Fassbinder on the Uncanny
Originally posted by 4inquiries at Fassbinder on the Uncanny
From Burns’ “Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf - a melo Brechtian drama”:
Brecht intended to remove emotional investments (qua familiarity) from theatrical performances because he wanted to keep the audience in a critical state of mind about the things they are watching. The filmmaker Fassbinder, on the other hand, introduced emotions precisely as the object of critique, for he aimed to “give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analysing what he is feeling” (65). In order to make the audience reflect on a wide variety of feelings, Fassbinder drew from Hollywood melodramas while retaining a Brechtian element of alienation in the service of critique, “representing a politicization of Hollywood material” (58). Thus I argue that while Brecht gives us uncanny objects (the alienation of familiar objects) Fassbinder gives us uncanny subjects (the alienation of familiar feelings), which amounts to an alienation of representation itself.
Fassbinder accomplished the melodramatization of Brecht’s alienation effect by combining two popular film factions in Germany, where “the ‘contentist’ faction favoured films evincing a sociological realism and an overt political perspective” and “the ‘sensibilist’ faction, by contrast... had a predilection for films which were informed either by a romantic vision or by a concern with the subject and which, above all else, revealed a ‘new partisanship for images’” (56). Thomas Elsaesser identifies the work of Fassbinder, e.g. Angst essen Seele auf, as both contentist and sensibilist because because it e.g. contributes “to the debate on the subject of immigrant workers” (57). Burns claims that a film of this type “inhabits an intermediary position between the poles of realism and stylisation which fuses the contentist demand for a popular culture with the sensibilist respect for ‘the politics of cinematic language’” (58). As an intermediary position between alienating and suturing the audience, I argue that Fassbinder’s style alienates representation itself, which generalizes Brecht’s uncanny beyond the vacuous “science age” into ages of various affects.
We see Fassbinder’s alienation of representation itself when his films suture and alienate the audience at the same time. Fassbinder uses certain techniques suck the audience in (suture the audience) through familiarity, e.g. the use of cliché, then he exploits the momentum of the audience’s anticipation give them something unexpected, i.e. he “uses cliché in reverse fashion” (66). This doesn’t simply alienate the audience from one representation or another, but gives an anxious indeterminacy to the mediation of representations (e.g. stereotyping), or representation itself. It is not just the object of representation which is split in alienation, but “Fassbinder presents the viewer with a divided self... split characters” (63). Thus we can say that Fassbinder’s audience is the subject qua uncanny, made alienated from its own feelings, for “By confounding stereotypes in this fashion Fassbinder confronts the viewer with his/her own prejudices” (65). Even language as a mediation of representation is parasitized by a certain unfamiliarity, as Fassbinder uses ungrammatical language to defamiliarize communication (e.g. the title of the film Angst essen Seele auf is not conjugated, which is associated with a certain immigrant's speech).
The field of representation itself is torn apart with Fassbinder’s use of “unnatural, extended silence,” “overloaded soundtrack,” and “empty spaces with the visual image” (67). We also see that editing, the cutting-up which sutures the subject, is haunted by Fassbinder’s technique of “foregrounding the transition from one scene to another” (70). Finally, many of Fassbinder’s films lack the “happy ending” of traditional melodramas. This is part of confronting the audience with its prejudice, namely for a certain idealism. Thus “you must think further - what will happen to them with the curtain goes down?” (65).
Good Notes:
Elsaesser’s “four salient features of melodrama as a mode of imagination” (58):
1. “the persistent clash of moral polarities” like good and evil
2. “has to function in personal terms and ‘touches the socio-political only at that point where it triggers the psychic’” (58)
3. “must ‘invest in highly symbolised personages, events and relations’, rendering ordinary situations at an intense level so that the figures of everyday life attain a symbolic projection” (58)
4. “not incompatible with realism; on the contrary, ‘it has power only on the premise of a recognisable, socially constructed world’” (58-59).
From Hollywood melodramas Fassbinder took the theme of “individual sickness as a reflection of social disorder” (59). I insist that when Fassbinder shows us illness as “a physical manifestation of the stress common amongst immigrant workers,” we are not seeing a cinematic trope but science. We know that “patterned, persistent [health] inequities... are due primarily to failed political struggles and power imbalances” because these patterns of inequity can only be explained through social determinants of health, e.g. the effect of the stress of being black in our anti-black world - or e.g. the effect of the poverty related stress - on the immune system (Richard Hofrichter “The Politics of Health Inequities”).
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/35/07879673/0787967335.pdf
Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun
http://youtu.be/p0P_3sDnh44
From Burns’ “Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf - a melo Brechtian drama”:
Brecht intended to remove emotional investments (qua familiarity) from theatrical performances because he wanted to keep the audience in a critical state of mind about the things they are watching. The filmmaker Fassbinder, on the other hand, introduced emotions precisely as the object of critique, for he aimed to “give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analysing what he is feeling” (65). In order to make the audience reflect on a wide variety of feelings, Fassbinder drew from Hollywood melodramas while retaining a Brechtian element of alienation in the service of critique, “representing a politicization of Hollywood material” (58). Thus I argue that while Brecht gives us uncanny objects (the alienation of familiar objects) Fassbinder gives us uncanny subjects (the alienation of familiar feelings), which amounts to an alienation of representation itself.
Fassbinder accomplished the melodramatization of Brecht’s alienation effect by combining two popular film factions in Germany, where “the ‘contentist’ faction favoured films evincing a sociological realism and an overt political perspective” and “the ‘sensibilist’ faction, by contrast... had a predilection for films which were informed either by a romantic vision or by a concern with the subject and which, above all else, revealed a ‘new partisanship for images’” (56). Thomas Elsaesser identifies the work of Fassbinder, e.g. Angst essen Seele auf, as both contentist and sensibilist because because it e.g. contributes “to the debate on the subject of immigrant workers” (57). Burns claims that a film of this type “inhabits an intermediary position between the poles of realism and stylisation which fuses the contentist demand for a popular culture with the sensibilist respect for ‘the politics of cinematic language’” (58). As an intermediary position between alienating and suturing the audience, I argue that Fassbinder’s style alienates representation itself, which generalizes Brecht’s uncanny beyond the vacuous “science age” into ages of various affects.
We see Fassbinder’s alienation of representation itself when his films suture and alienate the audience at the same time. Fassbinder uses certain techniques suck the audience in (suture the audience) through familiarity, e.g. the use of cliché, then he exploits the momentum of the audience’s anticipation give them something unexpected, i.e. he “uses cliché in reverse fashion” (66). This doesn’t simply alienate the audience from one representation or another, but gives an anxious indeterminacy to the mediation of representations (e.g. stereotyping), or representation itself. It is not just the object of representation which is split in alienation, but “Fassbinder presents the viewer with a divided self... split characters” (63). Thus we can say that Fassbinder’s audience is the subject qua uncanny, made alienated from its own feelings, for “By confounding stereotypes in this fashion Fassbinder confronts the viewer with his/her own prejudices” (65). Even language as a mediation of representation is parasitized by a certain unfamiliarity, as Fassbinder uses ungrammatical language to defamiliarize communication (e.g. the title of the film Angst essen Seele auf is not conjugated, which is associated with a certain immigrant's speech).
The field of representation itself is torn apart with Fassbinder’s use of “unnatural, extended silence,” “overloaded soundtrack,” and “empty spaces with the visual image” (67). We also see that editing, the cutting-up which sutures the subject, is haunted by Fassbinder’s technique of “foregrounding the transition from one scene to another” (70). Finally, many of Fassbinder’s films lack the “happy ending” of traditional melodramas. This is part of confronting the audience with its prejudice, namely for a certain idealism. Thus “you must think further - what will happen to them with the curtain goes down?” (65).
Good Notes:
Elsaesser’s “four salient features of melodrama as a mode of imagination” (58):
1. “the persistent clash of moral polarities” like good and evil
2. “has to function in personal terms and ‘touches the socio-political only at that point where it triggers the psychic’” (58)
3. “must ‘invest in highly symbolised personages, events and relations’, rendering ordinary situations at an intense level so that the figures of everyday life attain a symbolic projection” (58)
4. “not incompatible with realism; on the contrary, ‘it has power only on the premise of a recognisable, socially constructed world’” (58-59).
From Hollywood melodramas Fassbinder took the theme of “individual sickness as a reflection of social disorder” (59). I insist that when Fassbinder shows us illness as “a physical manifestation of the stress common amongst immigrant workers,” we are not seeing a cinematic trope but science. We know that “patterned, persistent [health] inequities... are due primarily to failed political struggles and power imbalances” because these patterns of inequity can only be explained through social determinants of health, e.g. the effect of the stress of being black in our anti-black world - or e.g. the effect of the poverty related stress - on the immune system (Richard Hofrichter “The Politics of Health Inequities”).
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/35/07879673/0787967335.pdf
Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun
http://youtu.be/p0P_3sDnh44