The autobiographical turn in Germanophone documentary and experimental film

352 Pages·2014·3.117 MB·English

by  Curtis, Robin;Fenner, Angelica

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here is a widespread notion in the scholarly literature on
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autobiographical nonfiction film that there are unchanging, universal e

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models for the investigation of the self through audiovisual media.
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conTribuTors: Dagmar Brunow, Steve Choe, Robin Curtis, fy
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Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Angelica Fenner, Marcy Goldberg,
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Feng-Mei Heberer, Rembert Hüser, Waltraud Maierhofer,
Christopher Pavsek, Patrik Sjöberg, Carrie Smith-Prei, Anna Stainton.
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is Professor of Theory and Practice of Audiovisual Media
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at the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf, Germany.
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AngelicA fenner is Associate Professor of German and Cinema d
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Studies at the University of Toronto. d d b
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Cover image: Scene from Hans im Glück (2003). Courtesy of Liechti Film Production. n
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Cover design: Frank Gutbrod R EditEd by
Robin CuRtis AngeliCA FenneR
and
The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone
Documentary and Experimental Film
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Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual
Series Editors:
Gerd Gemünden (Dartmouth College)
Johannes von Moltke (University of Michigan)
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The Autobiographical Turn
in Germanophone
Documentary and
Experimental Film
Edited by
Robin Curtis and Angelica Fenner
Rochester, New York
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Copyright © 2014 by the Editors and Contributors
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2014
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-917-7
ISBN-10: 1-57113-917-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The autobiographical turn in germanophone documentary and experimental
film / edited by Robin Curtis and Angelica Fenner.
pages cm — (Screen cultures: German film and the visual)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57113-917-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)—
ISBN 1-57113-917-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Biographical films—Germany—History and criticism. 2. Documentary
films—Germany—History and criticism. 3. Self in motion pictures. I. Curtis,
Robin, 1964– editor. II. Fenner, Angelica, editor.
PN1995.9.B55A98 2014
791.43'65—dc23
2014023844
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Whither Autobiography? The Difficulties of
Saying “I” in the German Context 1
Angelica Fenner and Robin Curtis
I. The Geographies of Self-Inscription
1: “If People Want to Oppress You, They Make You Say ‘I’”:
Hito Steyerl in Conversation 37
Angelica Fenner and Robin Curtis
2: The Impertinence of Saying “I”: Sylvia Schedelbauer’s
Personal Documentaries 52
Christopher Pavsek
3: Geography of a Swiss Body: Peter Liechti’s Hans im Glück 70
Marcy Goldberg
4: Reading Helke Misselwitz’s Winter Adé as
Multivocal Autobiography 87
Anna Stainton
II. Subalterities of Gender, Race, and Nation
5: How Does It Feel to Be Foreign? Negotiating
German Belonging and Transnational Asianness in
Experimental Video 111
Feng-Mei Heberer
6: Frankfurt Canteen: Eva Heldmann’s fremd gehen.
Gespräche mit meiner Freundin 137
Rembert Hüser
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vi  CONTENTS
III. Our Parents, Our Selves:
Families Framed by History
7: Mediated Memories of Migration and the National Visual
Archive: Fatih Akın’s Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren 173
Dagmar Brunow
8: History Runs through the Family: Framing the Nazi Past
in Recent Autobiographical Documentary 194
Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann
9: Clearing Out Family History: Thomas Haemmerli’s
Sieben Mulden und eine Leiche 210
Waltraud Maierhofer and Angelica Fenner
IV. Revisiting Authorship in New German Cinema
10: Reauthoring the Self: Brinkmann’s Zorn 235
Carrie Smith-Prei
11: From Death to Life: Wim Wenders, Autobiography,
and the Natural History of Cinema 255
Steve Choe
12: “Ich bin’s, Fassbinder,” or The Timing of the Self 277
Patrik Sjöberg
Filmography 297
Bibliography 307
Notes on the Contributors 327
Index 331
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Preface
THE IMPETUS FOR THIS VOLUME emerged out of a symposium that
took place in 2008 at the University of Toronto, conceptualized by
Angelica Fenner under the title “Autobiographical Non-Fiction Film:
The German Context” and hosted by the Department of Germanic
Languages & Literatures, with additional funding from the Faculty of
Arts & Sciences, the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies,
and the Cinema Studies Institute. Drawing together ten scholars and
two filmmakers from Germany, including Hito Steyerl, with whom
a memorable interview was also conducted, the event posed a vital
opportunity for culturally contextualizing contemporary trends in per-
sonal filmmaking. Building on this momentum, the ensuing launch of
an edited anthology in collaboration with Robin Curtis, at that time of
the Freie Universität Berlin and now at the University of Düsseldorf,
afforded a venue for showcasing scholarly approaches to theorizing
the autobiographical mode through the dual specificities of medium
and culture.
We would like to thank Jim Walker, editorial director at Camden
House, for his enthusiastic support of the project throughout a gestation
lengthier than with many such volumes, as a result of the cross-cultural
terrain navigated. We would also like to thank research assistants Béla
Jász-Freit and Viola Steiner-Lechner, who compiled the extensive film-
ography, and Christin Bohnke, who assembled the index. Contributors
hailed equally from the European and North American arenas, necessi-
tating nuanced editorial attention to clarity of language, to terminology,
and to the complexities of cultural perspective at various stages of each
manuscript’s evolution. As coeditors collaborating across two different
continents, we also navigated disparate academic calendars as well as dis-
tinct approaches to the editorial process. From these unique conditions, a
multifaceted collection has emerged that foregrounds questions of geog-
raphy, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, family heritage, and not least
of all, historical experience and historiography. These considerations con-
stitute both potentialities and constraints placed on subjectivity, whose
ramifications these essays explore amid the increasing mediatization of the
autobiographical mode.
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viii  PREFACE
Finally, the cover photo, a self-portrait of Swiss filmmaker Peter
Liechti drawn from his film Hans im Glück was provided by and is used
with gracious permission of his production company,1 following his unex-
pected death in April 2014 just as this volume was going to press.
Notes
1 See www.peterliechti.ch.
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Introduction: Whither Autobiography?
The Difficulties of Saying “I” in the
German Context
Angelica Fenner and Robin Curtis
RECENT TRANSFORMATIONS IN AUDIOVISUAL TECHNOLOGIES and rapidly
proliferating sites of reception have brought about an increasing
blurring of the divisions between the private and the public that is highly
relevant to any systematic study of the mediatization of the autobiograph-
ical mode. The impact of this blurring on the ways in which historical
experience and the discourses of historiography are negotiated has only
recently begun to make itself felt in the German context and will doubt-
less become ever more apparent in years to come. Two aspects of this shift
should be highlighted here: first of all, private viewing, whether facilitated
through DVD players in the home environment, clips from films viewed
individually or collectively on the Internet, or through other methods of
“exhibition” and dissemination that depart from the classical commu-
nal setting in the movie theater, can facilitate greater intergenerational
communication—a key component of autobiographical discourse. At
the same time, modes of reception made possible by new medial forms
of presentation and distribution have brought visibility to many films,
both recent and older, that might otherwise have remained inaccessible
and thus perhaps unknown outside of Germany. And yet, despite ever
increasing global circulation enabled through various platforms of digital
exchange, it is important to bear in mind that access to both films and the
discourses they explore is not only determined by virtue of their mate-
rial proximity, on, for instance, a DVD. Films may be physically readily
available but remain nonetheless linguistically or culturally impenetrable,
depending on the viewer’s background knowledge. Thus it is one of the
goals of this volume to foster greater access, physically, culturally, and lin-
guistically, to a body of significant films that not only adumbrate forms of
autobiography unique to the German context but also highlight with rare
insight the challenge implicit in the project of constructing the self via
audiovisual media.
Indeed, within literary theory, the assumption that autobiography is
an easily recognized genre that can be defined and delimited through a
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