Marcel Ophüls' November Days: German reunification as "musical comedy"

Film Quarterly

Volumn 51, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 32-43

  Alter, Nora M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 64249137812     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3697139     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Ophüls as cited by Kevin Jackson in his interview "Just Singin' round the Wall," The Independent, November 9, 1990
2. "Incorporation" in this sense means "to obtain pleasure by making an object penetrate oneself; it means to destroy this object; and it means, by keeping it within oneself, to appropriate the object's qualities." Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1975), 212
3. and Margarethe von Trotta's Das Versprechen (The Promise, 1994)
4. Ophüls in L'Avant-scène du Cinéma 127/128 (July-September, 1972), 10
5. See Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 200-237
6. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), esp. 33, 67, 73, 209-215, 219-222
7. Ophüls publicly admitted in the early 1970s that there is an element of exploitation in all film-making, and of con game in his manner of interviewing in specific. See "A Discussion with Marcel Ophüls," Filmmaker's Newsletter 6 (December 1972)
8. Cited in Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, second ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 245
9. On the film see further James Roy MacBean, "The Sorrow and the Pity: France and Her Political Myths," in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 471-479
10. Le Monde, August 18, 1981
11. At this point Richard M. Barsam asks a pointed question: "Does this song damn Chevalier and, through extension, the French, for avoiding reality? Or is it just another piece of wartime footage reminding us that history is a complex mosaic? Ophüls asks audiences to think for themselves about how others behaved, about how they might behave in the face of a great human challenge." Barsam, Non-Fiction Film: A Critical History, revised and expanded ed. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1992), 348
12. Insdorf first called attention to this audiovisual counterpoint in Indelible Shadows, 245
13. Since in principle virtually anything can be recorded, the constitutive postmodern illusion is also produced that the historical record we access is not merely permanent but total and self-sufficient. For a major analysis of this aspect of postmodernity, among others, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991)
14. The Times, November 11, 1990
15. Ophüls to Jackson, "Just Singin' round the Wall."
16. Hillel Tryster, "Friends, Romans - and Stasi," The Jerusalem Post, July 22, 1991
17. Sheridan Morley, "Too Polite by Half," The Times, November 12, 1990
18. See: Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)
19. The Cinema Book, ed. Pam Cook (London: BFI, 1992), "The Musical," 106-112
20. Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)
21. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)
22. and Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
23. Films alluded to by Ophüls in November Days' mini-history of cinema include: various "documentaries" about "everyday life" in Berlin, including Menschen am Sonntag (written by Billy Wilder, co-directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer, with Fred Zinnemann, 1929)
24. Joseph von Sternberg, The Blue Angel (1930)
25. Ernst Lubitsch, To Be or Not to Be (1942)
26. Bill Nichols notes that "documentary practices" are not merely in the mind of the beholder but are "strictly governed and institutionally bound and determined." Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts of Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 14-15
27. The relation in documentary between narrative voice-over and sound/image track is clarified by Bill Nichols. "Whereas the appearance of a narrator speaking in direct address almost invariably ruptures the diegesis of fictional narrative, it can constitute the 'diegesis' of documentary exposition. Hence, the 'diegesis' cannot be ruptured by the narrator's presence, although it sometimes can be by his absence, by the lack of a logical principle ordering the whole which the narrator usually makes manifest." Nichols, Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 184
28. Thus, throughout November Days, Ophüls can be felt to be present in his very absence at certain moments, even while generally shunning overt voice-over. On the problematic presence in documentary films of bodies, including the filmmaker/narrator's, see Nichols, Representing Reality, 229-266
29. Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills" [1970], in A Barthes Reader, ed. with an introduction by Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 320
30. See Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 1:570-611
31. Time, December 28, 1992, 73
32. On this film, see Judith Mayne, "Female Narration, Women's Cinema: Heike Sanders' The All-Round Reduced Personality/Redupers" [1981/82], in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 380-394
33. and B. Ruby Rich, "She Says, He Says: The Power of the Narrator in Modernist Film Politics" [1983], in Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions, vol. 1: Gender and Representation in New German Cinema, ed. Sandra Frieden, et al. (Providence, RI: Berg, 1993), 143-162
34. Cf. Jackson, "Just Singin' round the Wall."
35. On the importance of this film both in film history and in Dietrich's career, see Geschichte des deutschen Films, ed. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, Hans Helmut Prinzler (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 1993), 95-98
36. See Flinn, Strains of Utopia, esp. 13-17, 24-34, 65-68, 86-87
37. The Cinema Book, 112
38. For a semiotic analysis of the deep anxieties about currency reform that are engraved in the German psyche, particularly as they resurfaced in 1990, see Wolfgang W. Fuchs and Berthold Franke, "Decoding the D-Mark," The American Journal of Semiotics 8:1/2 (1991), 87-99
39. Think, for example, of the grotesque, ostentatious depiction of money at the end of Frank Capra's Its a Wonderful Life (1946)
40. as noted by Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 179-215
41. For data about the role that media played in transmitting the events both before, during and after the "Wende" and a critique, see After the Wall: Broadcasting in Germany, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Tana Wollen (London: BFI, 1991)
42. As Stephen Brockmann has noted, "The mere change from the definite to the indefinite article implied the move from a revolution based on democratic principles to a revolution based on ethnic togetherness, a shift from demos to ethnos." Brockmann, "Introduction: The Reunification Debate," special issue on "German Unification," New German Critique 52 (Winter 1991), 3-30; here 6
43. Michael Hoffman, "The Unity Train," in After the Wall, 66
44. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)
45. For an attempt to develop these terms for film theory and criticism, see my "The Political Im/perceptible in the Essay Film: Farocki's Images of the World and Inscriptions of War," New German Critique 68 (Spring 1996), 165-192
46. It is a Hegelian commonplace of film history, criticism, and theory that an initial representational and narrative mode of response is followed eventually by a more experimental mode which must logically be followed by the need for synthesis. Thus, in feminist film criticism, Laura Mulvey's seminal critique of visual pleasure in Classical Hollywood Cinema ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 1975), with its call for experimental alternatives, is in turn critiqued today for its ascetic, elitist austerity, and confronted with the demand to produce films and responses that include, alongside continued criticism of patriarchy and capitalism, what filmmaker Daniele Huillet calls "sensuality and pleasure [Lust]," and critic Gertrud Koch, explicitly critiquing Mulvey, calls a certain return to the "mimetic." Huillet, "Das Feuer im Innern des Berges" [interview with Helge Heberle and Monika Funke Stern], Frauen und Film 32 (June 1992), 12
47. and Koch, "Exchanging the Gaze: Revisioning Feminist Film Theory," New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985), esp. 144-148. Ophüls' response to the fall of the Wall clearly participates in this general tendency of film history
48. See Stephen Heath, "Narrative Space," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 379-420
49. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 285
50. See Teresa De Lauretis's elaboration of Gombrich's argument in Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 60-62