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Cinema After FascismThe Passion of Veronika Voss

Cinema After Fascism: The Passion of Veronika Voss [Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s trio of films set in the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany—Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981), and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982)—places us in the ruins of fascism. In addition to physical ruin—which is certainly present, especially in Maria Braun—Fassbinder’s films explore the intangible but no less excruciating ruin of subjectivity. Indeed, it could be said that the project of these films is to create ruin as well as to document it. Fassbinder’s Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD) trilogy constitutes a disconcerting act of historiography: he is meditating on the relationship of his present (the late 1970s and early 1980s) to the multiple “pasts” it has retrospectively constituted—Germany in both the fascist era and the postwar years. Fassbinder “ruins” conventional temporal divisions, refusing to respect any boundaries or demarcations between fascist Germany and the nation that was its successor as he examines the persistence of structures of desire and power. To this damaged historiography is added the ruination of desire and spectatorship. The subject is constituted both as a phantasm of spectacle (a creature of smoke and mirrors) and as an obsessive spectator, with scopophilia as the ruling desire. The self can never be naturalized when its unstable architecture is so obvious: its inadequacy is excruciating.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Cinema After FascismThe Passion of Veronika Voss

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2010
ISBN
978-1-349-28823-6
Pages
133 –155
DOI
10.1057/9780230109742_6
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s trio of films set in the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany—Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981), and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982)—places us in the ruins of fascism. In addition to physical ruin—which is certainly present, especially in Maria Braun—Fassbinder’s films explore the intangible but no less excruciating ruin of subjectivity. Indeed, it could be said that the project of these films is to create ruin as well as to document it. Fassbinder’s Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD) trilogy constitutes a disconcerting act of historiography: he is meditating on the relationship of his present (the late 1970s and early 1980s) to the multiple “pasts” it has retrospectively constituted—Germany in both the fascist era and the postwar years. Fassbinder “ruins” conventional temporal divisions, refusing to respect any boundaries or demarcations between fascist Germany and the nation that was its successor as he examines the persistence of structures of desire and power. To this damaged historiography is added the ruination of desire and spectatorship. The subject is constituted both as a phantasm of spectacle (a creature of smoke and mirrors) and as an obsessive spectator, with scopophilia as the ruling desire. The self can never be naturalized when its unstable architecture is so obvious: its inadequacy is excruciating.]

Published: Oct 9, 2015

Keywords: Movie Theater; Perfect Image; German Culture; Display Case; National Championship

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