claims about its artistic value. Cinema, and national cinemas especially so it seems, are intertextual and reflexive. What does this mean for the European cinema, though? On the one hand, European cinema searches for some tradition, or many traditions, from which to formulate tropes, and there is no reason to suggest that this is not a national as well as transnational search. As Silberman points out, genres, styles, narratives and so forth have travelled far: European cinemas “have also been challenged in the positive sense to develop strategies that respond to conventions and expectations schooled in their domestic audiences through popular American films, reintegrating in a complex exchange forms, genres, styles and themes that originally emerged from a specific national context.”199 On the other hand, European cinema projects its own historical presence, its own understanding of its historical development with the packaged nature of the consumable European film. Some European films construct historical problematics. Cinema has since its inception had a hand in the construction, mediation, preservation and propagation of history, and German

93 cinema neither was nor is any different. As Silberman points out, “In the East German Cinema the commitment to narratives about antifascist struggle, the central and founding proposition of the governing regime, explicitly divided guilt and innocence among the characterizations of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ Germans. And the strong tradition of historical and biographical films traced in the choice of events and figures represented the effort to construct a ‘German’ history for the cinema public.”200 This construction and reconstruction is a theme to which Andreas Huyssen speaks.201 It also represents a particular theme in recent studies of German films, to which Anke Finger’s recent article attests.202 So what is this history, this memory-making, for European cinema? What is the concept of history for the cinema of Europe? In order to trace a particular concept of history within a European social framework I look at two films from radically different historical epochs in Germany: Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund, 1977) and Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (Lola rennt, 1998). Both films are considered by German Films Service and Marketing GmbH and many mainstream critics to be on the list of the 100 most important German films. While lists such as these are normally tied more to audience reception, box-office receipts and marketing, and are not necessarily representative of aesthetic judgments, the choice of these two films is telling on many deeply social and historical levels. In my view, both of these films seem to expose the very dynamic of Germany’s transformation into a postnational space. Thomas Elsaesser has long been one of the seminal critics and historians of the New German Cinema, the politico-aesthetic model within which Wenders worked.203 Not only does Elsaesser examine the history of the New German Cinema, he also represents a particular doubling in the praxis of that examination, the doubling of the theme of history itself (he is, after all, a film historian). A master narrative for New German Cinema, if not the master narrative, is history as heterogeneous, multifarious and splintered. So, in a sense, this master narrative is that there is no cohesive master narrative at all. In his examination of Syberberg and Fassbinder, Elsaesser concentrates on the construction and representation of a particular history and a particular view of history, both of which find sympathetic vibrations throughout the New German Cinema, and both of which question the master narrative of history. In Syberberg, the importance lies in the representation of some form of history that is ‘performative’, exploded from its context, and linked with the present in a mode of

94 ‘Trauerarbeit’ “which exposes the spectator once more to fascination in order to recognize within oneself what it is one had lost and was secretly disavowing.”204 This is especially true in his seven hour avant-garde opus Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland (1978). The concept of the performative in relationship to much of Syberberg, i.e. in the sense of stage-craft, should be only loosely bound, at this early stage, to the Bhabhian concept within the context of nationalism. Syberberg’s performative history is a dramatic and visual re-rendering of Germany’s past, as Jameson says, an “orthodox criticism of dialectical reversals by which a binary or polar opposite (rationalistic Enlightenment forms of demystification) is grasped as merely the mirror replication of what it claims to discredit (German irrationalism), locked within the same problematic...”205 In this manner, Syberberg follows a “Blochian doctrine of hope,” which suggests that “all passions, nihilistic as well as constructive, embody a fundamental drive towards a transfigured future.”206 The recognition of the missing past and the suppressed emotional history of Germany are essential to Syberberg’s work, and his films “mark both the distance and the proximity of this repressed part of Germans’ emotional lives”207; or they are, as Jameson would have it, “a psychoanalysis and exorcism of the collective unconscious of Germany.”208 For, as Elsaesser points out, the cinema was at one point the realm of fascism; it recorded fascism’s history and propagated its ideology / propaganda in terms familiar to any Hollywood spectator. The historical ‘language’ of German cinema, its intertextuality, was as invested with Nazi ideology as was the literature, science, industry and philosophy of World War II Germany. This ideological investment, or infection,209 meant for cinema the association of narrative cinema in general as an ideological construct with the political ideology and praxis of Nazism. For this reason, Syberberg says early in Hitler, “farewell to the occident, subspecie eternitatus, and everything on film; our new chance.”210 In the case of Syberberg, the focus of his films rests on an emotional and performative remembering, or Trauerarbeit, of the ‘reality’ of German society, as it was before Nazism or outside of it, presented through an obvious, transparent mise-en-scène that does not seek to mask its own highly symbolic qualities. The Trauerarbeit plays out in Syberberg’s mise- en-scène through his symbolic presentation, for he works towards remembering a past as it was in symbolic form and in specific relation / juxtaposition to a Nazi narrative past of the state. In a sense, Syberberg’s mise-en-scène is that “controlled excess” of which Stephen Heath writes in relation to art cinema.211 Heath’s formulation leads Rosalind Galt to suggest “we

95 cannot consider self-conscious spectacularity to be radical when visual excess is exactly what defines art cinema as a genre.”212 However, in the case of Syberberg, this visual excess is exactly what works to compose the performative exorcism of German history. As such, the controlled excess exceeds its function of simple generic isolation and, within the context of Nazi history, slips into the mode of the figural. In many senses, then, this cinematic approach to history, or the “phantasmagoria of history,”213 represents the problematization of the normative historical narrative. It is a probing of the different causal strands, which led to an event, not as purely isolated events, facts, reasons, but as a complex network of interrelated concepts, assumptions, traditions—in a word normativity itself. For Patočka, history is birthed from this problematic, reaching backward though it does, as a means of understanding our own social existence. It is, also, from my point of view essentially intersubjective in its performative nature. This notion of the problematization of normative history also mirrors to some extent the work on public memory and permanence by Andreas Huyssen.214 Huyssen sees monuments as markers, not so much of memory, but of amnesia. As such, they do not worry out the complexities of history, but sit comfortably within the stream of normative historical discourse. For Fassbinder, the connection to history is important, as it is arguably for every member of the New German Cinema. However, Fassbinder does not focus on the creation of a new form of emotional remembering à la Syberberg; instead, he is interested in reconfiguring the history of German cinema itself by addressing the very essence of the Nazi dream machine in a flat, and transparent manner, all the while subtly reconfiguring this historical narrative to allow for heterogeneity in its presentation. For Fassbinder, the relationship of his films to German Cinema past is one of both obsession and disgust, fetishization and suppression. As Elsaesser says of Fassbinder: “more than anyone else he saw Fascism in relation to the present, and its representation across the dialectics of identification, the splitting and doubling of the self.”215 Fascism is written on the creation and substantiation of the German ‘identity’ and is inscribed into the period pieces. We can designate Fassbinder’s historical mise- en-scène as the chronotopic substantiation of intersubjectivity in contemporary German society. His films also play on intertextual relationships in both form and content, stretching diachronically into film history qua German history. The transparency of this move matched with the overdetermined quality of his camera reveals the nature of both a heterogeneous

96 present—which is to say the revelation of the construction of intersubjectivity in the heterogeneous ‘chronotope’ of modern German society—and a splintered heterogeneous past, split between propagandistic and real Germany. The story of Maria Braun’s rise to power in postwar Germany is an example of this; wife of Nazi soldier, murderer, prostitute, mistress, financial genius, to the final self-immolation of the explosive finale. The historical eddies which (in)form intersubjective history are juxtaposed, in Fassbinder’s films, to the totalizing discourse of rationalized society, and this juxtaposition produces the crisis in the New German Cinema subject. History becomes the ‘superstructural’ force of historical (bourgeois) normativity played out in the ‘real’ radio news reports running through the background (sometimes masking the dialogue) of The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 1979), Lola (1981) and Sehnsucht der Veronica Voss (Veronica Voss, 1982). Even without Maria Braun’s participation in the normatization of German history and the economic turnaround which allowed German society (according to the New German Cinema) to forget its Nazi past, that society would have continued, would have turned around; so, while Maria is essential to the story as an allegory for Germany, Germany is not an allegory for Maria. Yet history is reworked, as Elsaesser claims, in Fassbinder’s films as the interstitial history of spectatorship itself. History has little force in Fassbinder outside of the act of (passive) spectatorship, and his films address the spectator as the homogenizing, desiring subject who seeks in shot continuity the continuity of normative historical narratives. Whether it is the long static shots of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant or the dramatic noir-ish mise-en-scène of Veronica Voss matched, as it is, with the restructuring of Germany’s Nazi past, Fassbinder approaches the spectator as the ‘desiring machine’ whose very desires produce the normative ideological discourse of history. By exposing the spaces between, the interstices of spectatorship and history, Fassbinder exposes the German spectator to his own complicity in the forgetting (or repressing) rather than the constructive discussion of the past. Fassbinder’s use of history as ‘news’ also offers an interesting representation of the processes of temporal homogenization associated with the generation of the feeling of nationalism. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, according to Anderson, this temporary, evanescent specificity, the determined moment of the ‘contemporary,’ pulls the listener / reader into the unit of the national by (re)generating the concept of homogeneous, empty time.216 The

97 curious aspect of Fassbinder is that this ‘news’ is actually no news at all. It is history. Each time we hear the ‘news’ in the film, sometimes as it completely drowns out the conversation between two characters, it is archived German history we are hearing. As Maria Braun is rejoined with her long-suffering husband, and in the process of lighting the stove (which will explode a few shots later), the background is filled with the sounds of the German team winning the 1954 World Cup. This was a crucial moment in German popular history and represented the normalizing of German history after the Second World War. However, Fassbinder spent the rest of the film demonstrating the social and emotional toil such a history had on the people, the actants of history. In a sense, he represents the historical procession of news as it disappears on the horizon between synchronic, homogeneous empty time and the Messianic or memorial time of the state. Fassbinder’s use, in fact, highlights a particular complexity in the generation of homogeneous empty time. Whereas this national sense of time develops in relationship to the generation of narrative history, it is also lost within the ideological structures of daily existence—the lifeworld continues to cohere and bind itself to the national without the active consumption of the news by all concerned; and Fassbinder’s characters generally live in parallel with the news without consuming it specifically—we see this in the argument between Maria and her mother, both of whom completely ignore the news which, for the spectator, drowns out their argument. This news also represents a psycho-sociological horizon between forgetting history (the details of a particular day’s events) and coming to terms with it (recalling those events in all of their complexity). And on this level it forms a narrative for the state that is parallel to the narrative generation of nationalism within the dynamic of center and periphery that Homi Bhabha has outlined.217 So, the theme of history and the German conceptual binary of Vergangenheits- bewältigung (coming to terms with the past) and Trauerarbeit (the work of mourning), has a perennial prominence in New German Cinema films, and Wenders’s An American Friend is no exception.218 Even though Elsaesser works Wender’s oeuvre into a master narrative of oedipal proportions, exposing a desiring oedipal conflict within Wenders’s narrative structure, mise-en- scène, and subject matter, the obsession with American involvement in German self-

98 identification is also essential to his cinema outside of its psychological relationship to the oedipal complex. In The American Friend the story revolves around a German man who, having been forced to retire from the practice of art restoration, owns a small frame-shop in Hamburg. He comes close to exposing a plot to pass off multiple copies of paintings from a supposedly dead American artist (played by Nicholas Ray) masterminded by Ripley (Dennis Hopper), and instead becomes embroiled in a complex ‘turf war’ between the French and American mafias, during which he is hired to kill someone—after having been convinced that he is dying from cancer. The first scene of the film has Ripley meeting with Derwatt (Nicholas Ray) in a New York studio apartment. In the opening shot the slightly low-angled camera shows Derwatt staring at a canvas, his hand over one eye. Ripley enters and the mise-en-scène is split between the two of them. Ripley is on the left of the screen. Derwatt is off camera to the right. The visual field is disrupted by the presence of Derwatt’s absence, yet linked by the same, slightly low angle shot, showing the space of the bright and bland apartment stretching high above Ripley’s head. With this early shot, Wenders opens a gap in the traditional narrative structure of shot-reverse shot. The aural field continues to capture Derwatt, but visually we are restricted to Ripley as he moves into the room. Wenders’s camera exposes these two characters as related by language (both speaking English in a German production), but distanced by the narrative space. They are both figured as Americans, even down to Ripley’s cowboy hat, but Ripley is alienated from America in Hamburg, Germany; and Derwatt is alienated from social existence itself, the real hodological space219 of individualized intersubjectivity by his own faked death. From this scene in what we later come to realize is New York, the film cuts to Jonathon (Bruno Ganz) walking through a narrow, German street. Even though this street is profilmically a street in New York, the mise-en-scène is coded as Germany by the inclusion of a Volkswagen in the foreground and German graffiti on the walls, over which the credits role. Yet there is no spatial configuration within the mise-en-scène that reveals the ‘chronotope’ of the opening scene between Ripley and Derwatt as specifically American; only the use of English and the later juxtaposition of the ‘wholesome,’ German star / father-figure (Bruno Ganz) leading his son to school with the slick, conniving, and immoral Ripley in New York. Not only does this juxtaposition prefigure certain assumptions about Jonathon’s character within the traditional narrative film framework (loving father, provider, and so forth), assumptions that will not quite

99 play out as expected; it also juxtaposes the spaces (both thematic and geopolitical) of the film. That is to say that America and Germany become mapped one over the other by Wenders’s camera, and the allegorical mode of interpreting this mapping is to see Germany and America as linked at indistinct points across the visual, political and social fields. Wenders intentionally conflates geopolitical spaces in his film, a conflation which is reflected in the confusion of space within the narrative. In some recent European films, e.g. Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux destin de Amélie Poulain (The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain, 2002) an ambiguous chronotope, that is a de-specification of historical-social space-time, works towards ‘mystifying’ the narrative space, orienting it towards myth or fantasy.220 That is to say that Jeunet does not universalize the city of Paris in his film, he universalizes a ‘mythic,’ idealized Paris. The conflation of different historical epochs into an ahistorical field of reference onto the screen reduces the temporal specificity of the film, and there is no clear indication, indeed plenty of visual obfuscation, of the time period within which the narrative takes place; especially given Jeunet’s penchant for placing his narratives in some (post)apocalyptic future time. Thus culture is essentialized, rendered to its very mythical, continuous, deep-ethnic components. In Wenders, though, the emphasis, as becomes clear, is not on a ‘non-time’ but on a homogeneous geopolitical space, in a historically specific sphere; 1970s America is indistinguishable within the mise-en-scène from its contemporary Hamburg, which is indistinguishable from Bremen, and so forth,221 a fact that opens up a mimetic link between Germany and America. The one clear view we have of Paris in the film, in fact, is of a skyline conspicuously lacking the usual Parisian landmarks—filled instead with new construction, cranes, industry. Paris is rendered as a juncture of European capital, an allegory for European reconstruction. The space of Germany, its specificity, is what is called into question by the film. New configurations of continuity and contiguity are established, as the characters seem to move within a homogeneous space. Jonathan seems to be at one place in one shot, and then is instantly transported, with no diegetic explanation, to another spot; Ripley is shown at his house, then Jonathon in his workspace, again with no diegetic explanation. This is clearest early in the film when the introduction of Jonathon to the audience is interrupted by a static shot of a house, a house which we will only later come to realize is that of Ripley—in this montage there is no

100 overt, transparent connection made between Ripley and Jonathon, but between Jonathon and a house. In some sense then the opening up, the piercing of European space is what Wenders represents; a crisis which Mark Betz suggests is seminal to the (coproduced) European new wave cinemas.222 This opening up Rosalind Galt has also seen as an aspect of postwall or ‘new’ European cinema. However, in the new European cinema of Galt, the piercing through of the national space is no longer the crisis; rather it runs parallel to a reconfiguration and reclaiming of the national in the form of dialectical images of natural landmarks.223 The notion of a homogeneous or homogenized space, though, does not influence the construction of the narrative as disjointed and indeterminate. Wenders is very careful to construct a narrative (even though the film is a Verfilmung of a Patricia Highsmith novel) that retains little of its coherence, either psychological or narrational. One aspect of this is the disorientation of the spectator within the narrative space. It becomes difficult to locate the characters within a specific, narrative frame of reference: are we in Hamburg, Paris or New York? The narrative / psychological causality inherent in mainstream generic drama does not drive Wenders’s narrative; instead he relies on the plot points as bare facts to reveal sparse information to the viewer and allows the mise-en-scène a certain freedom in constructing a heterogeneous chonotopic frame. For example, when Jonathon’s wife discovers that something is not right with her husband (he has been convinced by the French mafia that he is dying, and it is in his financial interest to assassinate one of the American gang), they argue. Wenders’s camera tracks backward, down a hall and away from the couple as they argue, moving from a medium long shot to a long shot and heavily framing the action by the developing visual structure of the hallway—thus distancing the spectator from an intimate moment. Because of this, the argument reveals little about the deep psychology of Jonathon. Instead, it masks it. Afterward, we are shown a fairly typical, post-lovers’-quarrel sequence, with both lovers, restless, fitful, each sleeping alone. Both are shot in low-key lighting. The assumption, though, is that they are close to each other, in the same apartment. No sequence has shown Jonathon leaving the apartment; yet the next day, in an unexplainable panic, Jonathon runs home (a home we were never sure he had left) to find his wife and child no longer there.

101 This deep spatial ambiguity is played throughout the narrative, but especially by the ambiguous mapping of one geopolitical sphere onto another; these worlds, Hamburg and New York, Germany and America, home and workshop are all but indistinguishable as they are becoming, for Wenders, culturally indistinguishable. For the characters, the mapping of America onto Germany ambiguates the visual field and the visual narrative, and casts them into the position of a certain disambiguation or explanation of the narrative space. The characters are forced to reveal their position within the narrative, make it clear, within the presence of an ambiguous world sphere; they are forced into a double-meaning of ‘interpreter’, i.e. interpreting the plot for the viewer and interpreting the narrative space for the action. This doubles into the allegorical explanation of the world sphere—the weight placed on social actants to develop their own communities, conglomerates, spheres, and to bear this identification into the public sphere. As such, the existential construction of intersubjectivity is affected as the characters take on dual roles of interpreter of geo-political space, which is one of the normative foundations of modern intersubjectivity, intersubjective exchanges, and normative discourse. The meaning-generating function of intersubjectivity, which is birthed out of a certain normativity, is also affected. A firm social ontology within the film cannot be constructed in the face of reorganizing intersubjectivity brought about by the homogenization of geopolitical space in a homogeneous empty time. On the one hand, as I have suggested, Wenders’s film reveals the geo-political space of Europe in a homogeneous form—regions indistinct one from the other, cultures subjugated to the exchange relations of capitalism. Yet, at the same time, the intersubjective sphere is exploded into a Benjaminian myriad of fragments—the dynamite of a tenth of a second. Wenders maps age old concerns of the subjective crisis in modernity onto the homogeneous geo-political space of Europe. Moreover, he establishes a particular post-apocalyptic view of the world (the four horsemen of commodity exchange having swept through Europe...) wherein the only form of cultural or social resistance to be found is in the violence of murder, the ‘selling’ out to criminal elements no less (and no more) sinister than Brecht’s. This juxtaposition of homogeneous geo- political space and fragmented subjectivity presents an important reconfiguration of the age-old question of the ‘crisis of the subject’ in modernity. Rather than a crisis of the subject, Wenders highlights a crisis of intersubjectivity, a crisis within the aura of social praxis, work. The question of intersubjectivity comes into play through the various, truncated, and indistinct communicative exchanges which take place within the narrative. Jonathon speaks

102 German and English with Ripley (whose German is spotty, but very proper), and English with the French mobster. The Frenchman speaks heavily accented English and no German, yet is able to communicate quite complex details about Jonathon’s supposed medical condition. In many ways this is a film about language and the aporia of such, but only as it plays out in praxis: Jonathon, Ripley, and the Frenchman cannot generate a sufficient intersubjective exchange in spoken language, Derwatt speaks in riddles, and the American mobster (Samuel Fuller) speaks only of film lengths, distribution and sales. In his Wrong Movement (Falsche Bewegung, 1975) Wenders also portrays an aural / oral field that is disjointed and lacking in true communication, a position summed up in the completely mute character played by Natasha Kinski. His characters speak, but not with each other; instead they speak with the projection of themselves onto the other, reflecting what Elsaesser portrays—drawing the concept from the social psychology of Christopher Lasch—as the ‘post-industrial man.’ While Elsaesser’s interpretation may be a symptomatic reading of a symptom, what Wenders portrays in both The American Friend and Wrong Movement is the desire, mediated by social and cultural history, for intersubjective experience. The desire itself reveals the lack of a real intersubjectivity. It also reveals the fear of revealing some substantive discourse on history. Germany cannot speak of the unspeakable, in Wenders’s films, the suppressed reality of its own history; this presence of the absent horror lays the foundation for the disintegration of intersubjectivity itself.224 One very important aspect of Wenders’s film is the representation of a post-war Germany coming to terms with its sovereign past in ways specific to the redevelopment of national identity. We can read New German Cinema as a particular mode of crisis in this process. That is to say that while the search for homogeneous-temporal structures of belonging creates a space for socio-cultural resistance to the hegemony through performance, this process is also bound to a certain historical presence within the German public sphere, a concept of past atrocities that transcends notions of homogeneous, empty time and sublates it.225 This also entails a dialectical process of remembering and forgetting, a process that the critical cinema of Germany brought forward into the mise-en-scène, into the foreground of national narrative, thus designating distinctions between such a process and the ahistorical model proposed in postcolonial theory. As the German nation postulates itself as a liminal people (cf. Bhabha), it must also deal with the

103 ‘specter’ of the search for autochthony, of the atrocities committed, of the blood guilt spread across the very historical imaginary. Thus the creation of ‘national identity,’ one that I have formulated as fundamentally related to intersubjective praxis in the earlier chapters, cannot truly take place in Wenders’s films within the structure of the historical imaginary—and yet, it does. Wenders shows a social field that is disjointed, and bordered by the collective suppression of guilt, unable to reveal itself in relation to its true history, yet pulled together by other forces to formulate the nation of Germany. For Wenders this means that the question of nationalism is one obscured in a double ambiguity, masked in an untrue history and yet necessary for the coming to terms with this history. This holds true, as well, for the international reach of Germany in the postwar years, through the establishment of the EEC.226 These fundamentally economic considerations wove Germany back into the European community, back into the economic and social mainstream, supported by the economic upturn of the fifties and sixties; yet it postponed open acceptance and discussion of past sins. Wenders demonstrates that this is for the worse in regards to German society. The suppressed will bubble up, will disorient the social field, splinter German intersubjectivity, and thus fracture nationalism into myth and consumerism. Jonathon cannot ‘break free’ from his German past, in spite of the fact that he becomes embroiled in a turf war between the French and Americans, and in spite of the fact that he does not seek to come to terms with it. His social interactions are steeped in this history, a history that reveals itself in a fractured social field founded on the praxis of forgetting / amnestia. If modernity involves for the flâneur what Walter Benjamin terms ‘anamnesis’, the drunken reveling in memory, i.e. in the very dialectic of history, then Jonathon reflects the inverse of this phenomenon.227 The amnestia of a ‘collective German society’ eradicates the possibility of modern ‘anamnesis’ in its properly social context. Indeed, anamnesis is a means for Benjamin of resisting the homogenizing powers of capitalism—Wenders’ post-apocalyptic mise-en-scène seems to abandon completely this possibility of resistance within the structure of desire / consumption. Jonathon also reveals the coextensive quality of American influence in this forgetting and the close relationship between Germany and America. The presence of Ripley, an American criminal, signals the presence as physical manifestation and as cultural confluence of America in Germany. In this sense, Wenders globalizes the conflict between history and forgetting, connecting it to the engendering of ‘identity’ in both America and Germany. The continual

104 references in the film to vision and the manipulation of vision reminds the viewer both of his own manipulation at the hands of the film and, on the level of film history, the history of vision itself as a tool for history or accretion of intersubjective-historical processes; and, by extension, the confluence between Hollywood and German cinema that goes back to the Paris Agreement and before. Yet in the context of post World War II Germany, there is a certain nostalgia for these objects that saps them of historical meaning. They are, after all, toys. For Germany, vision is reception, pleasure, a game; for America, represented by the mobster (Samuel Fuller), vision is a business, pornography. This question of vision represents a complex problematic in the film. Firstly, there is the obvious homage to the historical confluence and competition between Germany and America. Yet, the visual field in Germany is represented by toys: the Zoetrope, the small trick photograph of a man who, when the image is turned, grins. One toy, though, brought to Jonathon by Ripley, is a small viewfinder with pictures of nude women. As Jonathon clicks the lever the view changes, and on the bottom of each shot is a series of numbers: angles, minutes, lighting and so forth demonstrating the perfect shots, the perfect ‘construction’ of the nude woman in cinema. This ‘toy’ represents the connection between Germany and America, the supplanting of art by pornography, the overtaking of ‘aesthetic’ Germany by American business concerns, and the connection of German and American consumption. Yet the apparatus of vision, as Wenders implies, cannot be a basis for intersubjectivity, cannot supplant the need for dialogue, for Trauerarbeit itself; especially not when vision, bound to the American colonization of the German field of vision, is bound up with a new discourse on Germany that moves towards disavowal of the Nazi atrocities without recognizing the historical basis of Nazism in modes of production and consumption. As one character from Wenders’s Kings of the Road says, the Americans have colonized the German subconscious. This colonization boils up in a search for some performative association with the colonizers, as both Chatterjee and Bhabha suggest in a different context,228 with the acceptance of the American matérial and the reconfiguration of such; it also reflects the desire to, as with Chatterjee, found a new, heterogeneous time within the homogenizing cultural / temporal field of (American) capitalism. Jonathon attempts to break the frame; he shirks his familial responsibilities, breaks free from his socio-cultural milieu. He enters the realm of international (postnational) discourse (if we conceive of the ‘postnational’ not as epochal but as a

105 phase of intersubjective experience). The homogeneous space of the mapped cultural field is revealed finally as truly heterogeneous by the spatial ambiguation of the mise-en-scène; and narrative continuity is worried to its breaking point. History is the discursive formation of a causal problematic; a problematic which moves through homogeneous time at the temporal horizon where future turns to present turns to past. In its ideological form, history isolates the public sphere, establishes it and offers up the very contradictions upon which capitalism is founded. In Wenders, the dialectical subject is a political individual, the mantra of which is freedom. However, Patočka warns of the dialectical relationship of freedom and responsibility. This responsibility is the current of control, the discourse of history, the horizon between ideological and intersubjective history. The intersubjective construction of history, which entails the loss of the grand ideological narrative (in the language of Jean-François Lyotard229), also informs the crisis of the New German subject. The problem is that, in the tradition of New German Cinema, the subject becomes the locus of this problematic and, as such, it is reduced to the interminable existentialist problematic from which the subject can never quite break; it must be “grafted onto the responsible life,” as Patočka says in a different context.230 The political is bound, in many of Wenders’s films, in an allegorical relationship to the individual, or to individuals, and society as the fabric of intersubjectivity tends to slip into the position of the foreign other, the natural world, the backdrop. If we bind Wenders camera to the historian’s pen, as he reveals and confronts film history within the essence of his mise-en-scène, there is a deeper, disjointed, ruptured historical field of reference he shows that mirrors a basic intersubjective crisis. He outlines the development of a post-national public sphere in the presence of Europe that is bifurcated between an idealized homogeneous empty time of capitalist consumption, and a disjointed and incohesive heterogeneous time of real social praxis, which is, however, rendered in fractured family relationships. Wenders shows an alternative to the ideological homogenization of History, the construction of the historical imaginary, in the manner in which Jonathon rejects both his life and his new “American friend.” However, because it is Jonathon’s task to do so, he also reduces this historical (re)construction of the public sphere to the allegorical Romantic individual, while at the same time calling into question the foundation of such a discourse in the reification of the

106 capitalized relations of late capitalism—there can be no discourse if there is no means of communicating. Walter Benjamin’s description of surrealism seems the mantra for Wenders: “We penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectal optics that perceives the everyday as impenetrable and the impenetrable as everyday.”231 Wenders explores the concrete or impenetrable by fracturing intersubjective space. It is within the gaps, ‘through the screen’ so to speak, that the viewer can witness the rupture between ‘anamnestic’ present (as a dialectic of the commodity) and ‘amnestic’ past, and historical and social time.

CASE STUDY 2 Run Lola Run: Performative or Instrumental History? Wenders, as is well known, employs and develops a certain master narrative for the European art house cinema, a master narrative that defines reception within a narrow frame of reference. Tom Tykwer, on the other hand, with his production of Run Lola Run directly affects this frame of reference in the context of international cinema by shattering it completely. In Tykwer’s 1998 film, Run Lola Run, the synthesis of the narrative only comes about through the complete overcoming of temporal causality. Lola (Franka Potenta) gets three chances to ‘get things right’ in the film, which she inevitably does. Though the narrative structure seems to initially unsettle the dominant spectator-position and thus fall into a counterdiscourse, as David Bordwell says of the recent spate of ‘forking path films’, the pleasure of these narratives comes from “their reintroduction of viewer-friendly devices in the context of what might seem to be ontologically or epistemically radical possibilities.”232 While the narrative might seem radical, it is actually made usual for the viewer. However, in the context of German history, Tykwer’s concentration on randomness and his ‘chaotic’ approach to temporal causality stresses a certain disconnect from intersubjective history, or positions it as an indeterminate within the construction of ‘identity’ or even social being. The construction of an atemporal mode of existence within Tykwer’s fabula is not a mode that simply offers several variations of possible futures, as in Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (Pryzpadek, 1987) where random chance drastically affects the possible outcomes of Witek’s

107 (Boguslaw Linda) future. Rather, though Tykwer has claimed that the film simply expresses artistically the ‘butterfly effect’—a populist understanding of mathematical Chaos Theory—in a manner similar to Kieslowski’s film,233 he draws a connection between his characters and the history within which they operate. Lola’s insistent “Stop!” not only acts as a sound bridge between first episode and the dreamlike interlude, but also seems to be worked so as to affect such a transition. Whether this is Tykwer’s intent or not is beside the point, of course. The effect is such as to elevate Lola within the narrative to a transcendent position, a spot within the construct of the ideology of narrative so that she is given the powers of the writer / creator himself. She comes to represent the idealized, ideological version of the writer, the creator, the artist in his position as historical engine, pushing history into a form that fits the mold of the medium. This is more than simply an episodic recreation of three possible outcomes, but a prescription for the overcoming of the problematic of history through narrative rather than dialogue. The film is ‘liberating’ in that it shakes the subject free from historical determination, from the chains of history, and looses him or her upon the world, activated by his or her own freedom, his or her own individuality—a freedom and individuality that is not turned back towards society, the freedom about which Patočka speaks.234 But history is not indeterminate for Lola, it is bound into a relationship with her. Lola does not learn from a history that is diachronic but from a history that is synchronic and thus located ideologically within the spectator’s Weltanschauung; she learns as the spectator learns in a manner that structures a specific affinity between spectator and film. She is a point of resistance to diachronic history and the sublation of synchronic time. She learns from her own fictional, or parallel, or paradoxically sequential / parallel pasts, even though these ‘pasts’ have supposedly only been registered by the omniscient observer in the diachrony of the history of the film qua matérial. If this film were shot in a parallel fashion, e.g. using split-screen in the manner of Conversations with Other Women (2005), then one could imagine cross-split glances at key moments, as the various versions of Lola learn from one another. Instead, the narrative unrolls in sequence, each section set off by death and return or ‘rebirth’—a rebirth into the red glow of idealized sexual relations. The spectator from the end of the first episode then already knows the sjuzhet from the moment the telephone receiver drops for the second time. The narrative begins to represent as a subtext the very history of the film-viewing experience, which is then reflected

108 into the subtle variations that occur within the fabula, and those then go to affect the sjuzhet, modifying it as it propagates into the film-future. On one pronounced level Tykwer’s film is an analog for the relationship between spectator and screen, such that the screen adheres physically to the ‘desires’ (or the idealized, historicized desires) of the spectator at his or her whim. Whereas German history and collective guilt is seen worked into the very intersubjective space of Wenders’s film, i.e. it affects the composition of such a space, thus underscoring the intersubjective nature of history and highlighting the historical crisis as intersubjective crisis, Lola displays simple iterations of ‘postmodern’ angst. History is removed from its intersubjectively constituted domain in the final overcoming of the problematic. For Lola, history is visual, kinetic—she learns not from interactions with others but from her own innate understanding of her past condition, i.e. a transtemporal kinetic memory that reminds the viewer of a transcendental ‘fate’. The notion that this film simply ‘plays’ with three possible outcomes, allowing each to roll along in a representation of the so-called ‘butterfly effect’ is to some extent misplaced. Lola clearly learns things from one sequence to the next, how to handle a weapon, how to affect her reality with her voice, and so forth, an act of learning that taps into the ideological structure of the narrative as an historical accumulation in the mind of the viewer, demonstrating a narrative- transcending connection within the figural notion of artist, creator, expression. Lola’s ability to retreat from her physical location within the film to the beginning of the narrative, unharmed, determined, repeating with some variations the same steps, calls to mind the power of the narrative as a means of wish-fulfillment. Not only does Lola have the seeming ability to translocate herself through time and reclaim the past, she also represents the idealized abilities of totalizing narrative within the postwall context of Germany. Narrative, or specifically ‘German’ narrative has been freed from considerations and suppression of the past, the so-called coming-to-terms with the past, which bubbles up in the intersubjective constitution of history; instead, postwall narrative approaches the past through the ideological framework of mainstream narrative, which reconstitutes the past in the form of individual subjectivities. Lola rennt establishes itself as a reconfiguration of German history in the form of narrative in such a manner that history is torn from its intersubjective foundation and placed as an aspect of transcendent ideological narrative. History in Tykwer’s film is not generated as an intersubjective construct, but is bound to the absolute narrative force.

109 My insistence in the narrative nature of history in Tykwer may seem heavy-handed. Indeed, after Hayden White and New Historicism it seems obvious that History is simply a narrative.235 And, importantly, that it is a narrative filled with ideological influence from the very nature of the project of history—i.e. what is objectivity and why should it prove important were it not for the Western concepts derived from the much-maligned Enlightenment. In this we see a reflection of Patočka’s work in that this narrative of history is birthed in the desire to control and understand the essential problematic of history.236 The very structure of what is considered ‘History’ is, then, or should be, inherently suspect and open to criticism. Why then should it prove a flaw if Tykwer represents history as essentially thus, i.e. malleable, infirm, unstable, and narrative? I find this representation to be troubling in that History is not presented as an non- causal system of extreme complexity, but is rather ‘linearized’ within the film to a different form of causality, an instrumental form. Lola uses history, in a way that is not that of the responsible “shaking of accepted meaning;”237 rather it is a shaking of the interface with meaning, which is decidedly not the same thing. Lola learns what is necessary to complete the day, and does away with the rest. This does, however, offer a glimpse into the shift from ‘Germany’ to Europe. If we follow Bhabha’s understanding of the generation of the national narrative, we can see that the performative generation of the nation is informed by and contrasted to an historical creation of the state.238 Bhabha, in much the same fashion as Benedict Anderson, constructs the nation as a function of a particular temporal state (i.e. flux). This temporal state is portrayed, in Bhabha, as a split between a homogeneous, empty time and a more heterogeneous time. Bhabha sees this split between a pedagogic (historical / homogeneous) and performative (heterogeneous) time as running through a hegemonic structure, separating a set of competing narrative strategies that, together, generate the “ambivalence of modern society,” which then “becomes the site of writing the nation.”239 For Bhabha, the performative nature of the national narrative offsets the pedagogic (historical) construction of the people (autochthony). This division, however, also institutes a temporal division, a “double time”: “The performative intervenes in the sovereignty of the nation’s self-generation by casting a shadow between the people as ‘image’ and its signification as a differentiating sign of Self, distinct from the Other or the Outside. In place of the polarity of a prefigurative self-generating nation itself and extrinsic Other nations, the

110 performative introduces a “temporality of the ‘in-between’ through the ‘gap’ or ‘emptiness’ of the signifier that punctuates linguistic difference.”240 In other words, the generation of the nation is not so much related to the establishment of an ‘Other’ nation or the self-generated differentiation of nation from nation, but is internally generated by the performative conglomeration of a liminal ‘people’ in the ideal of the ‘nation’; and this liminality is derivative of the very creation of the double-time instituted by the nation. (Benedict Anderson also distinguishes between a ‘mythic’ ‘Messianic time’ and the ‘homogeneous empty time’; both terms borrowed from Benjamin). Bhabha’s clarification on these points is to associate the ‘Messianic time’ with the national narrative and divide the ‘homogeneous empty time’ into double-time, where one is performative and the other pedagogical. Bhabha admonishes Anderson, as well, for not realizing that the essential division within signification-as-an-act (basing his argument on a Derridean conceptualization of signification) contributes to the generation of the national narrative; and this contribution is the division between, what Parma Chatterjee would call, a ‘utopian’ time (that construct associated with the idealized time-structure of global capital) and the heterogeneous time of social praxis thus bound up with the internal differentiation which is at the heart of the nation: “In embedding the meanwhile of the national narrative, where the people live their plural and autonomous lives within homogeneous empty time, Anderson misses the alienating and iterative time of the sign. […] The ‘meanwhile’ turns into quite another time, or ambivalent sign, of the national people. If it is the time of the people’s anonymity it is also the space of the nation’s anomie.”241 The people, in Bhabha’s model are inscribed into the liminal space of the nation and their performative (re)generation of the nation is an alienating one in some sense. This poses a problematic for the discussion of history and its relationship to the nation and its performative (re)generation. Clearly, by inscribing the people into the liminality of the nation, as Bhabha claims to do, he is seeking to generate a division between a hegemonic / ideological concept of the narrated nation (the nation as narrated for the people) and a heterogeneous concept of the nation (the nation as performed by the people). However, in the context of German (re)generation this process is matched with the reconstitution of the German people as both pedagogic and performative nation. The historical reality of World War II binds the people themselves, even in their performative (re)generation of the nation, into the history of such. Europe poses a unique opportunity for German citizens, then, to disconnect themselves from this

111 performative / pedagogic loop and work towards constituting a new state of Europe. The performative and pedagogic would then take on new aspects, distinguishing themselves one from the other. And this hope seems to be apparent in Tykwer’s transnational cinema. However, through his instrumentalization of history in the form of Lola, Tykwer would suggest that this shift into the performative construction of Europe is one that will purge problematic history from the process, in the generic certainty of the film’s narrative, burying it beneath the ‘instrumental’ and reified performative. Lola rennt also seems at the same time a commentary on the historical nature of spectatorship. The many references to cinematic past underscore this fact. Lola reflects both Lola Lola in von Sterberg’s Der blaue Engel (1932) and Fassbinder’s re-envisioning of that film from 1981, part of the so-called ‘BRD Trilogy.’ Her (Franke Potenta’s Lola) position in Tykwer’s film makes for an interesting comparison to the past considerations of the prostitute figure of Lola in von Sternberg’s film. The ability Lola has to break things with her voice, the pure expression of her ‘postmodern’ angst, also reminds one of Oskar from Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) and the eponymous Verfilmung of the same directed by Schlöndorff from 1979. There are also references to classic Hollywood westerns in Manni’s (Moritz Bleibtreu) deadline of high noon (which reflects the ‘projected’ historical ideology of America as seen in Ripley), and so forth. The history of film spectatorship, of film as an event, an aspect of the capitalized memory of history, is inherent in Tykwer’s narrative. Unlike Fassbinder’s approach, though, Tykwer does not bring in the specificity of history as a function of both its temporal liminality and as its historicized relationship to synchronic time. Indeed, Tykwer’s ‘history’ brings forward the entertainment value of the cinema rather than its social importance. Spectatorship is the overt desideratum of film narrative.242 Tykwer represents this desideratum in the structure of the narrative by casting Lola as his representative within the ideological structure. Lola is able to manipulate the narrative, which is paralleled with History (the historical ‘force’ to be found in Jameson243) in Lola to the extent that the proper outcome, life, is reached. While this reflects on one hand new, ‘postmodern’ or technological-age modes of spectatorship that can be found in video games, it also remarks somewhat on the presence of History in the German imaginary, and sees it primarily as manipulable, an essence of sorts that exists outside of the intersubjective structuration of such, or a force that, due to the loss of simplistic causality in the world of ‘chaos theory,’ then suddenly looses all import in social

112 processes. In other words, history becomes reified narrative, equivocally, and just at that point where narrative looses its social import. The statement “Der Ball is rund. Das Spiel dauert 90 Minuten. Alles noch ist Theorie...”244 begins the film. This quasi-philosophical expression from German soccer coach Sepp Herberger, seems to offer up some comment on what is to come. Certainly it seems to represent a proto-filmic philosophical system—i.e. no frills. Tykwer’s earlier and later films certainly do not support this as a general statement for his approach to filmmaking. Rather, the statement applies to Lola specifically, and prefigures the rough, almost brutal style that will follow. The quote also establishes a specific mode of spectatorship. By offering up this sports- pragmatic approach Tykwer suggests that this is a film to be superficially consumed, as a sports match is consumed, and that analysis of possibilities will prove, in the end, fruitless. Tykwer taps into the Hollywood myth of entertainment as a guiding principle for this new phase of cinema, a borderless concept of enjoyment, relaxation, and pleasure. Yet, the ‘happy ending’ doubly exposes itself as an inevitable aspect of the narrative and as forced by those very generic expectations. The Weltanschauung represented by the quote is one not necessarily of superficiality, but of limited empirical certainties representing firm truths that are unavoidable. Approaching the empirical certainties as representative of the larger ‘game’ of existence will prove, for Herberger, successful and considering possibilities that exist outside of those empirical certainties will only distract one from the fundamentals of existence. How does this ‘philosophy’ apply to the narrative? Tykwer explores possible futures with his narrative and refrains from the ‘realist’ doctrine of sticking to certain empirical facts; ‘realism’ is indeed the first concept ridiculed in claims of filmic entertainment that the industry tends to make. This seems clearly to be, as Althusser suggests, the “abstraction” of history.245 But the philosophy really foregrounds a certain concept of disengagement within the narrative, a foregrounding of inevitability in all of its complexity. Is this not also how Classical narratives of generic cinema draw divisions between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, reinforcing the ideological inevitability of social systems as essentially ‘real’ and thus unalterable? Instead of playing out as an interpersonal drama this film has meaning for the specific historical context of Berlin in the postwall period; which explains its current status as canonical postwall film. Lola’s adventure through the well-known and recognizable public spaces of Germany visualizes the reunification as a clarification and opening up of German geo-political

113 space for the presence of fabula. Berlin is privileged sight of narrative again, and as a unified and specifically German space. Yet this unification should also be understood as the reclamation of this space for Europe, the healing of the European split, the suturing of ideological wounds beneath the balm of global capital, especially if one assumes that East German history suffers from what Leander Haußmann calls a “‘collective desire for banality’ (kollektiven Banalitätswahn)”246; banal Lola certainly is not. Tykwer’s presentation of History as a narrative structure, which is inherently manipulable, underscores an approach to German history that reorients the consideration of history from the intersubjective approach to an essential problematic history to the essentially ideological conception of grand historical events and History in its teleological form. The problematic of history, for Tykwer, is less ontological than epistemological; it is indeed a game or puzzle to be solved. This is the narrative within the film. However, the narrative of the film, its place within the history of German cinematic production suggests the possibility of the total suppression (or sublation) of Germany’s Sonderweg and a post-modern rapprochement with late capitalism. What Lola establishes is an ideological division between historical homogeneous, empty time and the heterogeneous time of social praxis. The former is cast as manipulable matériel, an essence to be conquered through narrative. The latter becomes the ideal space of consumption through the link forged between the narrative and the synchronic spectator and the very consumption of the film. Whether one consider this film specifically postmodern or as Owen Evans suggests a fairytale-esque celebration of the human spirit,247 it is certainly a new way for German cinema to approach its own industrial and socio-cultural past.

CASE STUDY 3 Caché: Problematic on Film Contemporary European cinema has also generated a counter-discourse, which addresses history from a different, less liberating point of view. Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) represents a manner of resistance to the mainstream construction of history that sees it as existing outside of its intersubjective underpinnings. Through his carefully constructed mise-en-scène, Haneke explores the stilted world of intersubjectivity through the crises that develop therein. His cinema

114 also represents a counter-discourse that calls into question the cultural assumptions of the European project, postnationality, and cosmopolitanism by casting the questions in the form of the intersubjective. Fatima Naqvi has recently suggested that Haneke presents “western European life as an antagonistic aggregation…”248 Generally Haneke’s cinema presupposes the subsumption of history to narrative manipulation and the ideological version of history as representative form of the truth in the post-bourgeois age of the EU, and works from that assumption. In Caché he presents the historical truth as background for the narrative, but reconfigures it not as an ideological absolute, rather as a version of a myriad of possible truths all expressed in the intersubjective field of human relations and psychology. The factual basis of history becomes one vector in the construction of intersubjectivity. The faux-episodic nature of Haneke’s filmic narrative underscores the disconnection between historical fact and patterns of intersubjectivity in contemporary Europe, casting his characters into the mold of 60s and 70s political modernism as representative of the dialectic between memory and forgetting without leaning towards the romantic humanism of la nouvelle vague or the New German Cinema. To begin a discussion of Haneke’s film, one must have a certain understanding of the oeuvre from which Caché emerges. Specifically, this film employs many features of past Haneke films, especially in the creation of the subject position, in a manner that is familiar to his audience. However, there is also an institutionalized aspect to his filmmaking in the form of the recent “Austrian school” that has emerged since the mid-nineties and is now in full swing. This particular mode can be generically defined variously as ‘objective cinema’—a ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ for a new millennium—, cinéma verité or, in the case of Ulrike Seidl and Michael Schorr, documentary realism. The distinctions between these filmic discourses is far too subtle to explore here; but I want to stress for this reading that Haneke’s camera can be easily linked intertextually to his oeuvre as a whole and to the documentary realism movement that is currently en vogue in Europe. Caché begins with what will probably become one of the most well known static shots in cinematic history. The shot lasts several minutes and simply ‘shows’ a street, foot-traffic, bicycles, and cars. A jumble of architectural styles, the elevated position of the camera, the cars running at odd angles and the framing image of a wall, all compress the vision into a focal point that is no real point. Instead there is a narrow slice of image that the viewer waits to produce

115 meaning. Usually the shot, the essence of cinema, the ‘phoneme’ of cinematic ‘language,’ offers the viewer a visual means into the narrative.249 Thus we, the viewer, wait through this shot for the production of diegetic meaning. It is only when the voice-over discussion of the image, of its mysterious arrival and production, all happening off-screen, takes place that the narrative begins to unfold; and it does so off screen, outside of the image. The image becomes less of a ‘window’ into the narrative as it is an actual object of the narrative—that is to say that rather than being a way of representing the narrative, this shot works its own presence as an object into the narrative, foregrounding the absent presence of the camera itself. This sets up the competing ‘meanings’ between the form of the narrative (which gets wrapped into the sjuzhet and calls the process of representation into question) and the level of ‘proairesis’ or the world of the characters. That is to say that the proto-filmic and the filmic are interwoven within each scene with the early “present absence” of Haneke’s camera, a fact that is demonstrated in the opening shot, establishing a paradigm for interpreting the film, and reiterated throughout—most notably with the graphic suicide of Majid (Maurice Bénichou). The subject position is decentered through this act to a place outside of the narrative, as each shot makes the plot point of ‘observation’ and ‘spying’ problematic. And yet, this trope is not simply Haneke probing an ontological question of the cinematic apparatus. His camera is not working frantically to expose the machinery of production à la Godard, and thus formulating an empirical narrative of this process. Rather, Haneke manipulates the form of cinema into the narrative and introduces gaps within it, gaps which are filled not by the probing eye of ideology, but by the object of ideology. That is to say that Haneke works to expose the omnipresence of ideology as bound to communication and representation, as bound to the narrative, and represents this construct in the narrative gaps. On a certain level the narrative becomes an immanent critique of narrative. This is made sense of when the camera is never truly revealed, the person filming never makes himself known in the narrative, and thus allegorically and paradoxically this filmmaker becomes the filmmaker, and we the spectator become the terrorist voyeur: “Haneke becomes the spectator’s own video-stalker.”250 The aesthetic object of the film becomes its own sjuzhet. Haneke offers perennial critiques of ideology in his cinema and this film is no exception. However, in the construction of an intersubjective space for the development of the narrative, this technique problematizes the basis of filmic narrative space, suture, and also highlights the

116 dependency of the viewer on the placement of the camera. His technique breaks up the creation of synchronic time structures between the narrative and the spectator, effectively ‘alienating’ the viewer from the narrative by removing the quasi-causal relationships that the viewer associates with reality and which genre cinema employs to generate ‘realistic’ narrative.251 However, even within this exposure of narrative, there is the presence of a deep socio- historical query. Outside of questions of mode of production, Haneke’s film presents itself as a psychological parable and sociological exposition. Thus, I would argue that Haneke’s political unconscious is more conscious than not. Indeed, the presence within the fabula of a historical trauma, the “Paris Massacre of 1961”—which is mentioned but not shown in the film—binds the narrative to a specific historical event, connecting it to the French public sphere; and it also binds it to the general trauma of loss by humanizing the murders in the figure of Majid. This connection to the historical narrative of France has little to do with that specific event, though. Instead, Haneke figures the trauma in terms of human loss (Majid’s loss of his parents and, eventually, his adoptive parents). History is cast as a psychological play. In the classical figure of the return of the repressed, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) relives his childhood trauma through which he has reconfigured his own guilt into primal fear—he cast Majid from the house through his actions, and this event caused him to repress the memories of deep guilt under the cloak of deep fear. Now, in terms of the borders of the cosmopolitical space, this film encourages a certain reading. Firstly, Majid’s story reveals more than simply Georges’s repressed guilt. The careful configuration of the film, the long observation of Majid’s living quarters, his life in la cité, is cast in glaring contrast to the film’s observation of Georges’s home—Majid’s apartment is cramped, cluttered, sparsely decorated, grossly painted; while George’s house is large, well-kempt, and they eat dinner in front of a wall of neatly arranged books. The socio-economic conditions that prevented Majid from ‘succeeding’ are not only tied to his real childhood trauma, but also to the deep historical structuration of French society which allowed for the production of such trauma. He does not represent a crisis (based as it is on the Greek word “decide”); rather he represents the presence of the socio-historical problematic. Thus, in his death we see the historical development of his subjectivity, his final presence being the primal image of his own destruction. Majid is both the figure of French repression and oppression (it took until 2001 for the French

117 government to recognize and commemorate the massacre), but more so a figure of the continuation of historical borders within the intersubjective sphere. Haneke critiques the notion of the postnational or cosmopolitical European public sphere in two specific ways: 1) by foregrounding the presence of the absent ideological apparatus—a figuration which imbricates the construction of intersubjective space with the ideological processes of mass media; 2) the figuration of psychological trauma as sociological trauma and the association of these with the borders mapping the intersubjective realm of the ‘real, existing’ cosmopolis. The character of Majid signifies the very epistemo-sociological limits of the current EU project, one that is continually subtended by the political, social and cultural framework of nationalism. That is to say that the imagined community is at stake, sublated ( i.e. aufgehoben with its double meaning) as it is in contemporary politics. Overlaying this cosmopolitical meaning, though, this critique of ‘postcolonial’ European society as it pretends to shake off the fetters of nationalism, is the immanent, subjective interpretation, the allegorical / psychological level of meaning. Thus we can read a dialectic, wherein the psychological interpretation of the reemergence of suppressed guilt (through the anamnestic function of the video itself, the filmmakers ‘eye’) parallels the construction of the cosmopolitical space, haunted by the ghosts of its past, so to speak, and prefigures it. Yet, I want to reiterate that this construction is fully intersubjective—it is more productive to read Georges’s subjective experience symptomatically, i.e. in its presence in intersubjectivity, than immanently. It is within this space that the presence of the “aufgehoben” borders come into full existence in a manner that transcends language differences and avoids the reduction of this narrative into ‘timeless universals’ by recovering some historical specificity. Finally, I return to Haneke’s camera. The ideological presence of this device, as I have mentioned, is foregrounded throughout the film. The viewer is reminded that she is seeing through the screen, a constructed screen, and into the essence of ideology, the representation of the narrative. Thus, while the camera works in place of the probing analyst, aiding and following Georges through his anamnesis, it also works to bury this anamnesis (as does Georges, but differently) in the realm of ideology. This has the double effect of closing the viewer off from the realm of the imaginary ‘real’ while demonstrating the absence of such a notion in its totality by becoming the all-seeing, non-observing eye, the passive observer whose presence is dictated within the narrative by some liminal-diegetic figure—but also in relating the presence of the

118 construct of meaning, ideology itself. The camera reveals ‘truth,’ an absolute truth, and it is ideology, it is a construct. And this has meaning for historical specificity of the film. Haneke places the framework as the structural principle of the narrative, and from this perspective brings the historical as non-causal, heterogeneous force back into its interaction with the public sphere, outside of the narrative formulations of history within the European historical imaginary. In terms of the problematics of history, Haneke demonstrates the continual development of such problematics as both a corollary and powerful resistance to the configuration of homogeneous empty time. The presence of the problematic, a specific disresolution, unstructuration, or meaninglessness, is an empty causality in the film. The development of this homogeneous empty time of Europe, which is always an epistemological process of understanding and narrating the public sphere, working as it does to bind the public sphere, should also recognize the empty causalities (oppression, rationalization, demystification) to which it owes its existence. Otherwise, their return will continue to produce the violence that Haneke so abhors.

CONCLUSION Rosalind Galt has recently addressed the development of European Cinema since the fall of real existing socialism in the East. In her examination, films such as Lars von Trier’s Zentropa, Emir Kusturica’s Underground, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso among others, all of which focus on the period of the 1940s, demonstrate a certain reconfiguration of the space of Europe, in a manner that renders the socio-historical space of nations such as Germany permeable and no longer isolated.252 This can be seen in the simultaneous projection of disparate European discourses onto von Trier’s screen. In a sense, this simultaneous projection broadens the separation between what Colin McCabe calls énonciation and the énoncé by reneging on the promise of “the resolution of that incoherence” which classical narrative gives.253 However, from my point of view, we can render European cinema’s representation of history, that central discourse of the public sphere, in the form of the ideological and the intersubjective. In this manner, these representations are bound to the continual (re)construction of the historical imaginary of the public sphere, and thus to the development of European processes of socialization. The films that I examined above do not represent historical narratives,

119 per se; rather, they portray a particular historical presence in the narrative, a presence which also informs the ideological ossification of history for the public sphere. Colin McCabe’s notion of the énonciation and the énoncé might prove useful here as a means of explaining my approach. Writing of Lacan’s theoretical notion of the Symbolic McCabe says: “Language in the realm of the imaginary is understood in terms of some full relation between word and thing: a mysterious unity of sign and referent.”254 And, as McCabe explains, this relationship in the Symbolic between word and referent is not a lasting one. However, in the classical narrative the threat of castration and the possibility of the realignment of word and thing in the Symbolic is an innate possibility, indeed is assured from the very beginning of the narrative.255 I have already suggested that the historical imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere is present as a vector in the development of the European public sphere. In this sense, with the films above, we can see how the pleasure of a totalizing relationship informs the development of a totalizing historical ideology. In a sense, the pleasure of history is assured in mainstream narratives by the promise of a resolution of historical incoherence: “The narrative begins with an incoherence but already promises the resolution of that coherence. The story is the passage from ignorance to knowledge…”256 The historical problematic in Patočka is this incoherence which historical narrative promises to overcome. I presented three distinct approaches to the historicized intersubjectivity of social space. Each one disturbs the ‘promise of coherence’ in specific ways. Wenders’s by portraying the incoherence as an existential crisis of the German subject; Tykwer by giving power to the characters to reconstruct history, turn the rules of pleasure back onto the ideological subject (and erasing its dialectical basis); and Haneke by returning history to its socially constructed underpinnings—i.e. as an empty causality waiting to be filled with intersubjectively determined meanings. Whereas Galt saw Cinema Paradiso as establishing “a dynamic relation between past and present, in which nostalgia subtends a historical and political critique,”257 this very nostalgia also fills in the empty causality to which I refer, and in some cases works to normatize the historical imaginary. And the ideological normatization which informs the development of the historical imaginary must remember its own problematic nature, or fall into the trap of the abandonment of its responsibility: “in the historical epoch humankind does not avoid what is problematic but actually invokes it, promising itself from this an access to a more profound meaning than that which was proper to prehistorical humanity.”258 And while, as Patočka says,

120 this involves a certain risk, it is also what determines our social freedom in the face of totalizing meanings.

121 CHAPTER 4

FAMILY—INDIVIDUALIZATION, THE PAST AND TRANSNATIONAL CLASS

I would now like to turn my attention to an important ideological force in the context of late capitalism—the family. European political-modernist cinema is known for its skepticism about family—representations that either border on total indifference (family in Truffaut’s 400 Coups), depravity (Passolini’s Salo) or dysfunctional disintegration (Fassbinder’s Chinesische Roulette, or Chabrol’s ironic critiques of the French bourgeoisie). The importance of the family in mainstream cinema is well documented.259 Within this ‘political modern’ cinema, to borrow David Rodowick’s term, the family as representative of bourgeois normativity is normally the seed from which sprouts the psycho-social dysfunction of the characters. For the post-45 generation in Germany, for example, the clearer it became that West German society “had not broken with Wilhelmine, Weimar and Nazi Germany, the more the family became a key point of attack.”260 However, there seems to be a shift in postwall cinema, or post-political modern cinema wherein the family reclaims its nuclear centrality and is reinstituted in the processes of individualization. Whereas in political modernism the family normally represented bourgeois idealism and morality, tradition, and the emotional stagnation of capitalized society, in more recent films representations of the family have taken both a ‘realistic’—i.e. following the dominant mode of the transparency of the narrative screen—and a reflexive turn. The distinction between these two should be followed by a third: the family as problematic in and of itself, the allegorical exposure of the socio-historical forces which subtend (are sublated in) the European public sphere.

POLITICAL MODERNISM AND THE TENSIONS OF INDIVIDUALISM, FAMILY, AND THE STATE The development of auteur cinema seems closely linked to the development of an individualizing social system which centered on the individual at the expense of the family. Thus the family is

122 placed in the ideological position it is within this cinema as a metaphorical extension of traditional normative society. In films ranging from Le Weekend, to Antonioni’s Red Desert, to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning we see the family structure as that which traps and corrupts protagonists. This attack on the family is one, according to Elsaesser, that is “common to Western societies, suffering from the so-called ‘fatherless society’ and the ‘crisis of partriarchy’.”261 However, the emphasis on the entrapping nature of the family avoids the deeper structural issues of institutional individualization, and thus emphasizes the ethical and existential rather than the political. To pose a concrete example, in Wim Wenders’ Falsche Bewegung (1979), a (post)modern reworking of Goethe’s Meister Wilhelm’s Wanderjahre, which itself is one of the earliest examples of a Bildungsroman, the film begins with a filmic sketch of Wilhelm’s relationship to his mother. Peter Handke’s script and Wender’s careful on-screen framing draws out the vast chasm of communicative silence between the two, a silence and tension that have neither source nor symptom other than within the intersubjective. In the opening scenes, Wilhelm stands at the window listening to a record; he turns, sees his mother in the doorway and without speaking smashes the record. When there is any verbal interaction between the two on screen, they do not seem to be speaking with one another so much as at one another. Wilhelm’s inability to communicate effectively with his mother, and her inability to instigate such communication, presents the viewer with a visual and aural gap, one which signals Wilhelm’s deep apathy. The projection of home as alienating, filled with the deep alienating power of capital, so to speak, is then reflected throughout the film into all of his relationships—it becomes the master signifier of the depth and reach of his symptomal apathy. The mother-son relationship and how Wilhelm handles it foreshadows the various dysfunctional relationships that Wilhelm will commence throughout the film and proscribes emotional contentment. While on the one hand such a narrative layout has the function of ‘setting the mood’ in an art house film (its political-economic function), it is important that the presence of the domineering mother is only superceded visually by the aerial filming of a modern German city. The music to which Wilhelm is listening begins as extra-diegetic, a musical introduction to the socio-economic space for Wilhelm’s discontent, i.e. the city. Wenders goes to great pains (and expense) to frame the narrative in relationship to the industrial cityscape in such a manner that the inability to communicate seems prefigured by the presence of the socio-economic ‘reality’ of

123 the city. This chasm is symptomatic of the encroachment of the city’s alienating effects into the intimate sphere. Wenders’ configuration suggests then that the crisis within the intersubjective realm is produced primarily by the pressures of modern capitalistic society as represented in urbanity. This conflation of human emotions and morality with the exchange value system of the capitalized German cityscape, both as (inherently) self-reflexive performance for the audience and as visual juxtaposition of the intimate and the public within the mise-en-scène, is Wilhelm’s ‘crisis’—a socio-political crisis that initiates his ‘Bildung.’ When, in the end, his Bildung never comes about, the omnipresence of socio-economic reality, a base reality of exchange value and surplus, rises as the specter inherent in and proscriptive of every search for its exterior. Wenders presents the viewer with an interpretive schema, crisis=>solution=>Bildung— indeed, one that seems to reflect the Künstlerroman tradition of subjective development in opposition to bourgeois society à la Joyce. However, the moment of Bildung is not one of enlightenment; rather, it is a prolonged view of the snow-covered Zugspitze and a certain inevitable realization of the lack of any true resolution. And I believe it is important to point out that the development of the Bildungsroman, the essential individualistic narrative, parallels the development of the state system for individualization—indeed, it would seem to work as a means of mythologizing and humanizing the utilitarian strictures of individualization. Wenders’ use of such a structure can be seen, in this vein, as a humanistic critique of the mechanical and rationalized process of individualization in its post-war valence. In this depiction of the family, Wenders’ film is not alone. Fassbinder’s famous film Die Ehe der Maria Braun also follows this paradigm, where the presence of the mother’s desires, desires for items that will help mediate the temporal leap into postwar Berlin, becomes one indeterminate factor in Maria Braun’s embrace of rampant and unemotional capitalism. Claude Chabrol’s pêché mignon is in representations of highly dysfunctional bourgeois families and in the Italian oeuvre there is Passolini’s Mama Roma as one example. For the socially critical cinema of Wenders and other political modern filmmakers, the family seems to represent not so much the nuclear unit of modernity, as the driving force behind capitalist consumption, behind rationalized capitalism itself, and thus the continual specter of instrumentalized emotional relationships.

124 These representations of the nuclear family, closed off from a progressive society, inhibited, traditional (in the negative sense), bearers of what in psychoanalysis is called ‘transhistorical trauma,’ take place in a 1970s welfare state system in which the socio-political processes of individualization are rapidly increasing and becoming more complex. This is the process that, according to Zygmunt Baumann “consists in transforming human ‘identity’ from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’—and charging the actors with the responsibility for performing that task and for the consequences of their performance: in other words it consists in establishing a de jure autonomy (although not necessarily a de facto one)...”262 Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, writing together, specify that, in what Beck calls ‘second modernity,’ “individualism is becoming the social structure...”263 meaning that other modes of social integration and ‘solidarity’ are loosing ground to individualization, which is itself functionally related to what Beck terms ‘risk society.’ “The human being becomes (in a radicalization of Sartre’s meaning) a choice among possibilities, homo optionis.”264 For Beck, there is a functional relationship between the increasing prevalence of a specific mode of individualization and the risk society which is bound inextricably to neoliberal economic-social systems. As he stresses, though, individualization is a process that is itself inextricably bound to modernization: “The density of regulations governing modern society is well known, even notorious (from the MOT test and the tax return to the laws governing the sorting of refuse). In its overall effect it is a work of art of labyrinthine complexity, which accompanies us literally from the cradle to the grave.”265 And as such, these regulations produce a social formation of ‘identity’ that is reproducible. The development of the welfare state created pressures that worked in favor of individualization as “most of the rights and entitlements to support by the welfare state are designed for individuals rather than families. In many cases they presuppose employment (or, in the case of the unemployed, willingness to work). Employment in turn implies education and both of these presuppose mobility or willingness to move. By all these requirements individuals are not so much compelled as peremptorily invited to constitute themselves as individuals...”266 This suggests that there is a tension that develops during the institution and application of the welfare state in Europe between the individual and the family. And we can certainly see this tension, symptomatically, playing out in political modernism, wherein the family is de facto bourgeois and traditional, standing in as representatives of social and moral normativity.

125 Indeed, looking at political modernism, outside of the attempt to address what appears to be social issues of class and social alienation, what seems more prevalent given the growing differentiation of social (re)production and the individualization of welfare states is that political modernism seems much more oriented towards an ethical address than a social one. There seems to be the proto-modern cry for unfettered individualism or the indeterminate subjectivity derived from Romanticism and, at the same time, a constant impetus to rethink or reconfigure moral normativity from traditional universalism to individualistic conditionalism outside of the interdependence of individualization on processes driven by society and the state specifically. Importantly, though, this is a non-reflexive action. Thus many of these political modern films ideologically mask the processes of individualization in an all out and warranted attack on normative moral traditions that themselves formulate a ‘master narrative’ of historical continuity, an ideologically delimited historical imaginary. It is no accident that Wenders’ chooses a proto-typical Romantic novella as inspiration for his film; though, Handke’s brilliant twist presents an anti-Bildung message wherein Walter is physically displaced from his beginnings (being in the Alps rather than in Hamburg), yet emotionally and socially in exactly the same place—spatial displacement in modernity replaces emotional and intellectual maturation. While this is a critique on (American) capitalist modernity ‘colonizing’ the minds of the Germans, it takes place within the structure of the family, one that does not offer any respite. It is a moral question more than a sociological critique for it brings forward the question of morality of ethical responsibility within the framework of a rationalized society, a rationalization that is highlighted by the superimposition of (post)modernity onto Romantic ideology. Wenders’ presentation of a problematic in the formation of subjectivity in the modern context does set up, though, a historical discourse which works to worry out the contours of such a problematic. He points to the integration of subject into society and the interdependency of each on the other, while highlighting the incongruities in such a system, the contradictions and paradoxes. This same trope of the Romantic individual caught in crisis can be seen in Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun. While this is certainly a political film, initiating “a cinematic ‘history from below’…”267 in Germany, the figure of Maria Braun, as with those of Veronica Voss and Lola in the following films of the series, does not address the processes of individualization; and they remain very much ethical films. The family is the sight of transhistorical trauma. It is the

126 ambiguous concentration of symptoms which have no direct source. While Elsaesser finds that Fassbinder does not follow the usual paradigms employed by what he calls New Hollywood and New German Cinema, the emphasis is clearly on the psychological development of the individual and not on social processes of individualization.268 Wenders’ and Fassbinder’s critique remains within the ethical and moral and does not step into the essentially political realm of institutional individualization—i.e. real existing socialization. While there are exceptions to this, especially Fassbinder’s Ali: Angst essen Seele auf, there is a tendency in New German Cinema to concentrate on the new conditions of the individual in the presence of some ambiguous transhistorical trauma. When looked at in this manner we can see a parallel to Peter Sloterdijk’s critique of critical theory—Sloterdijk after all pointed out that the social resistance of critical theory was still indelibly linked to the rational male mind and turned an embarrassed eye from bodily modes of resistance to the domination of rationality. The members of this social-academic movement of critical theory positioned themselves as a moral compass, in a manner of speaking, rather than offering themselves up as objects of critique, or as the kynical body of critique, as Sloterdijk might have it.269 This idealism of which Sloterdijk is critical makes its way into many political modern films. It is not until the question of individualization itself begins to take on a negative, neoliberal, idealized quality that criticisms of this process and the social networks effected by this process begin to be seen in European cinema. Individualism seems, indeed, an impetus for the artistic, auteur cinema of political modernism. As has been pointed out by Elsaesser, political modern cinema in Germany, aka the New German Cinema, is linked in its foundations to the developing and changing system of distribution (and mainly distribution restrictions on American films), funding, governmental subsidies and film competitions.270 This bears a striking metonymical resemblance to the furthering of individualization within the framework of the welfare state—the individual is redirected into the network of social relations that establish the nation-state, to take individual responsibility. In France, this continuation of the essentially modernist obsession with the existential development and problematics of the individual can be seen in many films from this experimental period of European cinematic history. In Britain, for example, the “Angry Young Men” films of directors such as Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson of the Free

127 Cinema movement portray characters who “tend to hyper-frustration and despite possessing facility for sharp criticism are unable to transcend their working class milieu.”271 As Andrew Higson suggests of the British films of the 50s and 60s, “in these films, there is a marked intensification of psychological realism and a deeper attention to the articulation of character and individuality. The community now constitutes the backdrop, the setting for the exploration of the psychological complexity of the (usually young working-class male) protagonist.”272 The backdrop of the community means also that the processes of social individualization are also in the backdrop, disappearing from the screen and the characterization. The family, too, is considered an “intrusion on the private (sexual) life of the individual—now the hero of the film.”273 The family is the sight of trauma, and informs the existential problematic driving the individual into post-war society. And it seems clear from the presence of this trope in British cinema, that the abstract historical impetus which could be said to inform German cinema, i.e. the highly ambiguous relationship between the previous generation and wartime atrocities, might be more of an academic rationalization. At any rate, the insistence on the family as the source of existential anxiety seems to be symptomatic of a certain nostalgia for the unified and cohesive subject—a subject whose defining limit is in the logically paradoxical interaction with some intact and distinct yet imposing other. Questions of individualization, the real social development of the individual into society and the state, are left out altogether or at least placed into the ‘backdrop’. As a caveat, though, I must encourage the reader to consider the fact that this might very well be the fault of critics of the new waves, critics who tend to obsess over the existentialism of Heidegger, Levinas, and others as essentially philosophies of the subject rather than philosophies of socialization. Of course, the post-war cinematic landscape was not completely inundated by the highly critical ‘new waves.’ A contrasting representation of the family from an earlier filmic movement, postwar French popular cinema, can be found in Jeux interdits (René Clément, 1952). The family here becomes its own utopian registry, offering solace to the orphaned and abandoned Paulette, as well as stability and emotional security. They are certainly, however, not reproduced as a metaphor for bourgeois life, nor even as its inverse. Rather, this stable unit is self-contained and isolated from the pressures of modern individualization. Only the return from the front of the neighbor’s son, who then becomes the love interest for their daughter, demonstrates a connection

128 to the ‘outside world’, to modernization and the pressures of institutional individualization which is rather clearly figured as a conflict in the film. The family’s stability, while closely related to the earth and to early-twentieth-century concepts of an idealized and proper symbiotic relationship between man and ‘his land’ (e.g. Knut Hamsun’s Markens Grode, 1917, or even in its most negative form Nazi Blut und Boden ideology), also offers the viewer a representative, whole family unit that exists in opposition to the state and its representative urban society. They represent the ‘natural’ family in the face of the growing urbanization of rural societies and, by extension, the rapidly developing individualization of the modern welfare state economy. While not having the overt critical function of political modernism, such a film still represented the obverse of individualization and, by exclusion, the pressures of urbanized modern society. It did not work to mask individualization and the actants of the state and society within such a process by representing crisis as internal to the family unit, and disconnected from socio-economic pressures. However, it also did not work to underscore the political importance of individualization to the modern welfare-state; rather, it offers its ‘wholesome’ rural view as simply more truthful. Of course political modernism did not last. Whether the ‘crisis’ of such a system is to be found in the theoretical or in the social is left to other critics and historians to determine. It is, however, obvious that structural changes in distribution and production reduced the ‘genius’ factor in European cinema, mainly by reducing the processes of ‘artistic’ individualization in the filmic division of labor, reducing the role of the filmmaker as individualized artist. Structural changes taking place in other parts of society as well, i.e. the slow and seemingly inexorable move to the risk society as Beck would have it, shifted the social considerations away from the political individual to the private individual and back into the family. Not to read it too causally, but this might be one way of explaining the rise in ‘documentary realism’ films, which have lower overhead, and ‘art house films’ that use fewer edits and thus longer takes, again producing lower overhead and higher return.

129 NEW REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FAMILY IN THE AGE OF INDIVIDUALIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION I would now like to examine the representation of individualization in the European mode, the moment wherein Europe comes to recognize its own synchronicity in social integration, by looking at the development of the family in the mainstream and critical counterdiscourses of European cinema. These representations must be seen in relationship to the growing individualization of second modern society, a process that is often paralleled with urbanization274. My overarching interest in this section is in outlining the means by which European mainstream cinema approaches the growing risk of welfare state society while negotiating and masking the processes of individualization. I will also introduce the concept of the representation of ‘reflexive’ relations, representations that short-circuit the reification of human relations (and sublate such reification) and find their genesis and continuation specifically in the absence of deeper social structures.

CASE STUDY 1 As a counter-example to Wenders’ representation of the mother-son relationship referred to above, Aleksandr Sokurov’s somnabulent Mat i syn (Mother and Son, 1997), a postwall, post- communist film offers a completely different take on the relationship, one that sets up even in its radicalized form the normative relationship between parents and children that is to be found in some recent European cinema. While Sokurov positions this relationship as a terminal one, the son (unnamed in the film) is caring for his dying mother (also unnamed), the relationship between the two is one founded in a purified (and thus mythical) realm of an idealized intersubjectivity rather than cast into a mediated (socially) symbolic and metaphorical realm as tends to be the case with political modernism. That is to say that the mother in Sokurov’s film is not representative of tradition, bourgeois ideality, consumerism or any social function; rather, she becomes a concentration of the (very much human) dying process, mediated by no state function and completely separate from the processes of institutionalized individualization. Inherent in this presentation is the utopian desire for a non-individualizing society, some ‘return’ to an earlier Russian peasantry perhaps, but certainly a social realm that deinstitutionalizes the processes of dying at the very least, separating it out from all institutional forms including the religious. The critical function of the narrative is in its subtle utopian vision

130 of death outside of institutions. Sokurov’s portrayal continues, then, political modernism’s Romantic inclinations, but without the posturing, disavowal or politics. While not utopian in the same manner, Jeux interdits does represent a sort of ‘pragmatics’ of death, separating it from the deep emotional content it contains in modern, individualized consumer society—the death of the oldest son, bound to the arrival of Paulette and, narratively, to her obsession with death, is seen in pragmatic reality as an unforeseen but inevitable aspect of the lifeworld. The solution to the problem is also generated in a social network of religious certainty, thus distinguishing it from more reflexive solutions. However, the ‘realistic’ representation of mother and son as family unit in Sokurov’s Mat i syn, bound together as they are in such an intersubjective unity such that they dream each other’s dreams, touches on another mode altogether. Sokurov’s film extends political modernism’s tendency towards Romanticism, but without the posturing, disavowal, or the overt politics. In this manner, Mat i syn, outside of its inherent utopianistic criticism of modern society, also buries the tensions produced by modern individualization on the family structure. We could read this, on the one hand, as a matter of masking or ideology. Or, as has been Jameson’s project of late, we could take the very utopian impulse and draw out its inherent critical nature, its radical otherness, such that the absence of institutional individualization processes within the film represents the only possible conditions for the perfect intersubjective unity discovered by mother and son—the fuller horizon of human experience attainable only through the eradication of state influence. They are completely alone in their world—thus allowing seemingly for their radical ‘ideal speech situation’ (Habermas). The utopian inversion, of course, is that they are also without society. In Mat i syn, Sokurov represents human relations that are ‘reflexive’ in that the intersubjective relationship becomes inherent in its own representation of itself. That is to say that the characters of mother and son react not to a political horizon but to a purely human horizon of experience produced in their ‘ideal speech situation’, a situation that, reflexively, continually returns to the moment of generation. Both communicate, through language and gestures, in order to generate communication, and the language does not reflexively activate itself, deconstructively so to speak, but rather approaches the nature of the characters’ emotional state—there is no continual play of signifiers that spills over into some excessive void; indeed, there is no void. This is communication as an extension of a fluid and non-differentiating

131 subjectivity rather than the delineation of it, represented in long takes of the two contented people, looking at each other, feeling each other, captured by Sokurov in a middle close shot, the faces and upper torsos filling the frame. The soft-lens shots and the fact that mother and son dream each other’s dreams deepen this sense of total and seamless connection. The overall utopian nature of the setting presents the critical content; and that only as a postulated ‘radical otherness’ that is then put into the larger context of the viewers’ lifeworlds. Sokurov depicts characters that are one with each other, bound into a pure intersubjective world, and one with the natural world around them. In the moments when the mother and son are shown together, they fill the screen, oftentimes at unusual angles, in a manner which forces the viewer to consume nothing other than the intersubjective realm of their interaction. Indeed, Sokurov seems to use familiar, Hollywood post-coital formulations in his representations of mother and son as a means of distancing the viewer somewhat, while also reflecting the idealized nature of such post-coital scenes in popular cinema. However, when the characters step into nature, it is a nature reminiscent of the very internal world to which it is supposedly juxtaposed. Perhaps the term ‘juxaposition’ is inappropriate here, for Sokurov offers little contrast within the matte flatness of his mise-en- scène. The long shots, in a film that is notorious for being intensely soporific, also work to break down the distinctions between foreground and background, nature and man, intersubjective and subjective. In all intents and purposes, then, this is a radical utopian vision of death and human relations. The actions of the individuals within the narrative, though, are reflected upon themselves in a self-contained system. This process certainly seems to parallel the growth in European cinematic narratives of a ‘reflexive’ family system, wherein the problems of the family are seen as reflected back into the family unit, a feed back loop so to speak, in a self-contained system. I will examine this trope in some of the examples that follow. The fact that such reflexive narratives of family strife are presented ‘realistically’ underscores the growth of a of ‘neoliberal’ individualistic historical imaginary that distinguishes between the familiar, intimate sphere and (real) society as though one is somehow autonomous from the other. My claim is that Sokurov uses a utopian register to formulate a subtle critique against institutionalized Western society. This utopian register presents a radical other social (im)possibility. The manner of representation I outline above strongly suggests the utopian (no- place) rather than the heterotopia (an other-place, as Akin’s border region, for example). This

132 positioning in the no-place of the socially symbolic dislocates the narrative from its real place- holding in existing social relations, makes it unlocalizable. It is this unlocalizability, its unmapped and unmappable position in history, that allows it to be critical. There is no causal relationship drawn between this utopia and its inversion, no historio-cartographical interchange between this no-place and the spectator’s lifeworld, and yet this impossible social construction is made accessible, understandable, given existence—the interface of the mise-en-scène itself makes the unreal real. Indeed, the two references to a ‘real world’ in the film, an industrial society that exists at the edges of the mother’s world—a train seen in the distance and, what seems to be, a nineteenth-century schooner at sea—emphasize the radical otherness of their world. Yet it is in its utopian mode, to be found in their total visual, mental, aural confluence on the screen, that Sokurov’s film finds its critical potential. Sokurov’s utopianism allows, firstly, for a separation from the universal (utopia cannot be universal by its very logical coherence) while also bringing in universal experience (death). This imbrication of the universal and the radically limited demonstrates the potential in this universal experience to be radically other. It is through this radical otherness that the film can be viewed as inherently critical. In much the same way as Jameson sees the transindividual narrative of the Jews dramatically reduced to the individual narrative of Christ, so the transindividual experience of death in Sokurov is reduced to the singular narrative of a single death—the radical nature of this utopian experience can then bring forward critical and radical otherness into the lifeworld of the social-individual.275 The institutions, shifted to the realm of the ‘real’ (in a non-Lacanian sense) and everyday, are called forward by their spectral absence. In the first shots, we are already coded into a dream realm, through the soft lens and lighting used in each shot. The literal, already shifted to the figural, suggests the radical otherness of the narrative. Thus we have a division (utopia) and imbrication (death) to allow access. The division presents the inversion of our society in the usual logic of binary otherness— in other words each place where it is not the same highlights not necessarily the difference but the necessarily logical cohesion of our sameness. Therefore the absence of negative emotion and the absence of institutions calls forward the presence of such in our own reality. In this act of consumption, the moral and anagogical also act, as Jameson suggests, as the space of libidinal investment. But this libidinal investment must necessarily obey the logic of the utopian sphere,

133 even in its impossibility and through this dialectical process, the grounds of impossibility can be addressed—in this case the continual presence of institutions in their handling of death. Through this interface, the construction of society into superstructure and base, comes through as more than allegory—the superstructure (state, culture, religion) controls death, the ultimate horizon of human experience that is generated by the base. Only in a utopia, a no-place, could this control be relegated to the base. This does not, however, lead directly to an ideological critique. Indeed, quite the opposite, it would seem, for there is no re-expression of the state, of the institution of death, which reemerges in the film. There is consequently no critical expression of the ideological relationship between death and institutional individualization. Sokurov’s film is a good example of a utopian critique; and in this way seems similar to his mentor Tarkovsky’s critical films). Luisi Rivi recently writes about Tarkovsky’s Europe-Russia co-production, Nostalghia (1983) as a “weak utopia” which “remains anchored in history” and, by extension, to the Europe’s historical imaginary.276 And in some ways the cinema of Sokurov does not stray from this ‘weak utopia.’ However, I would argue that Mat i syn is representative of a ‘strong utopia’, one which does divide itself cleanly from the real existing relations of normative socialization, and in so doing offers an alternative possibility for these relations, a science fiction of intersubjectivity so to speak. The search for an ideological critique will take in another direction.

CASE STUDY 2 Whereas the utopian film can mask and reveal at the same time, revealing through lack as it were, a mainstream film normally simply masks the influences of modern society and the state/government on the constitution and structural subtending of the family and the individual. The lack is replaced by libidinal investment in the masking process itself—an always active process which inhibits the emergence of a lack in the social narrative. An example of this can be seen in, strangely enough, Run Lola Run. I have examined in a previous chapter how Tykwer’s film constructs generically (in Jameson’s dialectical reading of that term, cf. The Political Unconscious) a historical division between the European past and its present. Tykwer’s narrative suggests the possibility of a radical break with Germany’s past, through the elevation of the individual will. In the previous chapter I spoke of individualism and the manner in which Lola’s individuality itself takes control

134 of the temporal narrative and restructures it, binding her narrative powers to the spectator and her historical properties to the historio-existential Weltanschauung of the spectator. There is, however, a particular representation of the family that runs throughout the film and helps activate Lola’s individualistic, time-altering power. Without the threefold depiction of the recumbent, emotionally distant mother, Lola’s distinct individualism would not have the ring of ideological individualism, i.e. self-generated. Her mother’s disinterested call for shampoo stresses her general emotional distance, her inability or unwillingness to enter into an intersubjective exchange with her daughter. Whereas in Wenders such exchanges are clearly desired and impossible, in Tykwer the desire is simply not there. It is, indeed, in this manner that the narrative primarily establishes Lola as a liminal character. Her seeming distance from the usual emotional support network of the family and her mother’s apparent inability to grasp the complexity of the situation highlights the need for Lola to ‘go it alone’ and works its theme on the historical-imaginary concept of the determined and determining individual will. Later in the narrative she has three distinctly different run-ins with her emotionally domineering father, each of which is representative of a deeper split in the family unit that is just coming to fruition within the diegesis. These crises within the family are not depicted as related to the process of institutional individualization but almost inherently a condition for such a process within the ideology of consumer society. That is to say that the crisis within the modern family, seen as somehow self-generated and isolated from larger society, becomes the sole impetus for the construction of a distinct individual for the consuming adolescent, rather than the social demands and expectations of a normative modern state and society. Lola is born out of a fictively sheltered and psychologically encumbered world of the family and into truly ideological individualism—and an individualism that can alter the very state of the universe; an individualism that would make Nietzsche salivate. Whereas in political modernism, the family takes on the metaphorical onus of bourgeois society, as they are sketched in pure relationships to processes of reification and alienation, in Tykwer’s cinema the family becomes a reflexive unit, acting out the imaginary individualization of Lola and feeding off of its own apparent isolation. That is to say that Lola’s family does not extend into society, is not at all related to its deep-structure processes of alienation and reification, but exists solely to actualize Lola. Lola’s realization that her father has a lover, matched with the further realization that he may not even be her father, all plays out a recurrent

135 theme of familiar isolation, or the reflexive concerns of the family within second modernity, i.e. Beck’s ‘risk society.’ One could even go so far as to say that the family, as in the middle ages, is the body of society, rather than the children of it. Gone is the metaphorical power of the family as representative of tradition, bourgeois ideality, or moral normativity. Instead, the family reflexively turns into a unit of deep psychological crisis (or comfort) in order to mask the approaching crises of social risk under the forces of neoliberalism which impinge on the European market system. The family is represented as ‘traditional’, in Tykwer, but not in the since of class structures. Lola’s mother presents the viewer with a distinctly coded ‘ancient’ form of reading fate—astrology. She speaks on the phone about astrological signs, either offering a reading or using the outdated language of 1960s’ American pop-culture. Either way, she represents not so much the imminent pressures of bourgeois tradition on the family, but simply the outmoded nature of the previous generation—and, in the case of the use of the ‘passé’ language of the sixties, the reference certainly conjures up the baby-boom dynamic of the desired eradication of bourgeois tradition and, at the same time, its inexorable reconstruction. In both possibilities, the mother’s disconnection from Lola’s world is underscored and the political potential of the individualized subject is called into question. And her use of a fatalistic system of prognostication drives a further wedge between the generations. Her language seeks to predict the future, predict fate in order for the listener to work his or her way out of difficult situations. The modern spectator surely understands the coded falsity of such a system, as does, no doubt Lola. For Lola does not seek to predict the future, she lives it. Lola’s decisions have consequences, which are portrayed within the diegesis; she does not wait to be told the future and which decisions to make. This elevates and deifies Lola’s individualization, which Beck associates as well with the growing level of choice offered to the individualizing subject.277 In this manner, Tykwer again stresses Lola’s individualism but ties her individualization not to social networks and the pressures of the welfare state, nor even to the processes of sexualization which determined her namesake (i.e. Lola Lola’s sexual individualization in Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel), rather to the almost mythic powers of the isolated modern family, whose crisis forces the subject to ‘do for themselves.’ Tradition is not cast out of the family into a metaphorical network of normative conditions which subtend social interactions and intersubjectivity itself, as tends to happen in political modernism. Rather,

136 tradition is turned into a question of (un)fashionable adherence to certain trends—and thus more closely linked to the ideological power of consumerism, though not at all in a critical fashion. (Lola indeed sublates the social problematic of consumption into her trip through Berlin, binding the east with the west into a music video, a mode of marketing, which by its very nature generates capitalistic consumption.) While the nuclear family is represented as ‘traditional’ and outdated, distant and the source for individualistic crisis, the fruition of this representation comes about only in the forging of new, dependent social ties—but social ties that are not related to social institutional individualization, and instead are a product of this ‘crisis individualization.’ This is a strong current in contemporary, mainstream European cinema. Young people always find other young people with whom to continue the march of social traditions. And importantly these new social formations are juxtaposed to the crisis nuclear family which is seen as either the seat of emotional instability or a delimiting factor on the freedoms of youth. For example, Lola reconstructs her family with Manni, and even acts out the deepest Western tradition of complete sacrifice for him. Their interstitial promises of fidelity, bathed in reds and blues, transcend Lola’s own crisis family and offer the viewer a contrast, within the basis of crisis individualism, for emotional stability—the ‘do it yourself’ becomes the ‘do it ourselves’ as they develop a new reflexive loop. But importantly this happens without the criticism oriented towards normative society. Lola’s family is criticized, but the connections between family and society and, by extension, society itself in its complex and capitalized/rationalized form is never touched. The conflict is not social but ‘generational’ and thus energies of change are directed not at the stagnant social system, rather at the mythically complete family. It becomes a delimited criticism of the reflexive family—the family as isolated social unit disconnected from larger social, economic, political pressures and, thus, reflexive. While Tykwer’s film does offer a liberating ethic, a conditional view of history and causality that breaks free from normativity (by sublating it into processes of consumption and shaking it free from its deeply social roots) and deterministic models of the historically generated public sphere, it does so at the expense of the representation of the power of the family unit in questions of moral, ethical and social normativity. In this manner, the liberating power of the historical message is bound unnecessarily to the liberation of the individual from the reflexive family unit and thus to individualism. It also masks the social basis of institutional

137 individualization by rooting such a social phenomenon in the crisis of the reflexive nuclear family and thus sliding into the neoliberal-ideological realm of ‘individualism’.

CASE STUDY 3 Another example that plays on the same mode of crisis family and the generation of new, social formations derived from ‘reflexive individualization’ is to be found in Cédric Klapitsch’s L’Auberge espagnole (2002). Here the crisis family is only alluded to in Xavier’s (Romain Duris) relationship to his mother. However, the development of new social networks that stretch over borders broadens the extent of this consumptive ‘reflexive individualism’ to include the European cosmopolitical space itself. In many ways the film could be said to represent a particular problematization of institutional individualism, in that Xavier is preparing himself for a high-level job within the new, multi-lingual and transnational European economy, and eventually opts out of it in favor of his new social network. In a sense, this problematizes, and rightfully so, the economic orientation of European integration and the inherently economic or market orientation of the developing European identity. This has been, indeed, the continual ethical difficulty in European integration, and represents a perennial discussion in European political circles. For the film, the question is reflexively reduced to one, on a certain level, of individualization and social integration, such that the economic (Xavier’s job opportunity) and the social (his new multi-lingual social network) are divided one from the other as dialectical poles whose synthesis can never come about. As Beck suggests, in second modernity “both the firm and the workplace lose their significance in conflict and identity formation. A new site arises for the formation of social bonds and for the development of conflicts: namely, the sphere of private social relations and personal modes of work and life.”278 Xavier of course decides on the ‘human’ and social factor and through this act suggests, in truly modernist fashion, that the economic level of institutional individualism in no way represents the reproduction of social networks and indeed inhibits it. There are obvious ideological disconnects here, however, in that the economic level of society that the narrative inherently critiques is the impetus for Xavier’s initial trip and makes such a trip possible within the auspices of European economic interests. Nation-state modernity isolates Xavier in his

138 French routine and transnational cosmopolitan modernity pushes him outside of those boundaries into a transnational social setting—the foundations of an ideological, utopian cosmopolitanism. These ideological disconnects are, however, not overcome. They form a central contradiction which informs the ending of the film, the visual dislocation of Xavier from his friends, the pixilation of social space, as Xavier sprints across the tarmac. His only possible reconciliation is through becoming a writer, apparently. And in order to accomplish this he must, of course, isolate himself in the true English-Romantic notion of poetry. There are certain caveats to this cosmopolitanism that must be pointed out. Firstly, there is a lack of the social and economic integration needed, according to Beck, for true cosmopolitan resistance to neoliberalism.279 The characters do not engage actively with la société de consummation, to use Baudrillard’s phrase,280 which points up the reflexive nature of the narrative. That is to say that consumption is relegated to the background in the film. It is an assumed aspect of the lifeworld, the sublated ideological framework for the film’s action rather than a negotiable aspect of the lifeworld. And as such it does not figure into the overall problematics of the narrative and thus of the cosmopolis. And only through an ethical engagement with the world political economy can there be a true resistance to the global march of heartless capitalism, which is an inherent function of cosmopolitan idealism. Secondly, deeper ideological differences between societies are themselves salved over by the press of ‘human connections’. That is to say that the deeper structural and political differences between the nation-states of Europe, differences that are reflected into the various societies, is in no way addressed, thus not solving the essential problematic raised by Balibar.281 Finally, the ideological development of cosmopolitan space in L’Auberge is portrayed as something inherently and essentially human, thus dissolving political force into biological choice. This ‘essentially human’ quality parallels Martha Nussbaum’s emphasis on the moral quality of cosmopolitan citizenship.282 Yet Klapitsch’s film makes this a sexual-moral relationship—the biological drives of transnationalism. This is one aspect of the representation which is ideologically the most insidious—the inevitability and ease with which such a cosmopolitical space can develop, outside of politics, economics, and deeper social structures. It blossoms out of ‘simple’ human interaction, and is reflexive. This ideological simplicity reflects the simplicity of neoliberalism, which ties it to the individualism of Lola, birthed out of the reflexive crisis of the family. What does this mean for the cosmopolitan intent of the narrative?

139 That intent is forced into the ideological register, the reconstruction of a traditional moral world whose spatial and temporal displacement from that of the former generation implies a new mode of existence. Cosmopolitanism becomes less political and more a matter of choice in the process of individualization, an individualization that is oriented around consumptive youth culture, and thus filled with chance rather than rational action, rather than the processes of institutionalized individualization and as such is ideologically reflexive. The problematic that has developed here seems central to the development of an integrated European society. In one situation there is the question of historical determinism which impinges on the development of a European public sphere and in the other we are presented with the disconnection between the economic integration of Europe which has significantly outpaced the social and cultural integration. However, both of these films develop the problematic reflexively, oriented around a crisis in the reflexive family and, as such, mask the true complexity of the political situation. Both films develop a reflexive world system that delimits any larger problematic produced within the narrative. Mainstream European cinema tends to work by constructing a self-limiting, reflexive social system which is especially prevalent in mainstream European representations of the family. These films bracket off the family from state institutions and thus occult their essential relationship to complex social structures. In this mode, these films mask the deep structural relationships between society, communities and families, reflecting the rationalization and subsequent categorizational divisions of modern society.283

A CRITICAL MODE OF THE FAMILY IN CRISIS (A PROBLEMATIC) RATHER THAN AS CRISIS There is, however, a strong and vibrant critical mode of filmmaking in Europe that posits the family in its integrated social position rather than reflexively, meaning politically and ethically isolated from society. These films produce problematic social readings and ‘histories’ that themselves become an aspect of the historical discourse on the problematic of European integration. In each, the family is not represented as a reflexive, closed unit, and the internal crises of the intimate sphere are related to the integrated whole of society, not always simply

140 mislaying blame in the process, but rather unmasking to some extent the truly indissoluble roots of social integration and individualization. With these films, the roots of alienation are not indicated, a process that would return to the ideological realm of linearization; rather, these films tend to indicate the possible presence of the rhizomes of alienation within the context of the global risk society.

CASE STUDY 1 I have already discussed Michael Haneke’s Caché and its relationship to the internally generated borders of the European public sphere to some length. Here I would like to address an earlier film, Code inconnu. In one of the many ‘divers voyages’ that make up the film, a summary of which is difficult to give, there is the story of George (Thierry Neuvic), his younger brother Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) and their father (Sepp Bierbichler). Georges is a war photographer who has returned, in the narrative, to Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche). We are introduced to Jean, his younger brother, at the beginning of the film with Juliette Binoche, when he relates that he has left his father on the farm, which Jean is uninterested in taking it over. While this is seemingly a fairly common narrative of adolescent rebellion, Haneke drains it completely of any emotional content by presenting the situation as more of a contemporary problematic.284 Firstly, in the set up of the scene, Haneke breaks down the usual triangulated system of shot and reverse shot discourse by placing both characters within the frame and following their conversation as they move along the street. Reflecting Fatima Naqvi’s notion that “mutual contempt is the main hindrance to both human solidarity and active intervention in Code inconnu,”285 Haneke stresses Anne’s disinterestedness by having her disappear into a boulangerie while the camera waits outside with Jean. The linearity of the shot, tracking along the street with Anne and Jean at shoulder level, zero-degree angle, sets up Haneke’s signature ‘objectivity,’ while also narrativizing the public sphere through the single, forced perspective. There are difficulties to be found in the urbanization of society that is, inevitably, associated with cosmopolitanism. As Beck suggests: “individualization means, implies, urbanization.”286 And too often, cosmopolitanism implies a massive, moral and ethical expansion of the city, as one might argue in the case of Nussbaum. For the father in Code

141 inconnu, this means the eradication of a traditional family structure of which he has been part for several generations. So on the one hand there is the confrontation with tradition raised by political modernism. However, the film is careful to reduce this ‘tradition’ to its economic foundations in the form of the farm as business, rather than an enforced moral or ethical system. What is missing from Jean’s future is the idealized notion of ‘choice’, a notion that we have already seen raised in Lola above, and an idealized form of choice that is normally associated with urbanization. Jean will not be able to choose his own future from a set of possible futures as did Lola. His choice is reduced to the range of possible choices inherent in society, the choices that make up institutional individualization. This reality is what is masked by ‘Lola-type,’ reflexive narratives that distinguish between the internal and the external in such a profound bifurcation, as the individual is distinguished from the very real social processes that bring them into existence within society. Underneath this, what we might call, ‘critique of idealized choice’ in contemporary society is an attempt to understand or represent the rhizomes of social alienation. Beck suggests that social identity formation has shifted from workplace to private social relations in second modernity.287 If we look at George’s situation in the film we see that this promise of private sphere integration is ideologically oriented rather than an inherent aspect of the lifeworld. This belies the utopian promise of cosmopolitanism that is bound to its ideological construction. The social shift that Beck sees taking place and the same that is idealized in Klapitsch’s L’Auberge espagnole is this very turn to broadening of the private sphere at the expense of class dynamics and integration. George is unable to find these ties that bind within the private sphere, unable to relate to Anne, his girlfriend, who acts out her life as though it were a film. And he finds solace in capturing others’ alienation, or in forcing such alienation through his art. When he steps into the metro, his camera on his chest, and clandestinely takes pictures of those around him, he is capturing the isolation of cosmopolitan individualization, the essence of Beck’s concept of non-reintegration. Not only does he ‘capture’ this alienation or ‘isolation within the crowd’ that is inherent in contemporary urban society, but he also (re)produces it. His photographs isolate the people within them, superficially relating something important in their alienation while never delving below the surface. They are indeed reproduced as ideological ‘phonemes’ which act exaggerates and even overdetermines their social alienation. George

142 reifies this alienation within his photography, a reflection of the ideological impetus of photography itself. This fact mirrors George’s inability to ‘delve below the surface’ of others and end his cosmopolitan isolation that is brought about through the process of individualization without reintegration, thus completing the outline of an essential problematic within cosmopolitanism. Anne also represents at times a particular criticism of the shift from public to private in second modernity. In one instance, we see her standing in front of the television. She is standing at a slight angle to the flat surface of the camera, behind an ironing board, listening to the news and ironing her clothes. The room is small, private and intimate. We glimpse an intimate slice of her life in all of its deep mundanity, yet it is disturbed by the sounds of a child screaming and being beaten in the apartment above her. We can tell she hears it. She reacts slightly but continues her work and the scene ends. Later she tries to speak of the incident to the neighbor but is rejected outright. She later finds a note under her door about the incident. Each of these scenes set up the dynamic of urban-life/ intimate-sphere, spheres that are pierced through by society and become but figments of our imaginations, set off by structural divisions rather than ontically differentiated. And when Anne seeks to ‘integrate’ into the society around her the familiar problem of indifference raises its head. The real difficulty arises, however, in her differentiation between the private and the intimate sphere, or the conflation of the two depending on your point of view. She handles her private life as though she were starring in a film. Haneke stresses this by blurring the lines between the master-narrative and slave-narrative on several occasions when Anne is being screen-tested for a suspense film—she stares into the camera and, at the coaching of someone ‘behind’ us, acts a scene of terror and isolation. Her later reaction in the supermarket to an argument with Georges is so overly dramatic as, again, to stress the manner in which she acts out her private sphere existence by masking herself as though on stage. This comments on the tendency for people to act out a particular private sphere which is then separated from the more intimate sphere, and in this sense is very closely related to Habermas’s representation of the development of the public sphere from the parlor / salon of bourgeois households. What causes the crisis, though, is not the encroachment of the private into the intimate, but rather the very stark level of differentiation that goes hand in hand with second modernity institutional individualization and, by extension, cosmopolitanism. Haneke begins to pierce holes in the

143 utopian vision of cosmopolitanism by drawing the physical bodies of those idealized members of this universal community into the foreground, ‘warts and all,’ so to speak. Thus he does not mask the processes of institutional individualization, but calls the utopian promise of such processes, based as they are on more traditional forms of social life that have themselves been challenged by second modernity, into question. Finally, there is the father’s ‘final solution.’ From the blackened screen of one of Haneke’s distinctive edits, a sound bridge signals the sound of a gun shot. It is a subtle but distinctive pop, then the screen lights up with the father standing over the last of the dead cows slumping to the ground. As with much of Haneke’s depictions of violence the viewer is spared the full frontal brutality of it, as though Haneke is continually pointing out the unrepresentability of true violence. And the bodies of the cows, spread on the ground at his feet, their heads still tied to the fence in front of them, remind the ‘well-watched’ viewer of other scenes of animal violence in European cinema, from the slaughtering of the pig in Godard’s Le Weekend, to the cleaning of a slaughtered pig in Schlöndorff’s Der junge Törless, to the brutal and extended slaughterhouse scene in Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit dreizehn Monden. However, instead of the existential address of Godard, or the revelation of commodity fetishism in Schlöndorff and Fassbinder, the viewer of Haneke is left with the corpse alone as evidence of life and as evidence of the pressures of modern society. These animals were not animals at all for the father, they were chattel, economic units, and the center of his business. His destruction of them causes no emotional reaction, no sorrow at their sorry fate; rather, we see him dissolving his business. Even in the scene afterwards between the father, Anne, and George, in spite of the attempted extirpation of the deeper reasons for his actions as located in the absence of Jean, this is not a reflexive construction. The crisis is not located within the family unit, nor is it cast outward onto a disparate social system that impinges on the small farmer (thus retaining that reflexive moment by underscoring some fictional divide between the ‘private sphere’ of the personal economy and the public sphere of society). Haneke integrates this system into the world system he has developed in the film, tying it to the taxi-driver, to Amadou, to Anne and to the problematic of institutional individualization in cosmopolitan society. Haneke’s method of composition, bringing together disparate scenes of disparate tenor together into a pointed and intentional pastiche, heightens this sense. The crisis if not a reflexive one, but one that determines (as much as it is determined by) second modernity itself.

144

CASE STUDY 2 In the development of the relationship between the father and son, Code inconnu holds only a passing similarity to Laurent Cantet’s Ressources humaines (1999). Cantet’s narrative is a more classic tale of a relationship between father and son. But, like Haneke’s depiction of the family, this is not reflexively oriented. The crisis that arises within the film does not derive solely from family as a socially independent unit. The crisis comes about through the intense integration of family and society, family and work, and specifically family and economy. Cantet offers an interesting inversion on common socialist thought: rather than dehumanizing the ‘human being’ in favor of the rationalized economic, Cantet works to humanize the economic and to represent the deep roots of human integration in ‘rationalized’ economic systems. The son of ‘working class’ parents, Franck has gone to business school, in the classic ‘urbanized’ movement of the working class into the managerial class, and has chosen for his internship the factory at which his father works. While there he clashes with the union over the French thirty-five hour work-week, proposes to bypass the union to management by disseminating a referendum to the workers, and ends up aiding management in preparing a list of layoffs, on which list appears his father’s name. Cantet presents the complex question of the thirty-five hour week, a question that continues to cause controversy in contemporary France, in the form of a classic Bildungsroman wherein Franck realizes his social potential as corollary to his schooling in business. Indeed, the question of the thirty-five hour week is supplementary to the deeper structure of the film which can be found in Franck’s relationship to his father and his father’s relationship to his work. These relationships develop in parallel within the narrative, and therefore draw from each other within the narrative system, such that it is difficult to see a way of distinguishing one relationship from the other. Franck relates to his father as his father relates to his job, and the psychological complexity of this situation does not find a proper outlet within the narrative. There is no solution to the problematic, simply the representation of its presence, a presence which tends to be masked in ideological narratives of individualization. Indeed, the ironic twist to the title, “human resources” points out the deep integration of human beings and industrial resources; but the film inverts the problematic of ‘alienation.’ On the one hand, the father is a resource to the firm, and one that, while still highly productive (he proudly remarks on how he can turn out seven hundred welded parts per day), is also subject to

145 ‘downsizing’; yet, on the other hand, the father is maddeningly loyal to the company and defines himself through his work. He is not alienated from his work and society so much as the eternal reason for such a system and for such exploitation of labor. When the workers go on strike around him, he continues to stand at his post, offering the viewer the ultimate confrontation between him and his son. And at this moment it is no longer an issue of the work-week, but a reflection of a deeper crisis within the family unit—not one that is inherent to an isolated and self-determining family unit, and thus firmly reflexive, but one that is generated in the praxis of society, within the workplace itself, reflecting the real social interaction between workers and work, family and society. Society in the form of work penetrates into the family unit, subtending it, delimiting it and even effecting it. This concentration of larger socio-economic considerations into the deeply human moment between father and son, nicely underplayed by the actors, brings out the dependency of the family unit on the very thing that reflexive family narratives tend to isolate themselves from—society. While Cantet’s film problematizes the question or the common understanding of alienation, it does call for a new sense of class solidarity and one that is rooted in the social and ‘organic’ roots of the family unit. Conquering the conflict within the family that is generated by the social forces of individualization and the ideological mode of individualization can create this new basis for solidarity. Capitalism and the rationalization of society has become socio- economic ‘doxa’ that can most effectively be confronted from within the ‘organicity’ of the family unit. On the level of a political address comparisons can be made to the recent German film, Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators, 2005), by Hans Weingartner. This film is normally read as being highly political and a ‘call’ for a new, enriched mode of political engagement. Indeed, it begins with a scene involving Jule (Julie Jentsch) who is involved in a guerrilla-style, political rally against globalization. Weingartner’s handheld camera work here lends a sense of immediacy to the moment and seems to reference the popular music videos from U2 and Rage against the Machine, both of which were inspired by the Beatles infamous ad hoc concert from the roof of their production studio. The presence of the police in all three music videos, coming to ‘restore order’ and representing an essential division between society and state which is often overlooked in Ulrich Beck’s work, is also reflected in Weingartner’s film. Outside of its pop references, this opening of the film sets up the possible political content of the narrative.

146 However, whereas Cantet’s film approaches the structural relationship between individual, family and society, Die fetten Jahre works to construct the ideological individualism that one can see in Run Lola Run by linking up its political impetus with youth culture and the consumption of this culture. It also works to ‘expose’ ideological systems. And the process of ideological ‘exposition’ is built into the ideological system of capitalism, into the historical imaginary of Western society, so that it represents the further burying of these systems—in other words the ‘doxa’ of second modern society remain unaddressed. An aesthetic ‘exposition’ of ideology is an inherent aspect of a normative hegemonic system—instead of being destabilized the system is actually concretized by hiding behind its own exposition. The man behind the curtain is exposed, but the deep-structural reasons for his presence are hidden in the teleology of his exposition. By opening up the family and presenting it as an integral aspect of society rather than as in opposition to it, these films break the reflexive loop which isolates the family and generates ideological individualism. They also relate how family politics can and do reflect on the larger political situation of society. These micro-political units pre-determine in an ideologically complex manner, the form of the cosmopolis, and the faults that exist within them. These idealized and isolated units that produce individuals either through crisis or through ‘family values,’ are the very faults that exist within the idealized ideological cosmopolitanism that does not base its self-understanding within the integration of society.

URBANIZATION, GLOBALIZATION, TRANSNATIONAL REACH AND THE (BOURGEOIS) FAMILY OF IDEALITY The question and problematic of globalization is inherent to Beck’s sociology. According to Beck we live in a globalized risk society, a reality that parallels the concept of ‘late capitalism’ but is much more precise. The ‘globalization’ of this risk society is bound to the processes of urbanization and the transnational reach of capitalism, the ideological form of which is tied closely to the city and to the urban environment. While Ressources humaines portrays a family unit that is integrated with society and locates the crisis within the family as both generational and economic, this family is also representative of the conflicting forces within the capitalized society of ‘second modernity’ that affect and, indeed, effect the second modern family. The force

147 of individualization seems to bring the processes of alienation into the family circle. But how does this affect rural life and the transition from rural modes of life and the urbanized life of second modernity? The Turkish film Uzak (Distant, 2002) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, approaches this very problem. Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) is from a poor village in rural Turkey. He went to university and became a photographer and now lives in Istanbul where he is a member of artistic circles. Mahmut’s cousin, Yusuf (Emin Toprak) has joined him from the village in order to find a job. Obviously, he does not fit into Mahmut’s ‘cosmopolitan’ existence and, unable to find and keep a job, returns to the village at the end of the film, much to Mahmut’s relief. At many of Mahmut’s parties the discussion does not circle about politics or everyday matters, but rather films by Tarkovsky, Mahmut’s personal hero. Indeed, Ceylan uses the cinema and especially the art house cinema of Tarkovsky to symbolize a certain ‘cosmopolitanism.’ Mahmut’s penchant for intellectual detritus from the ‘first’ and ‘second’ worlds within the context of a rapidly ‘modernizing’ (read ‘capitalizing’) Turkey tells the viewer something of Mahmut’s existence. It also speaks to Ceylan’s own negotiation of art house traditions (long takes, strikingly beautiful cinematography, a deeply complex and subtly ‘underplayed’ narrative) in order to reach a broader base of distribution. Ceylan turns to the west and the north, the ‘first’ and ‘second’ worlds as does Mahmut in order to legitimate his artistic interests—this also has the effect of curtailing the entrance of exotic fetishism into the equation. This sets up a complex dynamic that brings out the clash of urban and rural environments even more. The clash plays out within the diegesis and as an aspect of the proto-filmic. Cosmopolitanism becomes, for Mahmut, more of a matter of ‘hybridity’ than of actual political or social integration as he (and the filmmaker) takes on the trappings of western art cinema in order to ‘cosmopolitanize’ himself. However, the reference to Tarkovsky also brings forward the question of the relationship between art and the state and art and political resistance. Tarkovsky worked under a system of censorship, a system that is radically different from Ceylan’s own. And surely Mahmut resists nothing; rather he consumes the object of resistance. Yet, Ceylan’s reference, given the context of the clash between rural and urban, ‘east’ and ‘west’ indicate the possibility of ‘quiescent’ resistance within the form of art cinema, resistance to the inexorable march of urbanized society and its production of ideological individualism.

148 However, the question of ‘distance’ in Ceylan’s film goes to the heart of the family problematic in ‘second modernity’ and the ideological impetus of the EU. Certainly, there is the obvious distance of the main character from his social ‘roots’—his own process of individualization involved his concurrent urbanization. And this individualization did not result in his deep integration into society; rather it resulted in his personalized interest in art and photography, both of which are apolitical: Mahmut spends his evening watching pornographic films rather than the deeply intellectual films of Tarkovsky. His distance from his home town is thus obvious as is his distance from true social integration. Indeed, this is a superficial ‘meaning’ within the film set up by the very first series of shots which show the village in the distance, down a road, huddled in the hills, and the entrance of Yusuf into the scene, looking for a ride. In fact, there are no shots of the inside the village, no representations of the life within the village, and without this objectification, there is no means of referencing exactly what it is that Yusuf is ‘escaping’. Rather, we have a depiction of the village bound by nature, bound by what Rosalind Galt might call the dialectical image288 which brings forward not the ‘backwardness’ or ‘otherness’ of village life, but instead its adherence to and incorporation within the natural world: it is made organic, it is made ‘national’ as representative of a different mode of social and political incorporation within the state. And from this ‘national’ organicity comes Yusuf into the ‘second modern,’ cosmopolitan city of Istanbul. The first image of Istanbul is not of the Bosporus Strait, nor of Hagia Sophia or other famous landmarks, rather, we are shown the street on which Mahmut lives. The edited leap sets up the visual ‘dialogue’ between organicity, nature and ‘nation,’ and the city. Not only is this the parallel of the ‘march’ of globalization or late capitalism, expanding by searching out new frontiers, but this is also the leap that the ideological family must take in the historical imaginary of the EU, from the position of bearers of national identity within their very genes, to the bearers of cosmopolitan identity in the form of an ‘inorganicity’ incorporated within the ideological composition of the city. It must also be remembered that this ‘leap’ indicates a chasm or division that is an inherent postulate of the ‘progressive’ ideological positioning in late capitalism. It is a leap from nature into the civilization, from the rural to the urban, from the village into the city—a leap that normally implies a ‘betterment’. And yet the ideological paradigm continues to bear ‘nature’ within the ideological structure as a place outside of the ideological formation itself, as when Vincent in Cantet’s

149 L’Emploi du temps buys a rustic cabin in the Alps. In the paradoxical structure of second modernity, the lack of reintegration after individualization destabilizes the social structure of ‘rural’ life, which again is postulated as a fundamentally different mode of social existence, and thus turns into, as within Uzak, a struggle between the urban and the rural, as though the cosmopolitan portal through which Yusuf must step is another world altogether, rooted in an ideological system that is almost unfathomable. And indeed, what turns Yusuf off about the city is the very lack of ‘ideological individualism’ through the capitalist reduction of the human to a resource, a unit of economic progress tout court—and capitalism is conflated with urbanization and modernization as it is (ironically) in Good Bye Lenin!. This leap is also one that is not always so simple to navigate. In Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps (Time Out, 2002) the problematical relationship between identity and employment, or identity and economics within the context of the European family unit is central. Vincent (Aurélian Recoing) has lost his job by the time the film begins and is in the process of developing a new identity within the framework of the European economic system—he lies to his family and friends, pretending to have secured a new job with the UN managing relief missions in Africa. Whereas Yusuf in Ceylan’s film experiences the difficulties of urbanization and the paradox of individualization and ideological individualism, Vincent demonstrates the sociological importation of identity which is based on the economic function of the individual rather than the Romantic individualism of mainstream cinema. Unlike Haneke’s atomization of the family, pierced through as it is by ‘modernity’ in a film such as Der siebente Kontinent (1989), or the atomization and emotional ‘Verfremdung’ that accompanies Mahmut in Uzak, Cantet integrates family and society perfectly to the point of conflating identity and social function. Indeed, the manner with which Vincent retains a social and familial stability is by pretending to retain his economic function within society. Vincent becomes alienated from his family only on the level of reception: the viewer knows of his duplicity. The crisis then becomes one bound up with the observation of Vincent’s behavior, bound up with the consumption of the narrative and thus develops outside of the family unit. This is not a reflexive crisis for its roots seem to be found not in the internal emotional economy of the family, but within the development of social identity that is based in ‘rationalized’ economic social systems. Vincent is ‘assigned’ an identity in the process of institutional individualization; however, one that is contingent to his relationship to his father and thus

150 binding the social and the familial. And importantly, as the final chilling coda of the film suggests, he cannot yield this identity without destabilizing the relationships that he has developed binding his ‘subjectivity’ with his social function.289 And whereas Yusuf leaves nature to come to the city in his trip into the cosmopolitan space, Vincent goes outwards to nature, buying a vacation cabin in the Alps, miles from the nearest city, in a move that reflects his own internal desire to isolate himself from the cosmopolitan space of Europe. And the repeated leitmotiv of glass in the mise-en-scène not only reflects the ‘glasshouse’ of Vincent’s dissimulations, but more importantly the pierced quality of European space, its tendency to, as with glass, move into the ‘doxa’ of second modernity, wherein these relationship within the family and between individual and social and institutional processes of individualization become normative pressures that delimit non-normative responses. This plays on the ‘morality’ of Vincent’s decision. Is the deep offense against his family or against society itself and the normative nature of cosmopolitanism? Clearly, the answer is both, but this offense is not only presented in the film but reflected in the viewer, whose very normative expectations of viewership are played with by Cantet in his ‘suspense’ format that never truly reveals any narrative reason for the tension, and the lack of narrative resolution. Cantet and Ceylan both represent the integrated quality of the family and the social forces that both determine and are determined by it. The family is silently reflected in cosmopolitanism and represents its tensions and conflicts, in a manner that belies the individualistic orientation of the European mainstream which tends to idealize real processes of individualization, which are based in deep social networks, and convert it into questions of self-discovery and ideological individualism. And while both Cantet and Ceylan integrate the family into the cosmopolitan and urbanizing impulse of western society, representing the hidden factor in such a process, Haneke turns the point of observation around and looks at the modern pressures that pull at the integration of family and society while also underscoring the deep structural relationship between social and moral normativity and the bourgeois family unit. In The Seventh Continent, part of his so-called trilogy of violence with the films Benny’s Video, and 72 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, Haneke represents the deep isolation of the family unit in its social alienation and lack of integration that accompanies neo-liberal concepts of ideological individualism, and as I have pointed out above in Code inconnu these pressures come from the very attraction of urbanization and its ideological individualism. In The Seventh Continent

151 Haneke reduces the intimacy of the family breakfast to an examination of the basic and ‘doxatic’ economic foundations of this breakfast. In the critical-cinematic counterdiscourse, the family is not the metaphorical enemy of social and cultural progress, dragging its ideological normativity, its transhistorical trauma, and its moral imperative insistently into the new era. Rather, they are represented as pinioned beneath their own ideological force. They are the bearers of normativity in their massive numbers, and their moral systems do impinge on all within the European public sphere; yet at the same time they are torn at by the conflictions of ideological individualism and institutional individualization. For Haneke and others, the family seems to represent all of the doxa of cosmopolitanism, the deep-rooted conflicts and social problematics that are non-linear and inexorable vectors in the push towards the cosmopolitan space. These vectors are the inherent borders in Balibar’s theory, the inevitable ideological doxa that, once sublated, disappear into the basic assumptions of all public sphere discourse. Rather than a radical linearization into the ideological space of comsopolitanism, based in normative assumptions, the critical discourse suggests that society should atomize its rationalized system of investigation and find its teloi not in the future cosmopolitical space but in the units that will inevitably compose that space and determine its form: the idealized (bourgeois) family.

152 CHAPTER 5

(DIS)INTEGRATING SPACE: URBANITY, SPEED, ALIENATION AND IMMIGRATION

In the previous chapters I propose several different vectors for consideration in the relationship between the developing European cinema and the developing European public sphere. As I examined in the early stages of film production and distribution, the question of national cinema in Europe is inherently ambiguous, indeterminate, and oriented more towards a manner of distribution of nationally tinted narratives into the world market, i.e. an external mode of nationalism—nationalism as projective, but not purely in the psychological manner suggested by Balibar, rather as the film projected onto the screen of the world market. Moreover, this mode is closely related to the rise of films d’arts which legitimated the medium in the eyes of the bourgeois public sphere, called by Hansen the public sphere of letters.290 In this chapter I examine the city, that ideal art form of the historical imaginary, and how the urbanization associated with cosmopolitanism and with individualization is used or explored in representations of the city in European cinema. In modernist studies the city is often seen as the backdrop of the flâneur or modern subject par excellence.291 I suggest that the mainstream representation of the city implies a certain cohesion of the cityscape, a cohesion that is mirrored in and mirrors the cohesive and regulated movement of the mainstream narrative as a whole. Such a process is an aspect of the practice of reclamation of the bourgeois historical imaginary, the unique conflation of the projective national and the transnational. In representations of the city the mainstream cinema reinforces the perceived integrity of the cityscape—that is the integrity of city and ‘scape’ or the natural, real world. 292 Such representations are, in a sense, a mimesis of the historical imaginary itself. The city becomes the world, is an intimate aspect of the natural world, or some logical extension of it—so that narrow events become the transcendental. This regulated movement of narrative and the social integrity of the city reflects, as well, the historical imaginary in its eschatological orientation and its spiritualization of social space, which in turn informs the public sphere.

153 The critical counter-discourse, meanwhile, displays the cityscape as pierced through by the very discourses that produce it—in this sense it is more of a Nachbildung or ‘replication.’ Films in this discourse also tend to portray marginal lifeworlds, but not as marginal in affect, rather as indistinctly marginalized by the processes of Ulrich Beck’s ‘second modern’ society. To put it succinctly, integrated depictions of the city subsume both city and nature under one phenomenological spiritual category; dis-integrated depictions represent a distinct separation between the city and the natural world—namely the city as historically determined human accretion. In this latter mode some films move incrementally towards an immersion into what Kristen Thompson calls cinematic excess.293 That is to say that the narrative succumbs to the visual presence of the city or nature—not in its spirituality but in its very phenomenological presence. Such a tendentious representation, which can be found in Winterbottom’s In This World (2002) Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps, Les frères Dardennes’ L’Enfant (2006), Haneke’s Code inconnu, Michael Schorr’s Schultze Gets the Blues (2003), just to name a few, dissociates the diegesis from the causally determined ‘real world’ over which it plays. The story floats above the real world, the real space of social intersubjectivity, as a mechanical replication not a mimesis. The city in European cinema can be representative of both urban progression and integrity, and social alienation and despair. But while representations of the city as disintegrated units, lacking some social cohesion or a collective understanding of the social presented through the narrative lens, can have various meanings, once reintegrated into the push towards cultural, social and political unity within the European public sphere, these representations take on some specific importance, working their way as they do into the European historical imaginary.

URBANITY AND SPEED

I. CHRONOTOPES Jeunet’s ninth film, Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain, 2001) is doubtlessly his most popular and one of the most popular European films produced in the last decade. It is also, with the exception of some monies put forward by the Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, a completely French funded production. It is a truism that

154 French cinema, being the more popular cinema in Europe, and producing more loyal cinema goers, has less trouble than other European productions systems in assembling funding, national distribution (Amélie was distributed by UGC-Fox in French theaters, a French company which was under the auspices of the Fox distribution structure, but by TF1-Video for DVD distribution), and international distribution (Amélie was distributed by Miramax in the United States).294 This allows for a specific homogenous structure called ‘French Cinema’ to develop— though this is always a matter of projection: the ‘French Cinema’ is a projection of national identity onto the screen which is enmeshed with the dialectical process of decoding by audiences who are French and those who are not. Especially in the context of the ‘art-house’ where French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish cinema became associated with the auteur and by extension individualistic national identity, even though the films themselves were less related to national identity in many cases than they were to a ‘political modern’ tradition that developed in the 60s and 70s.295 So, for Jeunet, the difficulty was not really in distributing or producing his film, but in following in his own footsteps with the cinéma du look, a term that spits vitriol or showers praise depending on your perspective.296 A striking aspect of this term, which stems from pages of the Cahiers du cinéma, is its hybrid blending of French and English, a process that certainly seems to match our ‘new age’ of cultural hybridity and transnational cinemas, however troubling such sweeping terms should be for the critical mind as they tend to bury actual social issues beneath ideological ones. What the French term does reflect, however, is a youthful obsession with Americana, an obsession which Jeunet and other European filmmakers embody to varying degrees, and the reclaiming of this Americana in order to support what Raymond Williams might call ‘emergent ideologies’.297 Jeunet and Caro’s borrowing of American images (sets for their first film, Delicatessen, were inspired by Hopper paintings) suggests how European films in the nineties positioned themselves in relationship to the dominant cultural form, i.e. ‘Hollywood.’298 These ideologies began to emerge in 1991, when Marc Caro and Jeunet made their first of two films together, Delicatessen. With its post-apocalyptic imagery and overtones, and its fanciful story, this film might fit very well into Jameson’s recent work on utopian narratives in science fiction.299 Certainly, Jeunet and Caro present a ‘dystopian’ world, filled with dark sets and a butcher who works only on people. But the bizarre quality of Caro’s mise-en-scène, which has heavily influenced the Canadian director Michel Gondry, presents a particular obsession with

155 the nature of trick photography, arguably the roots of modern filmmaking, roots that are to be found in the amazingly bizarre shorts of Georges Meliès.300 In the 1990s this obsession with what one might consider the ‘indexical’ nature of the cinematic image and its very contortion, presented a distinct variance from ‘American’ style filmmaking and special effects. The filmmakers had little interest in creating a realistic portrayal of the world, as evidenced by the fantastic, dark, fairytale narrative, which further distanced it from American films. The darkness of the city, dark even in day, seems a conflation of a paradox pointed out by Tom Gunning in representations of the city.301 While most cities wobble between light and dark, spectacle and mysterium tremendum, Caro’s sets conflate the two: the spectacle is the mystery, and the mystery the spectacle. Caro and Jeunet’s cinema was seen by many to be the rebirth of French national cinema—in a manner that both marginalized French cinema (the cinéma du look to which it was indebted was the definition of ‘style’ over ‘substance,’ while also, in its narrative, hearkening to another autochthonous European production, the fairytale), and produced a new mode of reception for French cinema on the world market.302 In Amélie, Jeunet continues in this populist mode of filmmaking, and continues to draw sharp distinctions between /Hollywood/ and his own style. He also has developed a more sophisticated means of representing the city, one that blends his earlier fantasy and more attention to the realistic expectations of the mass audience.303 That is not to suggest that he strives for what Bazin terms “pure cinema.”304 Indeed, if anything, Jeunet’s style would seem the definition of Stephen Heath’s “controlled excess” of the art film;305 though it is a tenuous control, always threatening to spill over into a playful mélange of different styles and epochs. This blend of realism and fantasy brings forward the Bhakhtinian notion of the chronotope, a specific point of configuration of meaning in narratives, and problematizes it. I briefly examined this point in chapter three, specifically the manner in which Jeunet ambiguates the ‘chronotope’ of Paris and thus reduces the historical specificity of the film. In reference to the representation of the integrated cityscape and the narrative link to the development and propagation of the public sphere, this ambiguous chronotope becomes an important and problematical bridge between the narrative and the social world of its production and consumption.

156 According to Bakhtin the chronotope is the means through which one can critically delve into the various links between the world of the narrative and the world within which the narrative was developed. As Bakhtin writes, “the chronotope is where the knots of narrative are tied and untied.” 306 It is the force that binds the narrative, diegetic world with the social world of its mode of production and consumption. There should be no critical confusion between them, however, as Bakhtin insists. Rather, the chronotope positions the work as an ‘optic’, as Hamid Naficy suggests, onto the social world: it acts “both as a ‘unit of analysis’ for studying texts in terms of their representations of spatial and temporal configurations and as an ‘optic’ for analyzing the forces in the culture that produce these configurations.”307 The ‘optical’ quality of the chronotope, for Bakhtin, is represented in the power of literature to represent images: this representation is bound up with the linked-up quality of the chronotope, acting as it does as a multi-level bridge between the social world, the diegesis and history. It is through our ability to understand the chronotopic nature of ‘reality’ that we can decode the linguistic processes of a literary text. In the cinema, the question is not so much in decoding the world of the narrative, as it is in decoding the social world itself, which is encoded by the diegesis in complex ways. It must be remembered, though, that the chronotope acts almost as a Kantian ‘faculty’ which the reader / viewer ‘uses’ in the action of decoding. This gives it the ring of ideology, or a system of understanding that is produced or at least determined outside of direct experience. Jeunet ambiguates this chronotopic interface by conflating different historical epochs and styles within the mise-en-scène, giving none priority over the other. Paris comes through as an essence that preexists the chronotopic interface of the viewer, that sits firmly within the realm of the cinema and the historical narration of the city, that is to say its own mythic representation.308 This process of mystification has two effects: 1) the city takes on a certain organic, human quality, thus tying it into the actual human (re)creation of the city as a narrative—that is to say that Paris is a human story; 2) however, this city becomes bound and integrated into its own representation in a manner of feedback, and the organicity of the cityscape is relegated to the ‘universal human’ domain, that ideological realm that affixes and intertwines normative social mores and supposedly transcendent concepts of ‘justice’—the physicality of the city, its environmental presence, and its real social effects are misplaced, or whitewashed as Andrew would have it.309

157 And yet there is the possibility that seen from the other vantage of the ‘optic’ this act of whitewashing signals the emergence into the historical imaginary. Jeunet’s purified Paris reflects the ideological purification of history, its deproblematization, as it emerges into the historical imaginary. It is certainly reminiscent of the deproblematization of history spoken of in the previous chapter. That does not necessarily entail the eradication of political possibility for the film. Indeed, the play of excesses implies a certain reconfiguration of the normative visual field, in spite of Andrew’s excoriation of the same. And, while there is a certain control exhibited, a control of the screen which reflects the apparent control Amélie herself bears over events in the narrative, the controlled excess also reflects the very mode that Stephen Heath sees as an important aspect of the art house narrative, and indeed draws historical connections to older forms of viewership.310 The city has traditionally been seen in sociology as the very site of modernism and the dynamic relationship between subject and sensorial input which helps determine many of the artistic modes of modernism.311 This understanding of the city can be seen in Georg Simmel’s view of the modern city. Essential to the experience of the urban landscape in Simmel is the rapidity and variance in physical sensorial input. However, this sensorial overload creates a certain blasé outlook, an indifference to stimuli that seem increasingly indistinct. Sense the lifeworld is essentially bound up in the act of differentiation (and we can see this is the theories of heterogeneous time in Bhabha), the modern subject confronts the conflation of the blasé with the differentiating power of consumption. Jeunet’s montage and use of sets creates an organic, intimate cityscape that fuses (or refuses distinctions between) innerworld and outerworld, lifeworld and system—and this is especially prevalent in his montage of Paris, Amélie (Audrey Tautou), and several different and rapidly appearing depictions of women’s jouissances.312 The use of sets in this montage, as the character Amélie wonders how many people in the city at that very moment are experiencing orgasms, weaves Amélie’s question and the rooftop-view of the Parisian cityscape (an elaborate set) with women’s pleasure. The montage does not juxtapose the city with human sexuality, but parallels them, interweaves them, and makes one the visual condition of the other. The city becomes a logical extension of the intimate sphere. At the same time, it is the space of nostalgic unification, a remembrance of a mythical connection between biology, lifeworld and public space.

158 Even when sets were not used, Jeunet famously had his crew clean the on-location streets of debris and graffiti so the city would match his (and frankly the viewer’s) imagination. The sepia tones used in filming, while highlighting the color scheme inspired by Hopper and especially Brazilian expatriate Juarez Machado, also casts a certain nostalgic quality onto the mise-en-scène. This nostalgia is bound up with representations of Paris in the worldview of the cinema—especially the references to Truffaut’s Jules et Jim and, by extension, the many representations of Paris in the work of Truffaut.313 Paris is cast as a memory of itself, of its reflection onto the screen and into the historical imaginary of Europe. The city is represented as an aspect of the personal memory of Europe, an ideological aspect of the intimate sphere of social life, and as such it is isolated from its own process of production and reproduction, literally emptied of social content as Jeunet empties the Parisian streets. This certainly recalls American films that accomplish this ‘empty city’ task—Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky comes to mind. But Cameron Crowe emptying Times Square points to the economic power of Hollywood filmmakers, even fetishizes it. Jeunet’s ‘empty Paris’ creates a more intimate space—quiet streets, quaint cars, carousels, pristine train stations—one in which the characters map themselves and their lives onto the physico-ideological space of the city, as Amélie in the abovementioned montage sequence. Jeunet closes the city off from its social underpinnings and social production by ‘referencing’ it as an ideological subject all its own (“oh, you know, Paris”) rather than representing it in its complex social form. The chronotope in Bakhtin’s use of the term, however, indicates a certain intertwining of the narrative world and the historical world within which the narrative was produced, such that one determines the other and is then ultimately determined by its own production. And Jeunet’s film did for French cinema what Run Lola Run did for German cinema—it birthed within it a mode for approaching a wider, popular audience outside of the traditional art-house public. And even while it managed this, the film produced a filmic discourse outside of the ‘cultural dominant’ by positioning itself as resistant to, perpendicular to Hollywood cinema. Hollywood is relegated to the same historical imaginary as Paris, represented in Amélie’s wondering how Spencer Tracy can drive without watching the road. Indeed, her query actually points up the relationship between Hollywood cinema and ‘reality’, not as bracketed-off in a Husserlian sense, but as represented by the mechanism of cinema—Jeunet suspends older forms in nostalgia and positions his own narrative through this process as more relevant to a contemporary, second-

159 modern audience. And even as Jeunet produces a Paris that is itself a product of the consumptive desire for Paris, his film also represents a particular, commodified space wherein only marginal characters can find true happiness and produce it for others—and this only through reclaiming a distinct childlike approach to consumption as social doxa itself.

II. INTEGRAL CITYSCAPES, DISINTEGRATED CITYSCAPES, AND THE ‘MARGINALIZED’ The integral cityscape is represented, and possibly critiqued if it is read as some ‘never-could- be,’ in Jeunet’s Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain as a social space that is isolated, distinct from the social construction, production and reproduction of the city. This isolation, its integration with its own fictional representation, parallels contemporary European discourse on the free market and the future of the social welfare state. It envisions a city that is a production of idealization rather than social work and thus plays into certain neoliberal concepts of individualism that are currently informing and influencing European politics. However, it also offers a critique of modernity as the source of social disorder and offers a mode of social engagement in the form of Amélie, whose small tasks are more helpful for individuals than are larger, more complex and more impersonal social movements. Capitalist modernity is the acknowledged source of social alienation—this two has become a part of the contemporary doxa. However, this continual assumption masks the sublation of consumption as a fundamentally malleable medium of social intersubjectivity. Another approach to the city can be seen in the disintegration mode. Here I will refer specifically to Richet’s Ma 6-t va crack-er (1997) and Mathieu Kassovitz’s more well-received La Haine (1995), which deal with the social difficulties of unemployed youth in the ‘banlieues’ of Paris—economically-blighted neighborhoods rife with drugs, crime, and violence. The emphasis in these films is placed on the conflict between the socially united, culturally diverse youth and the ‘repressive state apparatus.’ As with the American films like Menace 2 Society and Boys from the Hood from the nineties that inspired Ricochet and Kassovitz, both films are low budget, roughly produced works that aim for a gritty realism rather than aesthetic manipulation. Paris is not washed of graffiti, but rather enhanced by it. In the disintegration of the city, especially in ‘blighted-neighborhood’ films such as La Haine, the representation of the city remains integrated—there is no distinction between the city

160 and the natural world, no images of the city as human accretion. However, there is at times a desperation in this integration and a continual desire to break free from it. Indeed, in La Haine the integration of the banlieue is pierced through by the otherworld of Paris: Paris as a totality is divided between the city of the Eiffel Tower and the banlieue. Kassovitz gives neither one of these spaces more reality than the other, wrapping one around the other as equal spaces of social isolation and ennui, and equal products of the inevitable pressure of narrative force. The integration is more difficult to immediately realize, indeed, because Kassovitz points to a structural dis-integration within the city-space. The implication is that this dis-integration, or really division, precludes the accretion of the city and transcends it, informing the natural world as a whole. The narrative arc of the film indeed works to control the desperation, and the disintegration, weaving them back into the logic of social narration. Before the beginning of the film, a riot ensued over the violent police beating of Abdel, a friend of the protagonists Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui). During the riot a policeman lost his weapon, which was found by Vinz. Once Vinz shows the weapon to his friends, Hubert and Saïd, it is generically apparent that the outcome will involve Vinz’s decision whether to do as he says and kill a policeman for the impending death of Abdel, or whether he will retain his ‘humanity’. This narrative inevitability reins in the representation of the city by binding it with the revelation of the narrative. While bringing forward an important and previously neglected viewpoint on French society, Kassovitz’s film at the same time parallels this viewpoint with the dominant cultural form of consumption—if they had more money and were more integrated into the economy, then they would not be in this situation. The film begins by representing the social blight of the banlieue through long takes of stagnation. Occasionally intertitles reveal the time of the narrative, playing off of a reportage style that adds to the ‘gritty realism’ and draws comparisons with crime dramas. At one point the intertitle comes right after a boy has finished an endless and pointless joke, as a humorous exclamation on the joke. Kassovitz does not go so far as to delve into the depths of social ennui in modernity, as would Fassbinder or Chabrol. But this manner of editing the film mixed with the mise-en-scène of the cité for the first half of the film highlights the close connection between social alienation and simple boredom in the cité; and this boredom is preconditioned by the presence of the ‘action’ within the banlieue.

161 The nature of the disintegrated cityscape comes through in the juxtaposition between Paris and the banlieue. The banlieue is blighted socially and economically and is represented best by the burned out remains of Hubert’s gym, a casualty to the previous night’s rioting. Saïd’s brief obsession over the presence of a car within the hollowed-out frame of the gym proffers the stark juxtaposition to the destruction surrounding it. It is this destruction matched with the empty playground that determines the setting of the banlieue in the film. The social space is filled, however, with youthful culture. Rap music floods from the windows of the blighted housing units. Parties on the roof are broken up by the police. What Kassovitz manages is the elevation of youth culture over the blighted wasteland of the cité. This youth culture transcends the surroundings, transcends the social situation of the people themselves and offers the saving grace to the inhabitants of the cité. It is, in fact, this ‘culture’ that bridges the gap between Paris and the banlieue and offers itself up as a form of identity construction, but one that is reflexive in Beck’s sense of the word. This identity is in turn reflected in the narrative self-identity of the film, bound as it is by its narrative integrity. While the first half of the film works to disintegrate the city, the second half reconstructs the city through narrative inevitability bound with the inevitability of the commodity constellation as represented in youth culture, whose very commodification drives the consumption of the film. Kassovitz’s use of the psychologizing narrative, one whose telos announces itself from the beginning, could be said to offer a moment of resistance, a moment of indecision in the stable commodity unit of filmic consumption. At certain points, Vinz’s imagination overcomes the realist drive of the narrative and there is no sharp division between what he imagines and what is ‘really’ happening in the narrative. This has great effect when the objective camera becomes caught up in his imagining shooting a police officer, shortly after learning of Abdel’s death. The Hollywood style shooting, blowing the policeman through the window of a storefront, reflects just how much filmic reality informs the social reality of this youth culture. However, Kassovitz does not sufficiently draw this juxtaposition out. Rather, he uses this as a moment of tension wherein the narrative telos reveals itself falsely, drawing the viewer along deeper into the unfolding of the narrative matrix. While also reflecting the obsession within youth culture for violence and Americana, the enfolding into the narrative structure reduces this connection, comments on the expectation of such a violent reaction.

162 The result is a certain inevitability ascribed to the social situation. Even though it is a shock to the viewer when Vinz is shot dead, a shock that is not prefigured in the narrative and thus reflects the seemingly random nature of violence in this society, this final violent act matched with the subsequent standoff between Hubert and the policeman who shot Vinz and finally with the stark division between the two worlds of Parisian life, represents a chasm between lifeworlds in second modernity, between the different classes within the city, between the cité and the city rather than a fluid continuum of social engagement. Kassovitz’s manner of representation makes bridging this ‘gap’ all but impossible and indeed linearizes the problematic as one of conflict between youth culture (consumption as culture) and the police. In the critical counterdiscourse, the disintegration of the city represents the larger divisions within the global economy and late capitalism, divisions which idealized political movements towards cosmopolitanism fail to bridge because they are by their nature bound to the divisive ideological structure of the bourgeois historical imaginary. Haneke’s representation of the city in Code inconnu performs this service by dismembering the physical space of the city, removing its ‘universal’ markers, and at the same time fusing and interchanging the disparate social milieus within the diegesis. Haneke’s narrative is composed of several “divers voyages” which overlap in places but are largely independent. Each episode recounting moments in these divers voyages is set off by one second black-screen edits. There are no cross fades, sound bridges, or any other formal means of integrating the diverse episodes. These voyages are somewhat interrelated, much in the way the ‘cuts’ of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts are interrelated, but the connections are subtle, loosely formal, and do not in the end formulate a cohesive, coded plan for the arc of the film. Unlike the more integrated narrative of Altman’s film, the film to which Code inconnu is most often compared, Haneke’s narrative space is based more in the exploration of socialization and happenstance no which social formations and notions of community and identity are constructed. The psychological narrative impetus that is to be found in mainstream cinema, which sets up a specific telos woven within the narrative fabric that is then sometimes revealed and sometimes hidden from view,314 is nowhere present in Code. The distribution of the diegesis over these divers voyages is also seemingly random. The effect of this montage, each space delimited by a black screen, an abyss within the diegesis, turns the divisions into simple narrative division, rooted in the manner of relating the story rather than forcing these onto the social fabric. In other

163 words, while these blank screens, these empty spaces indicate the division between each social field, each class, and each narrative within which the characters involve themselves, because it is an episodic division, it is clearly a system of divisions that happens within the artifice of the cinematic apparatus, an aspect of the aesthetics of the film rather than bound to the realistic (McCabe) representation of the cityscape within the narrative. When Kassovitz presents the chasm separating the cité from Paris, he maps this chasm onto the realistic narrative, mapping the cityscape as essentially divided between youth culture and the ‘repressive state apparatus.’ Haneke presents the city as essentially unified, fluid, wherein each event creates another and another from that, a social causality with no corresponding teleology; the divisions within the diegesis go toward separating one narrative from another as distinct units within the diegesis and actually add to the concept of fluidity by casting the narratives as temporally imbricated. And the question is not really one of homogeneity and heterogeneity. Both of these films represent a heterogeneous social field within the city; whereas the city is much more homogeneous in Jeunet’s Amélie. Rather, the homogeneity of mainstream cinema can be found in the narrative impulse itself and the subtention of all elements to this one motive. It is no accident that this homogeneity can be found in both the narrative impulse and the ideological systems of Andersonian national homogeneous, empty time. The same mode of representation can be found in both because the nation itself is a narrated event. The performative mode of national self-generation to which Bhabha refers is mimicked in Haneke, but this mimicry is at the same time a questioning of the very ideological nature of such conceptions of community. This sets up a conjunction within the imaginary of Europe, a conjunction that works its way into the public sphere as a paradox. The public sphere, as I suggest, is more than simply a forum for debate: it is the very sphere wherein the concepts of social identity and the community are formed and implemented as derivatives of ideological structures. Thus, these films offer a glimpse into the conjunction, the point at which the homogeneous empty time of the collective ‘meanwhile’ and the heterogeneous time of social praxis comes into the foreground. Haneke’s film presents this conjunction within the mise-en-scène—his black screens falsely suggest the ‘meanwhile,’ while he also explores the marginality of the living subject of the state. Kassovitz’s film, on the other hand, describes the manner in which this self-understanding is employed within the European imaginary to address the culturally dominant, while refraining from

164 addressing the deep ideological structures that work to compose the images and their interpretation. This comes through in his representation of the urban space, an urbanity that in keeping with Ulrich Beck prefigures and sets the ground for cosmopolitanism. Kassovitz’s division of the urban space within the narrative, that is the representation of a divided urban space, figures the cité as discontinuous from the city of Paris and essentially separable from this ‘other’ social space. We are given no geo-spatial relationships which allow us to determine the true helix- entwining of cité with city, the mutual interdependence between them, and thus the visual nature of the cité overcomes any considerations of class, social determinism, and the other ideological processes which prefigure our understanding of our social space. Kassovitz presents conflict with no cause. Haneke’s urban space is divided not by the singular narrative but amongst different narratives. It is just as effective at critiquing the deep divisions within society that are often overlooked in cosmopolitanism, and indeed represents the way in which the divisions between class, quartier, race and gender, which subtend the social structure of the public sphere, are much less divisive than we may think, are indeed aspects of our ideological structures which inform our social understanding and even prefigure and determine all of our ‘experience’ of this social space.

III. SPEED, URBANITY AND SECOND MODERN SOCIETY In Jeunet’s Amélie, the use of montage and slow-motion filming produces a certain sense of speed and spatial compression. This trope, the compression of space through the compression of cinematic time is common in mainstream European cinema. It also feeds into the problematic of the economic and the humanistic which currently informs the development of the European public sphere. One famous example of this spatio-temporal compression, and one that does not have the usual narrative qualities of transition from one location to another, is to be found in the final shots of Jeunet’s Amélie. In this final scene, Amélie is seated behind Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz) on a moped, speeding through the streets of Paris. The camera rests somewhere on the front of the moped, speeding with them, so the city is a blur behind and above their heads in a low-angle shot. Both actors look repeatedly into the camera, turning the shots into what one might call ‘memory-shots’, or shots that reflect the idealized ‘home movie’ flickering across the screen.

165 The effect here is multiple. Firstly, it represents a continuous closeness between the camera and the actors, continuing the many close-ups throughout the film. Secondly, it also reflects Amélie’s unique relationship with the camera, in that she often speaks to it and through it, demonstrating for it, for example, how to crack the caramelized sugar which sits atop a crème brulée—this is a relationship which she alone has with the camera, so she seems to mask the presence of the director / auteur. Thirdly, this final shot reflects, as mentioned above, the audience’s own relationship to the personal cinema of home movies. This relationship is, of course, idealized and more a relationship to representations of the home movie in the cinema as a trope which normally represents the nostalgia of the protagonist. In Jeunet’s film it works as a means of closure, casting the halcyon-tint onto the end of the movie. The manner in which Jeunet has constructed the mise-en-scène throughout the film, with the many close-ups and the very carefully constructed shots, is also fulfilled somewhat in this final scene, when he draws on the final and ultimate relationship between the viewer and the cinema, i.e. the preservation of memory. This affects the chronotopic interface, to be sure, but it also finishes this compression of space that wraps the city in upon itself, finishing the complete relegation of Paris to a position of nostalgia as a figural reflection, always in the ‘past,’ of its own social propagation. The final series of shots in Amélie (which itself seems to reflect a scene in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 film Diva) is mimicked in a much smaller German film from Andreas Dresen, Halbe Treppe (Grill Point, 2002), for which Dresen won the European Film Award for best direction. In his final scene, the reunited couple, Kati (Gabriela Maria Schmeide) and Chris (Thorsten Merten), ride wildly through the streets on a motorcycle. The angle and position of the camera reflect very closely the angle and position of Jeunet’s final shot as does the behavior of the characters in the presence of the camera. The speed of the film, however, does not. It is not shot in fast-motion, mimicking the hand-cranked home movies of yesteryear. Instead, the characters seem to be acting out the final scene of Amélie for the camera, imagining themselves in the place of Amélie and her lover. Matched with Dresen’s style in the rest of the film, one that is indebted to the Dogme-95 films, this adds a certain objective and even ironic point of view. Dresen is not ridiculing Jeunet’s style, nor is he idolizing it. Rather, his characters seem to identify with the scene, acting it out as though this sympathetic approach will somehow cure the deeper problems in their relationship.

166 Their relationship to Jeunet’s couple seems to reflect the relationship between the members of the public sphere and the imaginary that works to (re)produce it. Both Ellen and Uwe work to mimic the success of filmic narratives of love, to force themselves into this mode, regardless of the deeper problems that very probably will continue to present themselves in their relationship. In this manner Dresen’s film seems to probe the points at which the public interfaces with the imaginary of its own public sphere, the manner in which the public imagines this sphere and their own relationship to it. And it tends to imagine itself as bound to this image of progression, this image of speed oriented towards a utopian horizon that sublates completely in the social doxa the capitalistic means of intersubjectivity. Dresen, however, reminds the viewer that this filmic convention is really the transparent papering-over of deeper structural problems. These problems persist, as does the memory of them, and yet the happiness of the ending is no less effective. Dresen has simply traded Jeunet’s totalizing and controlling chronotope, a controlled utopia, for what Beck might call the utopia of unintended consequences.315 And while Jeunet uses this fast-motion to mimic the intimate sphere’s self-imagining, Tykwer has used it in to quite a different purpose. In one of his lesser known films Der Krieger und die Kaiserin, Tykwer uses the speed of the film in one specific shot to offer a critique of the modern urban space. As Bodo looks out over the city, considering his and his brother’s plan for breaking free of their apathetic social bonds by robbing a bank and flying to Australia, the camera shows a high-angle shot, straight down onto the intersection below, and the sped-up image reveals a busy, ant-like society, a common trope in documentaries that deal with population or transportation issues in the urban setting. In the context of the Tykwer’s long takes and slow camera movement, and the frequent fly-over shots of the city that follow the tracks of the elevated train, this fits into the context of a certain social alienation produced by urbanity, by the progressive orientation of capitalist society. Again the reflexive nature of the city comes through, isolated from the utopian, elysian landscape of the North Sea, where the final fly-over shot retracts and shows a long, empty landscape of green hills, cliffs, and the sea glimmering in the sunlight. The intersection shot, though, is one of the most important and destabilizing of the film. It unsettles the neat reflexivity of the city by isolating one of the mechanisms that produce this apparent self-reflexivity: transportation. While on the one hand it certainly reinforces the psychological narrative surrounding Bodo’s own emotional and social isolation, his ‘alienation’

167 in the more conventional sense of the word, Tykwer has introduced a gentle seed of destruction which the rest of the film works to restrain. This one moment opens the possibility within the narrative unfolding of a problematic, an essential probing of the very visual and superficial nature of urbanization, i.e. its close and inextricable relationship with the ideological construction of urbanization. This destabilization presented by the very presence on the screen of urbanization is highlighted in Ulrick Seidl’s Hundstage (2001). In Seidl’s film, which follows numerous characters in unrelated narratives, urbanity is presented as synonymous with transportation— from the figure of the sexually depraved traveling salesman to the daughter’s death on the highway. The image of the roaring hotrod in the parking lot in a high-angle shot, the low-angle image of the sweat dripping from the man in his car, the interior shots from the moving car reminiscent in many ways of the opening shot of Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime, moi non plus, and finally the death of the middle-class family’s daughter on the highway, remembered in the flowers left by the side of the road and in the deep unbridgeable chasm in their emotional relationship. Similar to Haneke’s Code inconnu, Seidl’s film is composed of several different and non-interrelated narratives. Yet in each the pressure of the urban environment impinges, even outside of the urban space. Urbanity is pushed out of its deep association with the idealized cityscape and into the marginalized relationships within second-modern intersubjectivity. Seidl effects this infusion of the urban within the narrative visually and thematically by filming each one of the scenes when the temperature was within the temperature range for the human body, giving each scene the same range of colors and the same uncomfortable presence of the actors on the screen. They all sweat profusely in the heat. When matched with the immobility in many shots of Seidl’s camera, a certain claustrophobic feeling comes through—the characters seem pinioned within their social space, unable to find an ‘outside.’ The movie is also intimately connected with the organic human, becoming the effluence of human relations, one with them rather than a distant observer of them. His documentary style, which is becoming popular in Austrian cinema coming out of the Vienna Film Academy where Michael Haneke is a professor of direction, when added to the thematic approach of temperature fuses each one of the different narratives into a single unit, and draws no thematic distinction whatsoever between cityscape and ‘nature’ nor does it find some space outside of urbanity. Indeed, urbanity in Seidl seems determined by the marginal. This is a significant theme within the film, the omnipresence of

168 marginalized urbanity which offers no succor whatsoever, indeed inhibits it. Seidl’s camera, by never finding the ‘outside’ to urbanity, fuses the intimate and the public spheres within the mise- en-scène—the inside of the car reflects the inside of the house, and that the swingers’ club, and that the apartment, and so forth in a circularity which breaks the clearly defined bounds of Jeunet’s cityscape and conflicts with the idealized concept of urbanity. This adds to the claustrophobia of urbanity—an urbanity that is ‘always already’ bound up with the concept of European cosmopolitanism, yet whose dirty little margins are conveniently forgotten. At the same time Seidl delights in displaying the most graphic of intimacies in the public sphere of the cinema hall (a fellatio scene, strip-tease, and intercourse), and does not mask these intimate moments behind any aesthetic formulation. Instead, the striptease, performed by an aging, overweight wife for her aging, overweight husband, is deadpanned in a long static shot. The intimate has been displaced from its aesthetic formulation, its idealization, and presented in its marginalized reality—that marginality that Bhabha sees composing the national narrative is here composing the intimate sphere, which is inversely related to its public specter. Stark divisions between the intimate and the private, the idealization of the seclusion of the intimate sphere from its ‘outside’, viz. the public sphere, is called into question, as opposed to Jeunet’s elision of the distinction when he makes Paris a city of orgasms. This relationship between the intimate and public spheres is a ‘real’ relationship within the fluidity of social life. There are no stark divisions other than the spatial divisions of walls and fences, windows and doors—the intimate sphere is determined by and determines its public persona. Seidl does not criticize this relationship, calling into question the establishment of the public sphere on the backs of such marginality, but simply exposes the very real basis of such a sphere. His film reminds us of the interdependency between the public, private and intimate within the context of normative social life.

ALIENATION, IMMIGRATION, HYBRIDITY, ETHICS—FATIH AKIN AND MICHAEL HANEKE A critical aspect of the European representation of urbanity is the problematic, both social and political, of immigration. This problematic figures in the construction of the European public sphere as an inherent and often sublated problem, and one that is often bound with assimilation.

169 As I explored in chapter 3, the issue of immigration determines certain internal borders which remain within the public sphere. The idealization of the ‘borderless’ Europe parallels the ideological push towards what we might call ‘vulgar’ cosmopolitanism—itself bound to purely economic roots—and this both determines and is determined by the bourgeois historical imaginary of its own social process. It must be remembered that the final stage of a borderless Europe is almost always presented as the final steps in an inexorable march of progress, the telos of European capitalism. Immigration figures into this teleology as a mode of integration into the ‘western’ mode of rational life, i.e. the reconfiguration of ‘primitive’ life into ‘rational’ life. The critical counter-discourse in European cinema stresses the manner in which these borders are actually sublated into the new globalized doxa of European social life, and as such become much more difficult to address. The presence of the racial and cultural ‘other’ within the public sphere is the presence of the butler behind the bar, unnoticed until he spills the wine. Yet again there is the conflict between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous, the same and the others; but the heterogeneity of second modern society (Beck) is that explosion and irreconcilability of social/economic/cultural risks. If left unaddressed, if forced under the first modern rubric of “controlled excess,” the immigrant becomes herself the catalyst for social instability. In Haneke’s Code inconnu, one of the “divers voyages” of the title deals with Maria (Luminita Gheorgiu), a ‘sans-papiers’ from Romania (which has subsequently joined the EU). Maria begs outside of Anne’s (Juliette Binoche) apartment, where she is harassed by Jean (Alexandre Hamidi)—Jean intentionally, though perhaps not maliciously, tosses an empty paper bag into the hands of the begging woman. Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke) sees Jean’s act and begins the conflict that consumes the rest of the scene. Maria tries to disappear, since she is sans- papiers, and sets out the essential European problematic to which Etienne Balibar has recently dedicated so much ink.316 Moral certitude and a certain ethical position lead to trouble for both Amadou and Maria (both are arrested), a fact which would seem to support Fatima Naqvi’s conclusion that “mutual contempt is the main hindrance to both human solidarity and active intervention in Code inconnu.”317 Jean’s offhand toss reminds us of a particular concept of hegemony—the hegemony of the center over the periphery. In her examination of Haneke’s Caché, Luisa Rivi points out the overtones of Levinas in Haneke’s narratives.318 In general, Levinas suggests that the colonizing subject must not come to understand the other, which is for him an act of violence; rather one

170 must come face-to-face with the other, a position which certainly mirrors Martin Buber.319 For Levinas, as for Rivi, this ‘face-to-face’ is thought out in essentially racial terms—the other is the racial other. Jean’s offhand toss reminds us, though, that the hegemonic power structure in the west, which has traditionally determined the thinking through of race, is also equally powerful in the thinking through of class and culture. In spite of the fact that, on the surface, Maria is white like other French, as with the Jews in World War Two, she is culturally marked as other. The linchpin of modernity, rationalization and concurrent alienation that determines the carving up of society, is here present in the body and face of the true other (defined in French by their lack, i.e. sans-papiers meaning without papers). The organic unity of reality, the separation of which as Bertell Ollman points out leads to alienation, stands behind the face-to-face encounter; yet only if such an encounter carries over into all social relations.320 And, while immigration is traditionally a problem of /race/ for the majority, it is also, as Rainer Werner Fassbinder demonstrated in 1974, a question of transnational class and poverty.321 So, in terms of Levinas, we could see Haneke’s narratives as demonstrating the tendency in Europe to avoid the face-to-face encounter with the other in favor of a facile (and by Levinas’s definition, violent) understanding of the other. Jean, however, could not be said to be guilty of understanding Maria at all—indeed, the opposite seems to be the case. Nor, indeed, while coming ‘face-to-face’ with Amadou (though admittedly not in the fashion warranted by Levinas), does this existential encounter really bring Jean to some deep intellectual or cultural integration with the other. It would seem another explanation is in order. Naqvi suggests that this passage be read in the framework of Peter Sloterdijk’s controversial notion of Verachtung (contempt), a social fact which she sees related to the eradication of all vertical differences in a society which now values horizontal differences instead.322 While I personally disagree with Sloterdijk’s philosophical position, Naqvi constructs a convincing reading of Haneke’s films, especially the scene referred to above, using this framework. For Naqvi, “Sloterdijk’s assertions about the indifference engendered by horizontal difference resonate with Haneke’s film”; and his camera demonstrates that “the endogenous tensions in the social body, which are influenced by exogeneous forces, threaten to pull apart the fragile social fabric.”323 The mutual contempt which determines the public sphere, a violent and conflictual one, also leads to the dis-integration of the social.

171 For Haneke’s camera, however, the dis-integration of the social takes place not specifically at the sight of contempt, but at the sight of social construction, within the intersubjective space of communication. Indeed, the presence of Maria in the scene would suggest that Sloterdijk’s concept of Verachtung has certain definable, legalized limitations. It reminds one of the construction of identity, the development of individualization, the production of the citizenry which haunts the universalizing tendencies of western democracies. Etienne Balibar, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau and other political theorists have worried over this same limitation. At what point do the natural rights of the citizen develop within the alien’s body? Is there a transnational citizen, a species which exists outside of the age-old system of identity construction that is the nation? How then is contempt differentiated in this framework? Haneke’s camera reminds us, in this scene and throughout the struggles which follow it, that the alien, the immigrant, is the ghost that haunts the universalizing core of the nation—the historical imaginary of the public sphere. This is not, then, simply a question of Verachtung and lateral differentiation, the dream of a stratified society; this is the very worrisome point of production of the homogeneous empty time of nationalism, and the exposition of the limitations of such a construct—the stages of which are seen in Amadou’s ‘hybridity’ (birth), his father’s integration, and Maria’s dis-integration (illegality). Moreover, these characters exist free of psychological narrativization—their “meaning” is meaningless in the overarching story. There is another sense in which the reading of Verachtung has definable limitations—in the very ethics of Amadou’s initial action. This impulse, a purely ethical one on the level of Levinas or Knud Løgstrup, is central to the scene’s action; it is also what places Amadou in a specifically higher moral position in this early scene—a position which he will abdicate to some extent in his later brusque interaction with his girlfriend. Amadou would seem to portray Løgstrup’s notion that mercy is itself an ethical endpoint when he is unable to explain his reasons for stopping Jean. As Løgstrup writes, “mercy is spontaneous because the least interruption, the least calculation, the least dilution of it in order to serve something else destroys it entirely…”324 Amadou’s action is not ‘right’ it is ‘moral.’ This action is what Zygmunt Baumann calls pre- reflexive spontaneity.325 The preflexivity of moral action, its action-before-thought, is what makes it moral, slips it out of and a priori to what Levinas calls understanding in the context of the other. Haneke makes of Amadou the example of an extra-modern concern for the moral, the

172 symptom of repressed memories of morality which exist prior to or subtend, it would seem, codification in the modern legal structure. This scene at the same time reinforces the notion that the homogeneity of the public sphere or of national identity is determined by the proscription of the other as difference; and the only manner of integration for the other is seemingly through hybridization—Amadou’s ‘hybrid’ position between young Frenchman and son of a Malian cabdriver, whose wife goes to a traditional religious healer for emotional and physical support. Indeed, while Naqvi’s reading of this scene supports the Verachtung argument, the larger context of the film deflects such an interpretation. Amadou comes perhaps to learn the Verachtung of the Western world, a contempt which is not really related to new modes of stratification in society, but to violent understanding as the new modality of intersubjectivity. Hybridity would entail the subsuming of both into a new subjectivity without the worrying out of these problematics; new masks for the new world order. Fatih Akin’s films address this notion of hybridity more directly. Hybridity has long been the postcolonial project of cultural critics, though it has recently run up against some significant criticism. In the works of Stuart Hall or Bhabha hybridity would seem a quasi-utopian mélange, although it is ostensibly a critical concept meant to attack the structural underpinnings of cultural/racial difference in western society and its concurrent hegemonic power systems.326 Aijaz Ahmad, however, has been very critical of this “literary” move towards hybridity and its supposed counter-hegemonic power; and Ahmad is, as Marwan Kraidy says, “right to point out that postcolonial discourses of hybridity and mimicry sharply contrast with the living conditions of millions of people whose energies are devoted to securing the barest conditions of survival…”327 But this is part of a very long and complex debate, reflected in the work of Pheng Cheah, Partha Chatterjee, Benedict Anderson, and other postcolonial critics. Hybridity, again as Kraidy suggests, has been broadly overused and under-defined, leading to either broad excoriations or utopian idealization.328 One cannot escape the fact that for most hybridity is an idealized political means for the racially marked to integrate with and destabilize the hegemonic structure of Western capital. Both Haneke and Akin call the neatness of cultural hybridity into question by either, as in the case above, demonstrating the political and social insecurity of the culturally hybrid (especially as it is marked in race); or by seemingly pointing out the conceptual barrenness of the metaphorical hybrid in real existing society.

173 Fatih Akin’s depiction of immigration and integration in his Gegen die Wand (Head On, 2005) is one of the more interesting to emerge in the past decade and is certainly Akin’s best film. I contrast it here with Haneke’s depiction because, rather than showing the illegality of immigration it shows its legality and acceptance: they are the social doxa against which the narrative plays; and Akin questions the current hot-topic critical point of cultural hybridity. For Akin’s characters, hybridity offers little respite. In some ways Akin’s film seems to pick up where Haneke leaves off in his “voyage” of Amadou’s father (Djibril Kouyaté) and his return to Mali. Haneke shows the arrival from the back seat of the father’s taxi as it emerges from the ferry into a busy African market. There is no emotional close-up of the father’s face, or distinct reasoning given for the return, but when matched with the troubles endured by both him and his son in Europe, the narrative possibilities branch out from this scene to suggest the outline of expectations—this arrival is the end of Haneke’s narrative. The ‘return’ concept is also shown more intimately in Maria’s return to Romania, exiled into her ‘homeland’ from the streets of Paris. We can only determine a certain sense of ambiguity in these returns from Haneke’s narratives, one that informs a general de- romanticization of the return to the home country, to one’s roots. In both instances, there is neither nostalgia nor hope; rather we must question what ‘exile’ really means in its globalized context—no longer is it the deracination of the subject; rather, it has become alienation from capital and means of production. Akin’s film deals with another type of return, one of second generation German-Turks returning to Istanbul. The story centers on Cahit (Birol Ünel), a Turkish German in deep depression after having lost his German wife in an accident, and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), who is eager to break free of the sexual oppression imposed by her strictly conservative family. Both attempt suicide and meet in a German sanitarium where they are being treated. Sibel convinces Cahit to marry her, not out of love, but in order to achieve the social and sexual freedom outside of the limits of her family. When Cahit later kills one of her German lovers in a drunken rage and is sent to prison, Cahit’s brother-in-law promises to kill her in an honor killing, forcing her to flee to Istanbul to live with her cousin in hiding—this is her ‘return’. Cahit finally quits the German prison several years later and goes to Turkey to find her. Formally, Akin presents the film in several parts, each surrounded by a static shot of a large Turkish band playing a Turkish love song on the shore of the Bosporus Strait, the Blue

174 Mosque glimmering in the background. This episodic approach on the one hand presents the narrative as mythical or allegorical. On the other hand, it sets up a tension between the German and Turkish elements, privileging neither; yet this tension and irreconcilability of the Turkish and German spaces mirrors Cahit’s and Sibel’s irreconcilable romance and their irreconcilable relationships with both Germany and Turkey. Germany and Turkey are brought together and driven apart, a process that represents an impossible challenge for Cahit and Sibel. As with Im Juli, Turkey is represented as both alternative to yet economically and socially continuous with Germany, something which is reflected in the formal division of the narrative between Germany and Istanbul. The oppression of Sibel’s sexuality does not come from Turkey at all, but from Germany where her conservative family persists in its ‘hybrid’ cultural state. Unlike Akin’s Solino, the homeland does not become a Heimat, a utopian sphere where socio-sexual healing can occur, but is instead an extension of the violent social world from which Sibel flew. While finally forgetting Cahit and his plight in a drunken stupor, she collapses and is raped by the owner of the bar in which she works, the man who also provides her with heroin. When the owner finishes with her, he tosses her from the bar and into the street where she accosts a group of Turkish men. She insults them to the point that one stabs her after having beaten her severely. She does not die, but this image of Turkey parallels closely the bloody, violent, intoxicated image of Germany from earlier in the film such that the two social spaces are only really separated by language. Indeed, this representation of Turkey reinforces Polona Petek’s position that Akin distances the European audience from a consumptive and exotic “experience of ‘authentic Turkishness’…”329 Importantly, the social spaces Akin constructs are distinctly urban—traffic tunnels, hospitals, apartments, clubs, sanitariums. Akin’s representation does not underscore the socio-existential problematics of the ideological concept of cultural hybridity, a hybridity which becomes a slippery slope in the consumer economy and can be seen in a negative sense in Sibel’s family.330 There is not an overt existential struggle to retain a certain cultural outlook or traditions as a superstructure for normative social interface; rather the cultural traditions of Sibel’s family are allowed to exist as though culturally in situ, within the setting of German society—museum pieces plucked from their real context and reconstructed in another. The three prevalent languages in the film are German, Turkish and a Turkish German mixture known (oftentimes pejoratively) as ‘Kanaksprach.’331 When Cahit goes to Sibel’s family to ask for her hand, he is forced to take a

175 Turkish-speaking friend to speak for him and remind him of traditions with which he is no longer familiar. In such a fashion, Cahit is represented as fundamentally and ostensibly German, as is Sibel, though her ‘Germanness’ is more closely related to her sexuality than her cultural associations. Neither is portrayed as psychologically caught up in some complex of hybridity. The various flaws these characters have—sexual addictions, drug addictions, alcohol addictions, Cahit’s rage and depression—are set up in a complex relationship to the specter of the Turkish homeland—not as a subjective or ontological problem but rather as a social epistemological problematic. In other words, for Cahit and Sibel hybridity is not a matter of feeling but of acting. Cahit’s job setting, a raucous club, is juxtaposed to the calm, happy, celebratory marriage, a ‘traditional’ marriage that reflects Turkish culture and the calm serenity of Sibel’s family. But there is no even hand in the representation. The club consumes the early half of the film and is paralleled with Cahit’s rage—especially when he inexplicably slams his hands down onto broken glass and dances on stage with his own blood coating his arms. Akin intentionally sets up the Turkish tradition as a safe haven, a realm of ‘Heimat’ where social and psychological problems can be resolved through a deep connection with a transnational autochthony. He sets it up for a fall. This ‘Heimat’ turns out to be little different from the city within which the narrative begins. Sibel’s bloodied face in Istanbul conjures Cahit’s bloody hands in Frankfurt. Akin’s is, indeed, a cosmopolitan representation in that he sutures Istanbul to Frankfurt across the long lines of human and economic integration and social interdependency: cosmopolitanism as consumption. He also reconstructs the problematic of cultural ‘hybridity’ within the context of a cosmopolitan, i.e. specifically urban, social space. While the presence of the outcast taxi-driver in Istanbul, recognizing Cahit’s German accent and explaining how he had been cast out of Germany for dealing cocaine332, positions Turkey as a political space disparate from Germany, criminal to some extent, Sibel’s cousin, Selma’s (Meltem Cumbul) position with an expensive hotel belies this initial insinuation. The meeting between Cahit and Selma positions Selma as a successful member of Turkish society, in a position of economic and social power which allows her to live a life outside of ‘social tradition.’ This must be directly compared with Sibel’s family in Germany which, while seemingly ‘integrated’ into German society, retains family traditions that limit the social possibilities of women. Yet again, Istanbul is represented in

176 Akin’s work as a social extension of western rationalized societies both socially and economically, a part of a larger cosmopolitan space. Akin is also continuously intertwining Turkish, British, American and German music within the diegetic and extra-diegetic soundtracks. As Sibel prepares a large, Turkish meal for Cahit, Turkish music plays over sharp, extreme close-ups of the preparation, tapping into what Laura Marks calls ‘haptic cinema’333 a means of representing touch and the physical presence of culture on the screen. This steady flow of music brings out the relationship between the consumption of music and the social sphere, especially the association between music and tradition. Akin highlights the connection between economic cosmopolitanism (globalization) and the global music market—the construction of a new ‘traditional music’ for the cosmopolitan space. Curiously, though, and consistent with its presence throughout, the Turkish band has the final say, ending the film after Cahit departs alone on a bus for the town where he was born. This ending partially returns the exotic aura to Turkey, to be sure; however, it also elevates the narrative to the level of social allegory, an allegory on the relationship between tradition, history and society. Sibel decides to remain in Istanbul, and not to return to Cahit in spite of his claim that he has changed (a claim that is proven visually by the image of Cahit carrying a package of bottled water on his shoulder, which has replaced the earlier appearance of Cahit bearing the box filled with empty, broken beer bottles). This decision matched with the love song and the image of Cahit waiting for her on the bus before it finally pulls away, replaces the image of a ‘conquering love’ with the social realization that there is no outside to the social space, no ‘elsewhere’ to which to retire. That very concept is an aspect of the bourgeois imaginary and, though it inherently contradicts cosmopolitanism, is an aspect of ideological cosmopolitanism. Cahit will not find that distant seashore that Tykwer’s characters reach in Der Krieger und die Kaiserin. Rather he returns to the beginning of his social roots, the roots of the cosmopolitan impulse. The connection between the alienation of Akin’s characters, that general social alienation that has become the fetish of ‘art’ cinema, is associated with immigration but only as a corollary. Akin’s construction of a cosmopolitan space wherein the political holds little force when compared to the social, lends great power to consumption. But the corollary of immigration becomes the framework for social interaction rather than consumption. Consumption becomes an aspect of cultural connection, especially when Sibel prepares the meal for Cahit—both of them

177 ‘consume’ their culture, masking the deeper social roots of traditions as they mask their relationship before Sibel’s family. Akin’s characters consume culture, physically and in Baudrillard’s since of the word.334 This is the legacy of immigration for Akin, not social alienation produced by cultural hybridity, but alienation produced by deeper social alienation, which is then reflected into the relationship with the traditional culture. This produces a dialectic between immigration and alienation that is resolved not in the reconciliation of immigrant culture and ‘autochthonous’ culture, but in the reconciliation of the Cahit and Sibel with the generic, homogeneous social space of cosmopolitanism that subtends the ideological isolation of cultural attitudes into rationalized systems of self-reflexivity. The power of these ‘liminal’ characters is in the depiction of ‘cultures’ as ideologically oriented as well as intersubjectively and historically; i.e. they propagate within their ideology modern rationalized society. Cahit’s and Sibel’s story represents a certain desire to reconcile the ideologically-composed differences between Turkish and German society, while suggesting that it is an impossibility if we think of identity in ethnic-nationalist terms alone. An ethical reading of Akin’s could fall into Fatima Naqvi’s reading of Verachtung.335 Certainly there is a certain disruption in Cahit and Sibel’s lives from the point of view of Western normative ideology. Certainly, the addiction and sexual promiscuity leads one to see a disorientation which is cured by the return to Turkey, to the home land, a return which could be read as a recognition of the necessity of homogeneous, hegemonic society. However, again, it is more telling and more interesting if we read this through the more complex lens of Levinas, Løgstrup, or Baumann—that of the face-to-face, the a priori, the pre-normative moral. If anything, the final sexual liaison between Cahit and Sibel is the true face-to-face interaction, free of drink, drugs, or other chemical filters, an interaction which produces not a romantic meaning but a truly pragmatic and moral decision—separation. German and Turkey cannot truly exist as hybrid through wishing it, just as Cahit and Sibel cannot be brought together simply to satisfy their sexual needs outside of the practical effects such a result would have. The attempt to understand disappears with Cahit’s face, slowly shrinking in the window of the bus, alone, and yet somehow content.

178 CONCLUSION It is true that a particularly new geo-political and cultural mode has arisen in the west since the fall of the Wall (called die Wende in Germany, the ‘turning-point’). This turning-point opened up new territory for the expansion of capitalist concerns into Eastern Europe and allowed for new stages of development of the political EU. The old borders within Europe are sublated into the bodies of immigrants, others walking the streets, and these others effected a new mode of intersubjectivity within western Europe. Not only was the fear of loosing one’s job shifted from the Arab to the Pole in the new EU (a fact prefigured in Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf), but the Arabs and Turks were further relegated into positions of bordered entities (or even super- bordered entities) defined by either their legality or illegality and their physical appearance, thus positioned within the intersubjective field as an aspect of legal structures, the figural representation of western cultural normativity. The public sphere is engrained with these sublated borders, and the very nature of their sublation (Aufgehobenheit) makes it more difficult to recognize their continual, living presence in the form of the other. European films are addressing the issue of borders in new and interesting ways, ways that support the notion of the continual presence of borders by highlighting their presence in European intersubjectivity; but this discussion institutes a problematic in representation such that the normatizing of the other only happens by stigmatizing the form of the other as exotic desideratum and relegating it to the imaginary for the sake of consumption. The dynamic of consumption then also finds its way into the utopian ideology of cosmopolitanism as a form of doxa. This works its way into the imaginary of the bourgeois public sphere by confirming the distance and exotic nature of the other, while absorbing it into the normative, capitalist rationalism of consumption. The exotic becomes reified as place and as desideratum, and thus subtly distinguished from primal desire, purified by ‘rationalized desire.’ The city is often metonymy for the community. Urbanity then takes on the appearance of a universal. It represents the nation, the people, the community. Urbanity is the fata morgana of national identity or of national culture. In European cinema, the city is both a ‘melting pot,’ and a potpourri, of European and non-European cultures, existing in multivalent social forms, under multivalent rubrics and stereotypes. However, two definite trends develop within European cinema, which show the city as either, as with Jeunet, integrated and co-existent with the world, i.e. the ‘real’ world, or as dis-integrated, falling away from the world, existing over it or with it,

179 though not necessarily in harmony. For the latter films the criticism is normally social and not ecological. Whereas in the integrated view, all life and all people live in a homogeneous world, where ideas and ideals conflate one with the other; or, as in the case of Klapitsch’s L’Auberge espagnol, cities are conflated across Europe as points of youthful adventure, consumption, and unity. In the latter category, that of dis-integration, the city slides between realism and local, and universal and metonymical. But in the better of them the ethical concerns point up ethical concerns in the public sphere, they are topical; and yet they are also critical of the assumptions inherent in the historical imaginary of the public sphere, normative assumptions of inclusion and exclusion, same and other, homogeneity and heterogeneity, which are foundational to its existence. It is only in the separation of the city from nature, i.e. as a production of human discourse, legal structures, social conventions, rather than some pre-existent ideal, that ethical concerns can be addressed: following Løgstrup ethics is something which preexists considerations of ‘right’—but such a possibility is only critical if both are juxtaposed, if, as in Haneke’s film, the right (immigration) is juxtaposed with the moral (protection of Marie). Whether one agrees with Løgstrup’s deep depoliticization of ethics or not, this reading certainly agrees more closely with Haneke’s overall concerns as a filmmaker, rather than the suggestion that the lack of social stratification in European society leads to social discord, to chaos. If the legitimating function of the bourgeois public sphere is truly still present, then these films demonstrate a necessity of addressing just which the conditions are for legitimation, for legality. Humanity is fluid, and human cultures manifold; the mechanisms that determine the hegemonic system of capitalized culture, those related to consumption, when left to their own devices do not produce a significant critical cinema. This is the power of the European system, such as it is today. It allows critical projects to develop, projects which hopefully will continue to find a perceiving eye and attentive ear in the European public sphere and beyond.

180 NOTES

1 Cf. Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 2 François Duchêne, Jean Monnet: the First Statesman of Interdependence (New York: Norton, 1994) pp 36-37. 3 Ian Aitkin, “Current Problems in the Study of European Cinema and the Role of Questions on Cultural Identity,” in European Identity in Cinema, Wendy Everett, ed. (Portland: Intellect, 2005), 79-86. 4 From the German perspective see Eric Rentschler ed. New German Critique 87 (Autumn 2002), and the, in my opinion, more successful Deniz Göktürk ed. New German Critique 92 (Spring- Summer 2004). 5 See e.g. Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: New Press, 2006); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: the Question of the Other, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). 6 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994). 7 Hobsbawm, Age of Empires, 58. 8 The Morals of History, Alyson Waters, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 9 Ibid, 36. 10 Ibid. 39. 11 Ibid. 12 Cf. e.g. Spivak, "The Anti-Imperialist Empire and After: In Dialogue with Gayatri Spivak's 'Are You Postcolonial?'" PMLA 120:3 (May 2006): 829-31. 13 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of Empires, 1875-1914 (London: Guild Publishing, 1987), 79. 14 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 15 “Merkel: Demokratie ohne christliche Werte undenkbar,” Rhein-Zeitung, 11 June 2005. 16 “It was a beautiful, glorious period when Europe was a Christian land, when a single Christianity inhabited this continent forged by man; a single massive communal interest bound even the farthest reaching provinces of this wide, spiritual kingdom.—Without large-scale, secular property ownership a single overlord guided and unified the important political powers.—A vast guild, to which everyone had access, stood immediately under that overlord and performed at his beck and call and strove with diligence to support his eleemosynary power. Each member of this society was everywhere honored, and if the common people sought comfort or help, protection or counsel from him and therefore provided richly for his manifold needs, so found they too asylum, respect and attention with those in power, and all served these chosen ones, who had been equipped with wonderful powers, as children of

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heaven, whose presence and affection dispersed diverse blessings.” All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 17 cf. e.g. “European Constitution should take into account Christian traditions—Russian patriarch” (RIA Novosti, June 7 [2005] ); “Intellectuals urge reference to Christianity in EU Constitution” (PAP Polish Press Agency, April 22 [2005] ); “Church anger at Euro Treaty snub,” James McNamara (The Sun, August 12 [2004] ). 18 “The Presence of the Church on the Horizon of Europe,” The Church of Greece , no date. This and other speeches by the Archbishop revolve around the European Union and European identity as a cultural fact, thus disallowing the introduction of ‘other, non-European’ societies into the Union. He is, of course, referring to Turkey, though he is at no point specific; however, such sentiment has also been expressed by other politicians and thinkers of the Union who feel that the specificity of such a community can only come about through the erection of borders. The official, political denial of entry into the Union to Turkey is based on concerns over Human Rights issues and questions, ironically enough, of religious freedom. 19 Counsel of Europe, Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, Article 5.1 . The EU is proactive in placing all treaties, conventions, and such documentation online, the first true technocracy. 20 Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute (New York: Verso, 2001). 21 European Industrial Relations Observatory On-Line, ‘Workers from new EU member states undeterred by restrictive policy,” < http://www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int/2005/07/feature/nl0507103f.html>. 22 Žižek, 5. 23 Ibid. 24 Shohat and Stam, 104. 25 See Hasan Kösebaladan, “The Permanent Other? Turkey and the Question of European Identity,” Mediterranean Quarterly 18.4 (2007), 87-111, on the difficulties demonstrable in discourses on Turkey’s admission to the Union, especially what he terms the “minimalist discourse that Europe is the center of civilization.” 26 See e.g. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003). 27 See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). Žižek’s use of ‘ideology’ is much more in keeping with Mannheim’s broadening of the term as being almost parallel to ‘culture.’ 28 Wendy Everett, ed., European Identity and Cinema (Portland: Intellect, 2005). 29 See Eric Rentschler, “Postwall Prospects: An Introduction,” New German Critique 83 (Spring- Summer, 2002), 3-5; and other articles from the same issue. On the Cosmopolitan German Cinema see Schindler and Koepnick. 30 Randall Halle, “German Film, Aufgehoben: Ensembles of Transnational Cinema,” New German Critique 83 (Spring-Summer, 2002), 8. 31 For a sociological look at the industry and its relationship to national cinema(s) see Philip Schlesinger, “The Sociological Scope of ‘National Cinema’,” in Cinema and Nation Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 19-31. 32 Luisa Rivi, European Cinema after 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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33 Marc Silberman, “What is German in the German Cinema?” Film History 8 (1996), 297-315; 299. 34 Ibid. 301. 35 The Italian historical epics Cabiria (1914) and Quo vadis? (1913) (which was based on the novel by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz—in 1902 a French short of the same name directed by Lucien Nonguet was released based on the Sienkiewicz’s novel about which little is known) are examples of the international appeal of the film d’art cinema. Quo vadis was reportedly made for 60,000 Lire and Cabiria for 1,250,000 Lire. Toeplitz writes that both films broke all box office records up to the date of their releases, and not only those in Italy, but in London, New York, Paris and Berlin as well. 36 See Richard Abel’s recent call for a deeper understanding of the rural distribution and audiences of early cinema: “History Can Work for You, You Know How to Use It,” Cinema Journal 44.1 (2004), 107-112. 37 Cf. The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe: Free Press: 1950). 38 See e.g. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (April 1999), 59-77; Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); John Orr, Cinema and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986), 63-70. 39 Council of Europe, Explanatory Report on the European Convention on Cinematographic Co- Productions (Strasbourg, 18 May 1992) 4. 40 Angus Finney, The State of European Cinema: A New Dose of Reality (London, New York: Cassell 1997) 91. 41 Ibid. 98. 42 See Paul Hainsworth, “Politics, Culture, and Cinema in the New Europe,” Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe, John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth, eds. (Belfast: BFI, 1994) 8-31. 43 Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 44 Ibid. 3. 45 Cf. e.g. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, L. Crishman and P. Williams, eds. (London: Harvester, 1993). 46 See e.g. Deniz Göktürk, “Migration und Kino—Subnationale Mitleidskultur oder transnationale Rolle?” in Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland. Ein Handbuch Carmine Chiellino, ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 329-47. 47 Mark Betz, “The Name above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and Polyglot European Art Cinema,” Camera Obscura 16.1 (2001) 1-44. 48 Angelika Fenner, “Turkish Cinema in the New Europe: Visualizing Ethnic Conflict in Sinan Çetin’s Berlin in Berlin,” Camera Obscura 44 (2000): 116. 49 Adrian Favell, “To Belong of not to Belong: the Postnational Question,” The Politics of Belonging: Migrants and Minorities in Contemporary Europe, Anthony Geddes and Adrian Favell, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). 50 Cf. George Ross, “Confronting the New Europe,” New Left Review 191 (1992) 49-68.

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51 Cf. Ernesto Laclau’s work on universalism in Emancipations (Verso: London, 1996), On Populist Reason (Verso: London, 2005) and Elusive Universality (Routledge: London, 2007). 52 In this I am at odds, however slightly, with Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (Routledge: London, 1993), in that she would suggest a national cinema to be largely discursive. See chapter 1 for more. 53 Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 54Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick, eds. The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginery, 1945 to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 13. 55 See e.g. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations (Verso: London, 1996), and Martha Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 56 Luisa Rivi, 7. 57 Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, Erazim Kohák, trans. (Chicago: Open Court, 1996). 58 “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: a Diasporic Reading,” Cinema Journal 43.4 (2004), pp. 18-42. 59 Ong, Aihwa, Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), 4. 60 Cf. also Klein, op. cit. footnote 15. 61 “Transnational Cinema and the Mexican State in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también,” South Central Review 21.3 (2004), 150-168. 62 Histoire du cinéma: Art et Industrie, Vol. 1 (1895-1914) (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1967), 144: “the history of the cinema is incomprehensible if one does not envisage the economic, social and industrial conditions which presided over its evolution.” 63 See Jerzy Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, Band 1 (1895-1928) (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1972), 36. 64 Mitry, 149. 65 ibid. 66 Toeplitz, 50. La Société des films d’art was financed by Paul Lafitte—a French industrialist who also founded Société des Cinema-Halles in 1907—and La Banque Suisse et Française, thus seeing some of the first major outside investment in cinema as an industry. Their first production, L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise was supported by no less than the Académie Française and the Parisian Comédie Française; and the original score for the film was composed and conducted by Camille Saint-Saëns. Of course Sarah Bernhardt had already famously starred in a ‘sound-film’ dealing with the duel from Hamlet (1900), not to mention Lumière’s production of L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (1897), so the idea of filming literature was not something new. 67 Mitry, 148. Capellani would later immigrate to Hollywood where he had a fairly successful career, directing such films as Out of the Fog (1918), The Red Lantern (1919) and Sisters (1921). 68 One advertisement for an early Deutsches Bioscop show demonstrates how the ‘magical’ technology was one of the main attractions for early cinema-goers: “Auf der kleinen Bühne: zum ersten Male... das Bioscop! Die amüsanteste und interessanteste Erfindung der Neuzeit...” (On the small stage: for the first time... the Bioscop! The most amusing and

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interesting invention of this new age...). The focus for the ad is obviously on the ‘invention’ of the Bioscop and its presentation as such. Later the ad qualifies: “Die im Bioscop gezeigten Bilder sind keine Schattenbilder...” (The pictures shown by the Bioscop are not silhouettes...) Thus the notion of improvement over the more ‘primitive’ technology of older means of representation is stressed. This Bioscop is not only a new invention; it is an improvement on older more familiar forms. The advertisement is reproduced in Carlos Staehlin, Historica Genetica del Cine, Vol. 1 (Valladolid: Secretario de Publicaciones, 1981), 274. 69 Toeplitz, 56. “Before the first world war a large portion of the productions in French cinema kept the traditions of the Carnival-Cinema alive. […] The humor in [Jean] Durands films was often based on the conjunction of situations that were so improbable and fantastic, that even Méliès never dared dream of such.” 70 The Italian historical epics Cabiria (1914) and Quo vadis? (1913) (which was based on the novel by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz—in 1902 a French short of the same name directed by Lucien Nonguet was released based on the Sienkiewicz’s novel about which little is known) are examples of the international appeal of the film d’art cinema. Quo vadis was reportedly made for 60,000 Lire and Cabiria for 1,250,000 Lire. Toeplitz writes that both films broke all box office records up to the date of their releases, and not only those in Italy, but in London, New York, Paris and Berlin as well. 71 Cf. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Bürger and Frederick Lawrence, tras. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989 [1962]). 72 See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 73 Georges Sadoul, Histoire Générale du Cinéma, Vols 2 and 3 (Paris: Denoël, 1973), 365. 74 Mitry, 307. 75 Martin Loiperdinger, “The Kaiser’s Cinema: An Archeology of Attitudes and Audiences” A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1996), 41-50. 76 Mitry, 307. 77 Martin Koerber, “Oskar Messter, Film Pioneer: Early Cinema between Science, Spectacle and Commerce,” A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, 51-61. 78 Deutsche Bioscop was the production studio at Babelsberg in Germany. After the war it merged with the German branch of the French firm Éclair and formed Decla Bioscop before finally merging with Ufa (est. 1917) in 1921. 79 The German company, Lothar Stark-Filme, was the first to produce a film based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s literature, Das Abenteuer des Van Dola (1915) and German literature had already been tapped by Edwin Porter (dir.) and the Edison Company when they produced Goethe’s Faust in 1909; but the first well-known production of German Gothic literature was Ernst Lubitsch’s PAGU produced Die Puppe (1919) with the ‘German Mary Pickford’ Ossi Oswalda. Though, ‘Gothic’ fiction had already been picked up by the French in 1909 with the production of Poe’s Le Puits et le pendule. 80 Mitry, 308. Messter was apparently able to procure American distribution for The Conquest of Claire (1914) through General Film Company (assumingly through Pathé and Patheplay).

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Probably due to the cost, however, Messter did not repeat this American distribution with any of his other films. 81 Ibid., 308-9. 82 Ibid., 309: “Paul Davidson sought to establish, through the utilization of many small producers, a unique and powerful firm.” 83 Ibid. 84 Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk, “The French Connection: Franco-German Film Connections before World War I,” A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, 62-71. 85 “Die Verrohung des Kinos,” Ostasiatischer Lloyd-Schanghaier Nachrichten, no. 17, 25 April 1913; quoted in Kessler and Lenk, 70. 86 Mitry, 312: “Joe May was still the only director known to the German public.” 87 Marc Silberman, “What is German in the German Cinema?” Film History 8 (1996), 297-315; 301. 88 Peter Miskell, “ ‘Selling America to the World?’ The Rise and Fall of an International Film Distributor in Its Largest Foreign: United Artists in Britain, 1927-1947,” Enterprise & Society 7.4 (2006), 740-776. 89 Randall Halle, “German Film, Aufgehoben: Ensembles of Transnational Cinema,” New German Critique 87 (Autumn 2002), 7-46. 90 Chantal Akerman in Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema, Duncan Petrie, ed. (London: BFI, 1992), 69. 91 Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, eds., ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920-1930 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1999). 92 Martin Koerber, “Oskar Mester, Film Pioneer...” A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, 60. 93 Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2005), 4. 94 ibid. 95 Luisa Rivi, European Cinema after 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 46. 96 Susan Hayward, ibid, 5. 97 Mark Betz, “The Name above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and Polyglot European Art Cinema,” Camera Obscura 16.1 (2001) 1-44. 98 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press,1991 [1962] ), 14-26. Cf. also the 1974 definition of the public sphere in “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” New German Critique No. 3 (Autumn, 1974), 49-55,: “by ‘the public sphere’ we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed” (49). 99 Habermas can be read to suggest that this actuation is related to language only insofar as communication is a means for building consensus, especially since he structures certain affinities across the European public sphere regardless of language difference. 100 Language can and does limit the relationship between the immigrant and the national public sphere, but only as a border that must finally be traversed. As an example of the criticism aimed at Habermas over this issue of access to the public sphere see e.g. Doxtader, “Characters in the Middle of Public Life: Consensus, Dissent, and Ethos,” Philosophy and

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Rhetoric, 33.4, (2000), 336-369; Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, C. Calhoun, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 109-142; Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Joel Anderson, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); and Seyla Benhabib’s Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, (New York: Columbia UP, 1986). 101 See e.g. the evidence presented in Jack Citrin and John Sides on trends in attachment to Europe and Nation from the Eurobarometers 36, 43.1 bis, 51, and 54.1. (“More than Nationals: How Identity Choice Matters in the New Europe,” in Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the E.U., Richard Herrmann, et al., eds. [New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004], table 8.2, 169. While they do not formulate the concept of a European public sphere specifically, the coincidence between feelings of inclusion and exclusion closely reflects the same concept in the bourgeois public sphere. 102 “European Identity: A Social-Psychological Perspective,” in Transnational Identities..., 40- 58. Castano focuses on the fact that while most Europeans think that the Union is a good thing, at the same time they show little interest in giving up their national affiliations. For Castano, however, this fact does in no way hinder the formation of a European concept of community as something real and effective in everyday social existence. 103 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 24. The concept of “homogeneous, empty-time” comes from Benjamin’s Illuminations, p. 265. 104 Marc Redfield, “Imagi-nation: the Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning,” diacritics 29.4 (Winter 1999): 58-83, 63. 105 Anderson, 77. 106 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, C. Calhoun, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 107 Ibid. 113. 108 Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere...: 289-339, 335. 109 Fraser, 123. 110 Rivi, 46. 111 I would like to thank Fredric Jameson for this insight and his courteous and piercing examination of a paper I delivered at the Marxist Reading Group at the University of Florida in March 2007. 112 Anderson, 26. 113 This aspect of consumption and public sphere discourse is too often overlooked in criticism of national and international public sphere discourse. 114 Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Peter Labanyi, et al., trans. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993: 1972). 115 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2: Lifeworld and System: a Critique of Functionalist Reason, Thomas McCarthy, trans. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 318-331. 116 Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000). For Elsaesser, the historical imaginary is a specific historical narrative that

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restructures historical fact into new contexts. It is also the manner in which the nation refers to itself in the cinema, both concretely and abstractly, setting up systems of allegorical meaning ... 117 Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays Max Pensky, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001 [1998]), 18-19. 118 Ibid. 119 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, Christine Jones, et al, trans (London: Verso, 2002), ix. 120 Ibid. On the notion of European Apartheid, see also: Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, James Swenson, trans. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004), 31-50. 121 Ibid., 146-176. 122 Ibid. 147. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid. 149-55. 125 Ibid. 155. 126 Ibid. 157. 127 Cf. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2... 128 Op. cit. 129 See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005). 130 “European Identity: A Social-Psychological Perspective,” Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU, Richard K. Herrmann, et al, eds. (London: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 40-58; 55. 131 Nancy Fraser argues that you cannot understand the public sphere without first understanding the conflictual nature of such a sphere, and that this is Habermas’s main flaw: “the problem is not that Habermas idealizes the liberal public sphere but also that he fails to examine other, nonliberal, nonbourgeois, competing public spheres” (“Rethinking the Public Sphere...,” 115). 132 See Miriam Hansen, “Foreword,” Public Sphere and Experience, xxix; and Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), 63ff. Cf. also, Hansen, “Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?” New German Critique 29 (Spring-Summer 1983), 174-184; 151 : “In the effort to (re-)align itself with the cultural standards of the bourgeois public sphere, the cinema implicitly adapted the mechanisms of exclusion and abstract identity characteristic of the paradigm.” 133 Jean-Luc Godard, dir., Notre Musique (2005). 134 Reference to Gellner in Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism… 135 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 136 See Hasan Kösebaladan, “The Permanent Other? Turkey and the Question of European Identity,” Mediterranean Quarterly 18.4 (2007), 87-111, for more information on the controversies surrounding Turkey’s inclusion in the EU. 137 Luisa Rivi, European Cinema after 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 30. 138 Andreas Huyssen, “Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts,” New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003) pp 147-164.

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139 And this is not simply limited to cinematic narratives. Dominick LaCapra in his work History and Memory after Auschwitz (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), uses Auschwitz as a sort of universal test case for the function of memory and the public uses of history—that is to say that Auschwitz becomes an epistemological knot in the modern narrative. The structurally determinant relationship between Auschwitz and modernity (or specifically ‘western’ rationalized society) can be found in Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 140 Anderson, 24. 141 Ibid, 53-54. 142 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zorn, trans. (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253-264. 143 Op. cit. 144 Anderson, 24. 145 See the controversial book from Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001) for a populist historical examination of the structural relationships between American corporations and the Nazi extermination machine. 146 Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, Max Pensky trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 74. 147 Ibid., 73. 148 Op. cit. 77. 149 Armand Leparmentier and Laurent Zecchini, “Europe: Pour ou contre la Turquie,” Le Monde, November 9, 2002, pp 1-2; cited in Balibar, We, the People of Europe?..., 221, endnote 28. D’Estaing also mentioned this position in a televised interview with Charlie Rose, March 7, 2005. 150 See Hasan Kösebaladan, “The Permanent Other? Turkey and the Question of European Identity,” Mediterranean Quarterly 18.4 (2007), 87-111. 151 The recent furor in France over the adoption of a law, which criminalizes the denial of the Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Turkish government, demonstrates the discursive level of these borders. 152 According to Polona Petek, “Enabling Collisions: Re-thinking Multiculturalism through Faith Akin’s Gegen die Wand/Head On,” Studies in European Cinema 4.3 (2007), 177-186, the irreducibility of the experience of the other is an inherent aspect of Akin’s films: “Akin’s film [Gegen die Wand] redeems itself by eventually refusing to make the experience of ‘authentic Turkishness’ available in Germany” (184). 153 See Hito Steyerl, “Gaps and Potentials: The Exhibition Heimat Kunst—Migrant Culture as an Allegory of the Global Market,” New German Critique 92 (Spring-Summer 2004) 159-168. 154 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indian UP, 1984), 25. 155 “Back Projection: Visualizing Past and Present Europe in Zentropa,” Cinema Journal 45.1 (2005) 3-21. 156 ibid. 13-14. 157 ibid. 13.

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158 Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: from Neorealism to the Present, 3rd edition (New York: Continuum, 2001), 93. 159 Ibid., 93-94. 160 Ibid. 161 Eteinne Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, James Swenson, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 111. 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 164 Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Chris Turner, trans. (New York: Verso, 1991), pp 86-106; 95. 165 [Citation] 166 Balibar, We, the People of Europe?... 76. 167 Which calls to mind Randall Halle’s slightly pessimistic point of view: “National tropes now appear to a large degree as a matter of setting, background, temperament, and so on, to be consumed by spectators in much the same way as travelers on package tours ‘consume’ national treasures through the windows of their buses.” Randall Halle, “German Film, Aufgehoben: Ensembles of Transnational Cinema,” New German Critique 83 (Spring- Summer, 2002), 19. 168 Cf. e.g. Theory of Communicative Action... 169 Balibar, “The Nation Form...,” 96. 170 Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2000). 171 Habermas, Structural Transformation…, 49. 172 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere…, 109-142; 113 173 Goeff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere…, 289-339; 307. 174 Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities 175 Habermas, The Structural Transformation..., 85. 176 Ibid., 51. 177 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 109-110; quoted in Eley, 322. 178 For this concept I am relying to some extent on Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, vols. 1 and 2, and Michael Theunissen’s, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Buber, Christopher Macann, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984); the common sociological meaning and its explanation can be found in e.g. Emanuel A. Schleghoff, “Repair after Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense of Intersubjectivity in Conversation,” American Journal of Sociology 97.5 (March 1992): 1295- 1345, which lays out excellently the history of the concept of intersubjectivity and its tenuous place in sociological theory. I am not intent on questioning intersubjectivity as theoretical nomenclature, but simply see it as a representative figural field wherein Haneke locates specific tensions which then reverberate throughout public sphere discourse. 179 Maria’s narrative solves one of the difficulties Carrie Tarr, “The Porosity of the Hexagon: Border Crossings in Contemporary French Cinema,” Studies in European Cinema 4.1 (2007),

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7-20, finds with representations of post-border crossing East Europeans in recent films, where a lack of knowledge and emphasis on boisterous East European characters misconstrues the root causes of border transgressions. 180 Erik Doxtader, “Characters in the Middle of Public Life: Consensus, Dissent, and Ethos,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.4 (2000) 336-369. 181 “Back Projection: Visualizing Past and Present Europe in Zentropa,” Cinema Journal 45.1 (2005) 3-21. 182 ibid. 13-14. 183 ibid. 13. 184 ibid. 11. 185 In one scene, Anne is shown from the front, in a mid-range shot, ironing her clothes and watching the news on television. Within the diegesis, we hear the sounds of a child being beaten, shouting, crying, screams of pain. Anne, exasperated, unsettled, sets her iron down and glances at the ceiling. She then turns up the television and continues ironing. In this case, the extra-private has seeped into the private sphere, effectively exposing the fiction of privacy in the modern world. 186 Haneke’s portrayal of the private sphere in this film also acts to contract the ‘non-lieux’ of Augé’s supermodernity with the ‘lieux’ of the lived-space. Anne’s apartment is not more intimate or livable than the subway; she changes her approach to them both, thus signaling the distinction. On supermodernity see Marc Augé, Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris : Seuil, 1992) ; Non-Places : Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, John Howe, trans. (New York : Verso, 1995). 187 ibid. 142. 188 On EU policies and the telecommunications and electricity markets for example, see: Ian Bartle, Globalisation and EU Policy-Making: The Neo-Liberal Transformation of Telecommunications and Electricity (New York: Manchester UP, 2005). 189 “Europe after Communism,” We, the People of Europe?, 99. 190 Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays Max Pensky, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001 [1998]), 18-19. 191 For information on the contemporary production and distribution system for cinema in the European Union see Luisa Rivi, European Cinema After 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 192 See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books for the United Nations University, 1986); Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 193 Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, Erazim Kohák, trans. (Chicago: Open Court, 1996). Patočka was a phenomenologist philosopher living in Czechoslovakia during the period of communism. He is perhaps most famous outside of Europe for co- founding the Charter 77 human rights movement in Czechoslovakia and for being approached and discoursed upon in Derrida’s The Gift of Death. His general thesis is that history emerges from the interplay and interrelationship between the everyday process of history and orgiastic explosions of irresponsibility.

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194 Patočka, 57. 195 Ibid., and passim. 196 Ibid. 62. Patočka’s use of ‘prehistoric humanity,’ is complex and does not refer to the anthropological use of the word. Rather, this is a discursive and social formation which masks historical problematics with ideological religious belief. 197 Ibid. 118. 198 Marc Silberman, “What is German in the German Cinema?” Film History 8 (1996), 297-315; 297. 199 Ibid. 299. 200 Ibid. 301. 201 See e.g. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995). 202 Anke K. Finger, “Hello Willy, Good Bye Lenin!: Transitions of an East German Family,” South Central Review 22.2 (2005), 39-58. 203 Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: a History (London: BFI, 1989). 204 Ibid., 267. 205 Fredric Jameson, “‘In the Destructive Element Immerse’: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution,” October 17 (Summer 1981), 99-118; 100. 206 Ibid., 106 passim. 207 Elsaesser, 267. 208 Op cit. 209 I am using this term with specific reference to Pheng Cheah’s Spectral Nationality. 210 Quoted from Part 1, which has the trilingual title “Der Gral,” “Le Graal,” and “The Grail,” in Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland (1978). Syberberg also dedicates the film to Henri Langlois, famous French cinemaphile. 211 Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1981), 52. 212 Rosalind Galt, “Back Projection: Visualizing Past and Present Europe in Zentropa,” Cinema Journal 45.1 (2005), 3-21; 13. 213 See Thomas Elsaesser, “Myth as the Phantasmagoria of History: H.J. Syberberg, Cinema and Representation,” New German Critique 24/25 (Autumn 1981-Winter 1982), 108-154. 214 See e.g. Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Present Pasts: Urban Palimsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 215 Ibid. 216 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 217 Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 291-322. 218 These notions of Trauerarbeit and Vergangenheitsbewaltigung are also central to what become known as the Historikerstreit in the late 1980s. See the New German Critique issue on the controversy (44 [Spring-Summer 1988]). 219 According to Kurt Lewin, hodological space is a topological space in which vectors and markers are determined psychologically. See Tarja Laine, “Lars von Trier, Dogville and the hodological spaces of the cinema,” Studies in European Cinema 3.2 (2006), 129-141.

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220 See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). On the chronotope in German Cinema see Susan Ingram, “Running on Empty: Berlin as a Chronotope of Persistence in Run Lola Run,” in Floodgates: Technologies, Cultural (Ex)Change and the Persistence of Place, Markus Reisenleitner and Cornelia Szabó-Knotik, eds. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006), 133-48. 221 The depictions of ‘Hamburg’ in the film are intentionally disjointed by the fact that Wenders shot on five different locations (in five different cities) for scenes that supposedly took place in Hamburg. While this is not unusual in mainstream cinematic production, this process is intentionally exposed on occasion by Wenders’ camera. 222 Mark Betz, “The Name above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and Polyglot European Cinema,” Camera Obscura 16.1 (2001), 1-44. 223 Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 224 If we see intersubjectivity as an ‘Ich-Du’ (I-Thou) relationship as does Martin Buber, the crisis can be located in the doubt raised in communal relationships in postwar Europe. See Martin Buber, Ich und Du (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1923). 225 On this particularly complex subject see Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture of Amnesia; and Present Pasts: Urban Palimsests and the Politics of Memory. 226 Indeed, Mark Betz suggests that the nature of these ‘critical cinemas’ in intimately related to this very fact. See Mark Betz, “The Name above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and Polyglot European Art Cinema.” 227 See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999). See also Miriam Hansen’s work on Benjamin and his relationship to cinema: “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), 179-224. 228 Partha Chatterjee, The Nations and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) and Bhabha op. cit. 229 See The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1979]). 230 Patočka, 99. 231 “Surrealism,” in Reflections, Edmund Jephcott, trans. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 190. 232 David Bordwell, “Film Futures,” SubStance 31.1 (2002) 88-104; 91. 233 Indeed, the fact that Tykwer would later go on to direct an unfinished Kieslowski script, Heaven, in 2002, suggests a formal and intellectual relationship between the two directors. 234 I.e. an admixture of freedom and responsibility. 235 See e.g. Hayden White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 236 See Patočka, especially the ‘thesis’ on the meaning of history. 237 Patočka, 62. 238 Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 291-322. 239 Ibid. 297.

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240 Ibid., 299. 241 Ibid., 309ff. 242 See the discourse on so-called ‘gaze’ theory and that of spectacle: Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus,” in Film Theory and Criticism, Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975); Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: Women’s Films of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 243 Cf. The Political Unconscious... 244 “The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes. Everything else is just theory.” 245 Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, Ben Brewster, trans. (London: New Left Books, 1970). 246 Quoted in Anke Finger, 55. 247 Owen Evans, “Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run: Postmodern, Posthuman or ‘Post-Theory,’” Studies in European Cinema 1.2 (2004), 105-115. 248 Fatima Naqvi, “The Politics of Contempt and the Ecology of Images: Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu,” in The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginery, 1945 to the Present, Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 235-252; 237. 249 Whether through the ‘window of the world’ of Bazin, or the ‘great signifier’ of Metz, or through the notion of Lacanian notion of suture, each hangs its hat on the shot. 250 David I. Grossvogel, “Haneke: The Coercing of Vision,” Film Quarterly 60.4 (2007), 36-43; 39. 251 See Grossvogel. 252 Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map. 253 Colin McCabe, “Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Philip Rosen, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986 [1976]), 179-197; 188. 254 Ibid. 184. 255 Ibid. 256 Ibid. 188. 257 Galt, 42. 258 Patočka, 63. 259 See e.g. Raymond Bellour, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: An Interview,” Camera Obscura 3/4 (Summer 1979), 70-103. 260 Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 122. 261 Ibid., 123. 262 Zygmunt Bauman, “Individually, Together,” Foreword in Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences, by Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (London: Sage, 2002), xiv-xix; xv.

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263 Ibid., xxii, emphasis in the original. 264 Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, ibid., 5. 265 Ibid. 2. 266 Ibid. 3. 267 Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 105. 268 Ibid. 123. 269 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 270 Thomas Elsaesser, The New German Cinema: a History (London: BFI, 1989). 271 John Hughson, “The ‘Loneliness’ of Angry Young Sportsmen,” Film & History: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 35.2 (2005), 41-48; 41. And see J. Richards, Film and British National Identity: from Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) for a discussion of the Free Cinema movement in Britain. 272 Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 269. 273 Ibid. 274 See Beck, 5. 275 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 30. 276 Luisa Rivi, European Cinema after 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 88. 277 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 8. 278 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, 36. 279 Cf. Ulrich Beck, Power in the Global Age: a New Global Political Economy, Kathleen Cross, trans. (Cambridge; Polity Press, 2005). 280 See Jean Baudrillard, La Société de consummation (Paris : Gallimard, 1997 [1970]). 281 Cf. previous chapters on this problematic. 282 See e.g. Martha Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 283 See e.g. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West, Stephen Kalberg, trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jürgen Habermas, , The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1&2, Thomas McCarthy, trans. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Frederick Lawrence, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), for discussions of rationalization and modernity. 284 In many ways the plot is similar to the subject of the well-received documentary on the French rural school system, Être et avoir, directed by Nicolas Philibert (2002). The problem is in the urbanization of French (and European) society which draws more and more people into the ‘information’ society and, reflecting Balibar’s essential fear, forcing the fundamental, low-wage jobs out to the periphery. 285 Fatima Naqvi, “The Politics of Contempt and the Ecology of Images: Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu,” in The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginery, 1945 to the Present, Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 235-252; 242.

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286 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, 5. 287 See footnote 9 above. 288 See Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 289 Indeed, this is based on the ‘true’ story of Jean-Claude Romand who carried on his charade for 18 years before finally slaughtering his family in cold blood when they discovered the truth and was arrested after he botched his own suicide. 290 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon… 291 See e.g. “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 362-402; and the issue on the cityscape in Wide Angle 19.4 (1997). 292 Beck, along with other sociologists, has long since regarded nature as a social formulation. See Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), especially the chapter “World Risk Society as Cosmopolitan Society? : Ecological Questions in a Framework of Manufactured Uncertainties,” 19-47. 293 Kristin Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Philip Rosen, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 130- 142. 294 According to the European Film Companies Alliance website, national and subnational funding for audiovisual production was the highest in France in 2004 at Euro 523,425.94 compared to the second place Euro 168,509.44 in Germany. <> And the UniFrance website reported 188 million tickets sold in the French box-office in 2006, of which 45% went to French films 295 Cf. David N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988). 296 According to Guy Austin, the cinema du look was championed in France by mainstream cinema publications such as Première and lambasted by the more serious Cahiers du cinema. See Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: an Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 119. 297 Raymond Williams citation... 298 See Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2005). 299 See Fredric Jameson, Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005). 300 See Aaron Sultanik, Film: A Modern Art (Cranbury: Cornwall Books, 1986); or Sean Cubitt The Cinema Effect (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), especially the chapter “Magical Film: The Cut,” 42-69. 301 Tom Gunning, “From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls,” Wide Angle 19.4 (1997), 25-61: “The visual representation of the city remains paradoxical. On the one hand it exists as a festival of visuality, a spectacle of display, a delight to the all-eyes gawkers. But as darkness descends, it unfolds its mysteries and visual understanding becomes elusive” (54). 302 See Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: an Introduction.

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303 Susan Hayward calls this matter of spectacle an aspect of the “French spectacular genre film,” which seeks to compete with Hollywood “through its use of technology as spectacle” (French National Cinema, 299). 304 See André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1962). 305 Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1981), 52. 306 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans., in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), 84- 258; 250. 307 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001); 152. 308 See Dudley Andrew, “Amélie, or Le Fabuleux Destin de Cinéma Français,” Film Quarterly 57.3 (2004), 34-46. 309 Dudley Andrew, 45. 310 See Stephen Heath, on excess and Andrew, op. cit.. 311 Cf. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995). 312 Dudley Andrew writes that this manner of montage “repeatedly reproduces the satisfaction of closure…” (43); and it certainly is a means of controlling the excess of the screen. In this manner it would seem this would fit into the classical analysis which sees the edit as a threat (cf. Oudart, Heath, and others) and the narrative as a smoothing over: “the threat appears so that it can be smoothed over, and it is in that smoothing that we can locate pleasure—in a plentitude which is fractured but only on condition that it will be reset” (Colin McCabe, “Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Philip Rosen, ed. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986]; 179- 197, 187). 313 Andrew draws a deeper visual intertext to French poetic realism. See Andrew, op. cit. 314 See Colin McCabe, “Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Philip Rosen, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) for a quick introduction to this process. 315 Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); see especially his chapter “Risk Society Revisited,” 133-152. 316 See e.g. Etienne Balibar, Monique Chemilier-Gendreau, et al. Sans-papiers : l’archaïsme fatal (Paris : La Découverte, 1999). 317 Fatima Naqvi, “The Politics of Contempt and the Ecology of Images: Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu,” in The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present, Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 235-252; 242. 318 Luisa Rivi, European Cinema after 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 319 See Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority, Alphonso Lingis, trans. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000 [1969]). See also Martin Buber, Ich und Du (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1923). 320 See Bertell Ollmann, Alienation: Marx’s Concept of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), where he writes in reference to Marx and Weber’s

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concept of alienation: “the organic unity of reality has been exchanged for distinct spheres of activity whose interrelations in the social whole can no longer be ascertained” (47). 321 In his magisterial Ali: Angst essen Seele auf (1974), Fassbinder shows the subtle shift of prejudice from Ali to a polish woman as Ali becomes ‘integrated’ into his new family and social structure. 322 See Peter Sloterdijk, Die Verachtung der Massen: Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkampf, 2000), and the references to his work in Naqvi, op. cit. Sloterdijk’s position seems far too reminiscent of discourses that lamented the loss of vertical differentiation from the beginning of the twentieth century. 323 Naqvi, 238-239. 324 Knud Løgstrup, After the Ethical Demand, Susan Dew and Kees van Kooten, trans. (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2002), 26; quoted in Zygmunt Baumann (see citation below), 104. In this sense, mercy shares a similar basis with Levinas’s ethical face-to-face; both exist outside of the rationalizing (and capitalizing) function of reason or understanding. 325 Zygmunt Baumann, The Art of Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 326 See e.g. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in ‘Race,’ Culture and Difference, James Donald et al., eds. (London: Sage, 1992); “Cultural Identity in Question,” in Modernity and Its Futures, Stuart Hall, et al, eds. (Cambridge: Polity, 1993); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004); and for a recent summation of their arguments and the burgeoning academic interest in questions of hybridity, globalization and transculturalism in a critical context see Marwan M. Kraidy, Hybridity, or The Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). 327 Kraidy, Hybridity…, 67. See also Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” Race and Class 36.3 (1995), 1-20. 328 Kraidy, Hybridity…, 65-66. 329 Polona Petek, ““Enabling Collisions: Re-thinking Multiculturalism through Faith Akin’s Gegen die Wand/Head On,” Studies in European Cinema 4.3 (2007), 177-186; 184. 330 Indeed, as Ayşe Çağlar has pointed out, Turks in Germany are now a major consumer group marketed to on a rather large scale. See Ayşe Çağlar, “Mediascapes, Advertisement Industries and Cosmopolitan Transformations: German Turks in Germany,” New German Critique 92 (Spring-Summer 2004), 39-61. 331 See Elizabeth Loentz, “Yiddish, Kanak Sprak, Klezmer, and HipHop: Ethnolect, Minority Culture, Multiculturism, and Stereotype in Germany,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 25.1 (2006), 33-62. 332 The inside joke is that Cahit, hearing that the driver lived in Munich, remarks disparagingly on the driver’s ‘southern’ roots. He is German enough to understand internal cultural differences. 333 Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 334 See Jean Baudrillard, La Société de consommation: ses mythes, ses structures, (Paris : Denoël, 1970). 335 cf. Fatima Naqvi, op. cit.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

John Arrington Woodward

John Arrington Woodward graduated with a Master’s degree in German Studies from Florida State University and decided to pursue a PhD in Humanities in order to continue his study of narrative and its relationship to society, his primary interest, and to continue teaching language, literature and film, his secondary interest. He is world travelled, having spent much of the past ten years in Europe, has spent time in Mauritius, and would love to teach oversees for a large portion of his career. This dissertation will formulate the bulk of his second book on the European public sphere. His first book will deal with second modernity and two European filmmakers, Michael Haneke and Fatih Akin.

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