Memory, History, and Trauma in Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Alexander Kluge, and

Mira Nairs Films

By

Amresh Sinha

A Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Cinema Studies
New York University
September, 2015

Richard Allen

DEDICATION

To My Mother and Liz

ii

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my advisor, Richard Allen, for his valuable advice and helpful suggestions
guiding this project to completion. I would also like to thank committee members Robert Stam
and Dana Polan for their encouragement and support. Special thanks goes to Dudley Andrew for
giving his valuable time to serve as an external advisor to the committee and for inviting me to
the subtitles symposium at Yale University in 2013. And I would also like to express my deep
gratitude to Thomas Elsaesser for joining my committee as an external advisor and for being the
guiding spirit to my work in general. Without all of these committee members it would have
been impossible to successfully complete this work
I would also like to take a moment to thank David Rhodes, President of the School of
Visual Arts, for granting me a sabbatical last year and for his continuing support all through my
teaching career at his school. Special thanks to my friend, Reeves Lehmann, Chair, and Sal
Petrosino, Program Director, in the department of Film and Animation at SVA. I would also like
to thank Bruce Wands, Chair, Computer Art, and Charlie Traub, Chair, Photography, Video, and
Related Media, SVA, for their continuing support. I sincerely thank Cindy Wong, Cynthia Chris,
and Matthew Solomon for their valuable support at the College of Staten Island. I must not
forget Amit Das for providing me some of the best teaching opportunities at NYU along with
Ted Magder in Media, Culture and Communication.
I would like to raise a toast to my friends and interlocutors Thushara Hewage, Antina von
Schnitzler, Enrico Cullen, Angus Loten, and Earle Sebastian. I am deeply indebted to my friend
iii

Delmaur Thompson for his generous help and guidance in formatting the manuscript. I would
also like to take a moment to thank Terence McSweeney for co-editing the Millennium Cinema
book and also to wish him a great success in his further endeavors. I would like to thank my
sister, Pratibha Srivastava, and her husband, Rahul Srivastava, for their love and hospitality
while I stayed at their house in Assam, India, during my sabbatical last year to work on my
dissertation.
I would also like to acknowledge the enthusiastic participations of my undergraduate and
graduate students in my classes that have made my teaching life so much more meaningful.
Finally, I would like to extend my deepest and most sincere heartfelt thanks to the love of
my life, Liz Helfgott, whose care, love, guidance, and devotion have not only shaped the
discourse of my dissertation, but also the very course of life.

iv

ABSTRACT
The thesis, entitled Memory, History, and Trauma in Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Alexander
Kluge, and Mira Nairs Films, addresses a range of issues, questions, and debates exploring the
relationship between History, Memory, and Trauma in the films of Resnais, Marker, Kluge, and
Nair. How does the philosophical discourse (which includes the modernist and postmodernist
discourses) of memory, history, and Trauma take shape in their films? The dissertation aims to
raise questions crucial to the understanding of how cinema (re)works the ideas of history trauma
and memory through representation. What is the nature of this relationship? How does memory
become history when realized through the return of the trauma? The rationale for organizing this
dissertation is to trace the trajectories of these forcesMemory, History and Traumaalways
implicated with each other in the films of these directors.
My effort here is to bring these filmmakers, such as Kluge, Resnais, Marker, and Nair, to
our critical attention and to present their films in a systematic manner in order for us to
appreciate and evaluate the works in a self-reflexive and intertextual manner. The purpose of this
undertaking is to create a field of interest in the early stage of film appreciation by inculcating a
desire to go beyond the luster of linear narrative into the realms of personal and elliptical
storytelling. To remind ourselves what the cinematic medium itself is? The comprehension of the
nature of cinema, both ontologically and epistemologically, is one of main thrusts of this
dissertation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

iii-iv

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: Memory, History, and Trauma in Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Alexander
1 34

Kluge, and Mira Nair

35 52

I.

CHAPTER 1: La Jete and 12 Monkeys: Memory and History at Odds

II.

CHAPTER 2: The Lessons of Hiroshima mon amour: Evasion of History and the
Trauma of Remembering and Forgetting

III.

CHAPTER 3: The History Lessons For and From Kluge: Memory, i.e., National
Identity, Monument, Archive, Women, and the Other

IV.

V.

53 179

180 323

CHAPTER 4: Memories of a Catastrophe: Trauma and the Name in Mira Nairs The
Namesake (2006)

324 349

BIBLIOGRAPHY

350-451.

vi

INTRODUCTION
This dissertation, Memory, History, and Trauma in Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Alexander
Kluge, and Mira Nair, addresses a range of issues, questions, and debates surrounding the
relationship between history and memory in the films of Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Terry
Gilliam, Alexander Kluge, and Mira Nair. How does the philosophical discourse (which includes
the modernist and postmodernist discourses) of memory and history take shape in their films?
The dissertation aims to raise questions crucial to the understanding of how cinema (re)works the
ideas of history and memory through representation. What is the nature of this relationship? Is
there a difference between memories of the past and the past itself? How do individual and social
memories intersect? What do the sites of memory tell us about how events are remembered and
forgotten? How does memory become history? The rationale for organizing this dissertation is to
trace the trajectories of these two forcesMemory and Historyalways at odds with each other,
in the films of these directors.
This dissertation is designed with a view not only to introducing the conceptual and
analytical tools for understanding and appreciating the discourse of memory and history in these
distinguished filmmakers, from France, Germany, Britain, and India, but also to widening our
knowledge of the cinema as such. The dissertation has been conceptualized with a broad range of
meanings. The analyses of the films of these directors I hope will provide valuable insights into
what these exceptionally intellectually oriented directors consider to be the role of the artist and
the nature and the purpose of artistic expression.
My effort here is to bring these great but neglected filmmakers (like Kluge, Resnais, and
1

Marker) by mainstream cinema audience once again to our attention and to present their films in
a systematic manner in order for us to appreciate and evaluate the works in a self-reflexive and
intertextual manner. The purpose of this undertaking is to create a field of interest in the early
stage of film appreciation by inculcating a desire to go beyond the luster of linear narrative into
the realms of personal and elliptical storytelling. It is to remind ourselves what the cinematic
medium itself is. The comprehension of the nature of cinema, both ontologically and
epistemologically, is one of main thrusts of this dissertation. To compare and contrast means to
evaluate and interrogate one in the presence of the other. This is a valuable epistemological tool
for comprehending the nature and being of cinema.
The thesis tries to equip us with the tools to learn how to comprehend the relation
between similarities and differencesto know that comparison involves what is comparable, that
is, the qualities that are compatible, and also what is beyond comparison. Here, I have engaged in
the act of comparing filmmakers and their films by examining two or more films with a view of
discovering resemblances and differences between their objects of study. I have tried to compare
and contrast, for example, Terry Gilliams use of memory in 12 Monkeys (1995)whether it
follows a linear pattern of chronological arrangementand the kind of experimentation carried
out by Marker and Resnais. Films like La Jete (1963) and Hiroshima mon amour (1959) are
especially useful for understanding the Proustian dimension of voluntary and involuntary
memory through the writings of Walter Benjamin. Such an exercise, I believe, will only sharpen
our faculty of reflection and make us more critical and appreciative of the artwork. If the
opposition between memory and history is based upon the distinction of past and present,
2

objective and subjective, private and public, then we must extend this analogy to film studies and
apply this distinction to the genres of fiction and documentary as well.1 Therefore, in this
dissertation, I have paid serious attention to both fiction and nonfiction films. The basic approach
is to focus on one of the fundamental epistemological questions confronting the issue of film and
reality: what cinema means or how meaning is produced in the process of cinematic
representation. What are the tropes and conventions of the organizing principles of cinema that
are so discontinuous in comparison to the way we normally apprehend and experience the actual
world in a space-time continuum? In order to answer those questions, it is essential to map and
analyze the multiple ways that cinema can construct its signifying effects through
shots/editing/mise-en-scne/panning/voiceovers, and also effectsdeep focus, jump cuts,
space/time (flashbacks in Hiroshima mon amour and flash forwards in 12 Monkeys), fades and
dissolves (in La Jete and Hiroshima mon amour), on-screen/off-screen space, etc.
The understanding of the dynamics of social memory, its infrastructure (archives,
museums, libraries, monuments, and other sites of memory), has been taken under consideration
with the mediation of Kluge and Peter Schamonis Brutalitt in Stein (Brutality in Stone,1961),
Resnaiss Toute la mmoire du monde (1956) and Night and Fog (1955), and Markers La Jete.
All these films present a powerful discourse of social and collective memory. Both Hiroshima
mon amour and Night and Fog are Resnaiss examinations of repressed memories at the site of

I have sketched the difference between memory and history through Pierre Nora in my first
chapter. See Pierre Nora, General Introduction: Between Memory and History, Realms of
Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 1, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 3.
3

traumatic history. The discourse of monuments and sites of memory has also been examined in
Kluges and Resnaiss films with respect to the limits of representation.
What can be shown and what cannot be shown in ethical terms when confronted with an
extreme historical occurrence (cf. Claude Lanzmanns Shoah, 1985, a paradigmatic film about
the limits of representation of the Holocaust)? Can trauma and other historical occurrences be
represented in films without violating the biblical injunction of Bilderverbot? Curiously, the
Nazis are rarely at the center in Night and Fog. Resnais focuses on the victims and not the
aggressors, but the Jews are rarely mentioned specifically. In contrast, Kluges first film,
Brutalitt in Stein, is a short, innovative documentary on the Nazi period that rarely mentions the
victims but concentrates on archival newsreel footage, photographs, speeches of Hitler and
Hermann Gring, architectural plans of Albert Speer, the diary of Rudolf Hss, the Commandant
of Auschwitz, and the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide at the site of the Nuremberg rally. I have
provided analysis of Resnaiss Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour, since both films, one
documentary the other fiction, are located at the sites of two of the most devastating historical
traumas of the twentieth century. This is to provoke ourselves to think of history and memory
through suffering in art.2
Why Kluge, Marker/Gilliam, Resnais, and Nair? What is common in their films that bind
them in this eclectic combination? What distinguishes them from each other, and what strikes the
affinity among them? The reason I am proposing these questions has to do with the fact that
these directors have an inherent affinity with each other. Marker and Resnais had already
2

See Harold Schweizer, ed., History and Memory: Suffering and Art (London: Associated
University Presses, 1998).
4

collaborated in the past, on Les statues meurent aussi (1953) and Toute la mmoire du monde.
Their art, visibly marked by a forceful cinematographic criture, dismantles the order of cinema
by rupturing cinematic codes. In their films, particularly in Hiroshima mon amour and La Jete
and also in Letters from Siberia (1957), the visual and the audio fields are open to rupture and
dislocation. Both pay a very high premium to memory and history in their films. The analogy of
memory and film is best articulated by Marker in Sans Soleil: I am writing you all this from
another world, a world of appearances. In a way, the two worlds communicate with each other.
Memory is to one what History is to the other. An impossibility. Legends are born out of the
need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make with their delirium, with their drift. A
moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.
Markers hybrid CD-Rom/film on the history of Okinawa, Level Five (1997), discussed
in the second chapter, has many parallels with Hiroshima mon amour. At one point, the lead
actor, Laura (Catherine Belkhodja), a computer programmer, tells us that she calls her story
Okinawa mon amour. Like his predecessor and collaborator, Marker has many shots that are
normally defined as archival footage, including a tourist bus drive through the streets of
Okinawa. It isshot exactly from the same distance and composition as in Resnaiss film except
the tourist guide here sings a popular song. The visit to the Okinawa museum, walking on the
sites of mass suicides, etc., makes one feels as if we are walking in our memory in the lanes of
Hiroshima mon amour. Without the scenes of Hiroshima appearing on the screen, it appears on
our mental screen, and like in Resnaiss Hiroshima mon amour, where Nevers and Hiroshima
appear side by side, when the wall between the present and past no longer intervenes, we walk
5

with Resnaiss Hiroshima in Markers Okinawa. It becomes both a tribute and a memoir. We are
simultaneously a voyeur and a fellow-traveler. Markers film looks at the archival footage with a
greater degree of reverence and respect than is seen in Resnaiss rather flamboyant disdain for
the same archival footage.
In Germany, Alexander Kluge is regarded both as a major filmmaker and as a major
social theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Many of his films center upon questions
of memory and history.3 His films reject the narrative thread of the conventional cinema of
Hollywood, which follows the official project of logical continuity.4 He reveals the inadequacy
of such projects in confronting the peculiarities of history, especially of German history. In
what could be a statement of Kluges own project, Gabi Teichert remarks in Die Patriotin
(1979), what else is the history of a country but the vastest narrative surface of all? Not one
story but many stories. These stories in his films are neither consistent nor continuous; they are
a vertiginous collage of many fragmented and disrupted stories that are linked together in free
association. Kluges films do not reconstruct the past: they deal with history from the perspective

Amresh Sinha, The Intertwining of Remembering and Forgetting in Alexander Kluges

Films, Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City Media Inc., 2002), p.
332.
4
According to Robert A. Rosenstone, Kluge creates history as a series of disjunctive images
and data, a kind of collage or postmodern pastiche. Looking at the Past in Postliterate Age,
The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, ed. Marcia Landy (New Brunswick, NJ.:
Rutgers University Press, 2001), p.58.
6

of the present.5 In Kluges work, the tension or outright conflict between history and memory
is both necessary and productive.6
Although Kluge is not that well known in the United States, he is undoubtedly one of the
most cerebral filmmakers of all times. Kluge and Marker are perfect interlocutors. Their films
are visibly marked by the critical discourse of memory and history. Markers La Jete, Sans
Soleil, Letters from Siberia, and Cuba Si! (1961) are dossiers of memories culled from the
images captured by Marker in his globetrotting. His films are the other of the cinema, because
their meaning is not located in the image and what follows, the classical montage, but can be
found in what lies between the images, in the gaps and absences of memory otherwise not
represented. Kluge and Marker constantly use voiceover; both speak in their own singular voice,
(substituted through narrators), whereas Kluges gentle voice never loses the pathos of irony. I
have provided critical reflection on the relation between autobiography and history through the
voice in La Jete and in Kluges Die Patriotin. These filmmakers are too close in their filmic
sensibilities to be ignored any longer. Their films provide us with the wherewithal to approach
serious intellectual films in a self-conscious manner.
Harvard-educated Indian filmmaker who makes both the United States and Uganda her
home, has little in common with Kluge, Marker, or Resnais in terms of style and sensibility. On
what basis, then, can she be a part of this eclectic fraternity? Perhaps through marginality, being
on the fringe, she could claim her status as one of them? So the choice of including Nair among

Sinha, The Intertwining of Remembering and Forgetting in Alexander Kluges Films, p. 348.
Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, Introduction, Represntations, no. 26 (Spring
1989): 5.
7
6

the European directors is provocative and perhaps also an anomaly on the surface. Unlike Deepa
Mehtas Earth (1998), adapted from Bapsi Sidhwas novel Ice-Candy-Manwhich features an
intercommunal relationship between a Hindu woman and a Muslim youth situated within a
particular historical moment in the grand narrative of Indian history, the partition of India in
19477 Nairs film, The Namesake, is not historically oriented toward the tragic or glorious
Indian past. Its focus is on a contemporary transnational Indian familys life in suburban
America. Although Nairs previous film, Mississippi Masala (1991), did confront the historical
crisis of the Indian community expelled from Uganda in 1972 by the edicts of Dada Idi Amin, in
general her work fits into what diverse film scholarsincluding Hamid Naficy (accented
cinema), Laura U. Marks, Vijay Mishra, Jigna Desai, and Wimal Dissanayakehave broadly
termed postcolonial cinema, intersecting with the developing themes of diaspora and exile,
migrant, intercultural and interracial, and hybridized non-hegemonic discourses of national
cinemas.8 Her relationship to Indian history is more fluid and contemporaneous than the fixated
imperial nostalgia of the British Raj films of Hollywood or, for instance, Stephen Frears My
Beautiful Launderette (1985), in which India is continually drenched in the nostalgic tears of an
imagined community in the eyes of the exilic immigrant Papa (Roshen Seth), rather than
considered as an actual trace/place of reality. Her films, too, represent a form of memory,
especially in her trilogyMississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding (20010, and The Namesake
(2006)which at times verges on the borders of nostalgia but never without a sense of ironic
7

Manju Jaidka, Engendering History, A Critical Study of Deepa Mehtas Trilogy: Fire, Earth
and Water, (New Delhi: Readworthy Publication Ltd., 2011), p. 26.
8
Sandra Ponzanessi and Marguerite Walter, Introduction, Postcolonial Cinema Studies (New
York: Routledge, 2012), p. 8.
8

distance. Her films are a projection of postcolonial historiographies of marginality and dangerous
supplementarity, encouraging and negotiating complex reading processes.9 I also think that the
politics of translation of the postcolonial experience of marginality into the broader racial
iconography of otherness reflected in the foreignness of the name (Gogol) forms a crucial
relationship to the theme of translation in Hiroshima mon amour.
My selection of Nair is based upon her film The Namesake, adapted from the novel of the
Pulitzer Prizewinning author Jhumpa Lahiri, herself a transplant from Britain (of Indian origin)
to the United States. Despite her rather successful career in Hollywood, where she has made
some well-known commercial films like Vanity Fair (2004) and Amelia (2009), Nair has been
essentially known and refers to herself as a diasporic filmmaker. Before she embarked on her
career in Hollywood, she made an award-winning documentary on the plight of Indian cabaret
dancers (India Cabaret, 1985) and a neorealist film about the dangerous and tough life of street
kids in Bombay (Salaam Bombay!, 1988), her first feature, which won the prestigious Camra
dOr at Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award. Mira Nair is also the
only Indian filmmaker to date, since Satyajit Ray, to win the Golden Lion at Venice,
for Monsoon Wedding, a film about NRIs (Non Resident Indians) converging in Delhi for a
lavish Punjabi wedding. Her most successful film in America so far has been her second
feature, Mississippi Masala, which deals with the politics of multiculturalism, specifically an
interracial heterosexual romance between a local black man and an Indian darky in the small
town of Greenwood, Mississippi, resulting in racial intoleranceshifted from the usual black-

Ibid., p. 12.
9

white to black-brown dichotomy10among Indian immigrants against the African-American

community. A great deal of Indianness has to deal with memory and nostalgia. Nobody in India
has felt an iota of Indianness, because the term itself is an invention of a diasporic consciousness.
The role of memory has hardly ever been properly explored in the postcolonial text. The
desire to continuously situate the problem of Indianness out of Indiainto a space where its
existence simply becomes a perpetual longing mediated by distanceis crucial in the
construction of this narrative of Indianness. Unlike the lack of the trauma theory, Indianness is
created out of a resistance to this lack-ness, the absence; Indianness forms a continuity amongst
the Indians with a world that they carry within in the various popular cultural forms, mainly
through Bollywood films and popular songs, religious and social functions, especially weddings,
and cricket matches. Indianness is not conceived out of distress and plight. It wasnt experienced
in the same manner by the Indian-Caribbeans, or Indian-Africans; it is a relatively new term
coined when migration from India became consensual and voluntary and also predominantly
middle-class, those who were looking for a better education and a more prosperous life abroad.
There is no trauma that separates the 1980s immigrants to the United States, which cannot be
said about the trauma that separated the people of the divided nation, the partition of India that
resulted in the dislocation and the deaths of millions of Indians, a subject, as I mentioned above,
explored in Deepa Mehtas Earth.

10

Zeenat Saleh, Mississippi Masala: A Case Study in Forced Hybridity, India and the
Diasporic Imagination, Texts collected by. Rita Christian & Judith Misrahi-Barak, Srie
PoCopages, Presses Universitaires de la Mditerrane, 2011, p. 373.
10

So what is the concept of Indianness that emerges from a theoretical consideration of

Mira Nairs films? In order to do that, first, I will have to define what I mean by Indianness. Like
any conceptual category, Indianness cannot be defined as a singular phenomenon, a single
characteristic, which can be applied to a host of things. It is a slippery and constantly evolving
sense of identity whose basic notion includes some form of Indianness as in food, clothing,
speech, books, movies, songs, etc. Gogol in The Namesake realizes this call of Indianness at the
moment of his fathers death, in the absence of the logos he turns to the ontological premise of
his existence. He turns to Hinduism in order to recover from his hybridize identity the real
ontological core of his being in the form of mourning. Gogols reincarnation as an Indian son
and his devotion to the filial piety resembles a desire to relocate an absent history from within
the world that has always been waiting (eternal India) to be reclaimed as a lost paradise.
Chapter One: La Jete and 12 Monkeys: Memory and History at Odds11
The first chapter of the dissertation is devoted to a comparative reading of Chris Markers
La Jete and Terry Gilliams 12 Monkeys. La Jete is the inspiration and model for Gilliams 12
Monkeys, as it is mentioned the credits. In this chapter I have tried to show that La Jete, as a
short science-fiction film, manages to evoke the very idea of memory as something that is prior
to its integration and transformation into consciousness as a narrative of remembrance. I suggest
in the chapter that it remains frozen at the threshold of consciousness as a trace of an
unconscious assimilation. The film begins with a memory and ends with the death of the

11

La Jete and 12 Monkeys: Memory and History at Odds in The Memory Effect: The
Remediation of Memory in Film and Literature ed. Russell J.A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty
(Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), pp. 175-193.
11

narrative whose meaning sinks into oblivion. Here we witness the fruition of an idea that seems
to imply that memory is anterior to consciousness. The structures of temporality, that is, the
distinction of the past and of the present, history and memory, in La Jete and 12 Monkeys are at
odds with each other. I have tried to differentiate the various levels at which memory works in
these two films in relation to the dialectics of time. Gilliams 12 Monkeys narrative belongs to a
notion of time that is formulated on the distinction of the linear distribution of time along a
clear past/present axis.12 In La Jete, as far as the nature of memory is concerned, it is Proustian
in dimension, thereby closer to mmoire involontaire, the personal side of the memory. In 12
Monkeys, on the other hand, the nature of memory appears to correspond to a totalizing and
universalizing form of memory that resembles history in a public sense. Thus we have a
division of memory and history on the basis of public and private, a distinction that is further
explored in greater depth in my third chapter on Kluge.
The public or historical discourse of memory in La Jete, also constituted poetically
through a polyphony of photographic/acoustic signs, is inaugurated through the presence of the
natural history museum, where we find the protagonists joyously framed with the petrified
animals and stuffed, suspended birds (the latter a clear tribute to Hitchcocks 1963 The Birds and
1960 Psycho). The museum as memory is a recurring theme stretching from Resnaiss fortress
of memory13 in Toute la mmoire du monde to La Jetes subterranean Palais de Chiallot,
reappearing in Madeleines somnambulistic sance in front of Carlottas portrait in the Palace of
12

D. N. Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference & Film

Theory (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 106.
13
See an illuminating analysis of Toute la mmoire du monde by Dudley Andrew in What
Cinema Is! (Malden, MA, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2010), p. 46.
12

the Legion of Honor in Vertigo (1958), to Rivas compulsive visits to the Hiroshima National
Museum, to the ruins of Nuremberg monument in Brutality in Stone. Citations of Hitchcock
abound in La Jete, including of the famous cross-section of a tall tree in the Redwood forest in
Vertigo (the scene is repeated in 12 Monkeys in a theater featuring a triple feature of Hitchcocks
Vertigo, The Birds and 1955 Strangers on a Train, recalling Markers jesting remarkbut not
without a hint of tragic pathosthat those who have not seen Vertigo do not deserve to live).
My reading of La Jete is also mediated by both Jacques Le Goffs and Pierre Noras
writing on history and memory. It is an attempt to distinguish past from the present, a present (in
the film) that is more or less defined by a single instant or point of time,14 which becomes the
privileged duration that cannot be accounted for in experience or for that matter in history. The
meaning of the present in history is paradoxical due to its very nature because it problematizes
the very discourse of time that history can only apprehend as that which is related to the future.
In order to understand properly the events of the presenting phenomenon, history must return15
to another time to make connections between that which was and that which is. In La Jete, the
time of the present is traced from its origin in the past to the present by reversing the order that
determines the relationship between the present and the past. This reversal of order institutes the
basis of memory that favors the orbit of time that moves from the inside to the outside. History,
on the other hand, moves from the outside into the inside. For instance, Le Goffs example of the
contemporary history of France begins in a historical sense from the period of the French

14

Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 1
15
Le Goff, History and Memory, p. viii.
13

Revolution in 1789. Similarly, contemporary American history can be traced from the Civil War
of the 1860s (1861-1865). In Germany, contemporary history begins after the zero hour, after
World War II (discussed in Chapter Three).
The memory of contemporary events, like any specific moment, defines itself as
containing information that lacks any specification in time; although it may be about a particular
moment in time in which the memory is evoked in order to recall a particular event. What is
lacking precisely in memory is, however, the connection to time that is experienced but cannot
be fully perceived as in, for example, waiting for a train or watching the sunset, when time is
virtually imprinted in its visual dimension on the horizon above the mountain or the sea. Times
visual significance is reflected in the motion of natural phenomenon such as light and shadow
but its effect is less visible in a continuous form. This is one of the reasons why we never seem
to perceive the continuous changes in our appearances until we have a way to measure the
difference with the help of everyday data in some visual or representational form, for instance, as
in the difference in weight or height or loss of hair. We do not really experience the appearance
of one more wrinkle on our skin or even the gain of an ounce, but its existence remains a proven
entity despite our lack of any awareness of the changes in our body in somatic terms. La Jete
does not offer a linguistic difference between the dichotomy of past and the present; instead it
follows the psychological component of that distinction. The consistency of time consists in its
inconsistencies. No time is alike, yet time is shared equally by a multitude in its diversity. It is
not that time changes, but rather it changes all substance, mutable or immutable, organic or
inorganic, living or dead. We say or feel that time moves fast or slow depending on the
14

circumstance (fast when we are having fun, slow when we are bored), when, in fact, it remains
outside the categories of mind. History is not created as a study of time but is related to time as a
condition of the possibility of knowledge to understand time through arbitrary division of events
that have a deep relationship with the societys collective consciousness. History is a science of
consciousness of time that has been subjected to periodization with resonance in the collective
human consciousness as shared horizon. According to Piaget, to understand time for a child is to
liberate oneself from the present, which is precisely what Marker has in mind in his tale of a
childhood fantasy in La Jete.16 To understand time is essentially to demonstrate reversibility.
The childs fixation on his memory constitutes the attempt to create its own personal world
outside the socially and historically mediated world of the collective memory. By constituting its
own private world of memory the child has a personal world that is not constituted by tradition
and education. In other words, the external factors that render the collective memory through
tradition and education no longer apply to the childs memory that is constituted by the inner
world of the childs experience. La Jetes temporality is produced by an inner consciousness of
a child to escape the present, over which it has little power or mastery, in order to recover the
past that it can control through the agency or the power of its memory.
Chapter Two
The Lessons of Hiroshima mon amour: Evasion of History and the Trauma of Remembering
and Forgetting
16

Jean Piaget, Le development de la notion de temps che lenfant.1946, p. 274. Cited in Le

Goff, p. xx. In On the uses and disadvantages of history for life, Nietzsche also takes up the
analogy of the child, who, like the beasts grazing in the field, plays in blissful blindness
between the hedges of past and future. Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 61.
15

The distinction between public and private also forms an integral part of Hiroshima mon amours
narrative structure in relation to the public or historical mode of recollection in Hiroshima as
opposed to Nevers, where memory assumes a fictional but private mode of remembrance. The
division between history and fiction is not necessarily an external or arbitrary division; it is also
an internal cleft that reveals the ironic mode of historiography that bears the traces of linguistic
signs. Both history and fiction (story) converge in the French word histoire as a mode of
historiography. Taking a cue from Hayden White, Lynn Higgins explains the contradictory
discourse of histoire that points to history as the event it purports to describe in a factual and
objective manner (as it happened), and the rhetorical mode of the story telling that always
already partakes in the present thus inflecting it with the consciousness of the historian whose
relationship to his/her own autobiographical self (in Diltheys sense)17 becomes paramount.
These two functions reappear in the linguistic distinction between nonc and nonciation and
apply to literature as a relationship between rcit and histoire (Grard Genette) or discours and
histoire (Benveniste), or fable and sujet (Tzvetan Todorov and the Russian Formalists) and
between Jean Ricardous literal dimension (or narration) and referential dimension (or fiction) of
a text.18 Similarly, the historian, White believes, performs essentially a poetic act, a

17

For a role of autobiographical remembering as a starting point for the relationship between
history and memory in Dilthey, see Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 34-35.
18
Lynn A. Higgins, Myth and Textual Autonomy: From Psychoanalysis to Historiography,
Hiroshima mon amour, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and Representation of
History in Postwar France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 26-27.
16

prefiguration for the disclosure of the linguistic ground on which a given idea of the history is
constituted.19
Hiroshima mon amour is a film about bearing witness to a memory that is constituted by
the organization of past events in the framework of literary tropes. This chapter has been divided
into five acts: History, Trauma, Memory, Forgetting, and Transmemoration, mirroring the fiveact structure of the film. These acts do not follow Resnaiss chronological division of the
plotline; instead they are motivated by conceptual and theoretical underpinnings. The first act
consists of a discourse of history, to be precise, the evasion of history. In this part, I have argued
that Resnais-Duras have neglected the actual history of Hiroshima, the tragic loss of hundreds
and thousands of peoples lives and a total destruction of an entire city, by adhering to a paltry
and trite interracial love story that simply does not do justice to the immense suffering wrought
upon the Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have also read Hiroshima mon amour
as an allegory of French history during the Vichy France. My main contention is that Hiroshima
mon amour, on the one hand, hides the French collaboration with the Nazis by showing the
moral innocence of the young girl who has fallen in love with a Nazi soldier. In a way Resnais
manages to both condemn and rescue the girl by making her the victim. Naomi Greene
eloquently puts it: behind the repressed memories of the female protagonist lie those of a
country given to amnesia.20

19

Hayden White, Prefeace, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century

Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. x, xi.
20
Naomi Greene, Alain Resnais, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French
Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 42.
17

After making Night and Foga film I discuss for its crucial omission of naming Jews as
victims of the Holocaust, tying it with Kluges lack of mourning for the Jews in Die Patriotin
Resnais apparently felt that building a monument to the dead wasnt sufficient for him, for he
had to think of the present and the future. Critics and scholars, mostly Europeans and Americans,
have mostly accepted this explanation that Resnaiss decision to abandon the documentary form
in Hiroshima mon amour has artistic merit for its intrinsic auteur sensibilities (with a few
exceptions like Robert Jay Lifton and Donald Ritchie). It was an intentional and a rational
decision, both ethically and morally defensible, to refuse any direct representation, through a
technological medium of reproduction, of the horrors of Hiroshima, which was essentially
unrepresentable and beyond the limits of human understanding due to the magnitude of the
catastrophe. This is an argument that has been endlessly repeated but now sounds a bit archaic.
Hiroshima mon amour is not a historical film, despite its historic setting. History plays some
role, according Lynn Higgins, but not a familiar one.21 An unfamiliar history in a familiar
terrain elicits a paradoxical narrative of remembering and forgetting in a place where forgetting
intercedes and rescues memory from being assimilated mimetically into a history of catastrophe.
Speaking of mimesis, the familiar site of Casablanca is implicated in a subversive manner.22 The
presence of Casablanca, the name of the bar where the penultimate encounter between Riva and
Okada occurs, needs to be put in a proper historical perspective. Why were Hiroshima and
21

Higgins, p. 20.
See Michael Cahn, Subversive Mimesis: Theodore W. Adorno and the modern impasse of
critique, Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Mihai Spariosu,
(Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984), pp. 27-64. Also see Amresh Sinha,
Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory, In Practice: Adorno, Critical Theory and Cultural
Studies, eds. Briel, Holger and Andreas Kramer (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2001), pp. 145-159.
18
22

Nagasaki subjected to the first atomic attacks against a defenseless civilian population when the
war was already winding down and the Japanese surrender was inevitable? This question has
been a part of a controversy that requires hardly any scrutiny in the presence of overwhelming
evidence.23
One of my concerns has been to question the films apparent equation of a fictionalized
narrative of personal grief and the collective tragedy. Hiroshima mon amours opening
sequence, the Preface of the movie, begins with a haunting sequence of Hiroshimas ashencovered bodies, covered in radioactive ash, two entwined bodies slowly merging through a series
of close-up dissolves into a sweaty erotic drench, the bodies coming back to life. Laughter breaks
out, the couple laugh. A film about Hiroshima that begins with sex and laughter, before a word is
said, was not, unsurprisingly, well-received in Japan.
The spectator is exposed to a barrage of images, from newsreel to documentary footage
of the destruction of Hiroshima, reconstruction films, images from the visit to the peace museum,
photographs of lacerated bodies, deformed limbs, and burnt bodies of children, hair fallen from
skulls, shadows stuck to stone due to intense radioactive heat that rose to ten-thousand degrees,
like a thousand suns, in Rivas testimony to the unknown interlocutor. She remembers these
images as she recalls them to him, for us, to the world. Yet this testimony, given on behalf of a
remembering, testifies to its authenticity and truth, through enunciation and proclamationI
23

See Hiroshimas Shadow Writings on the denial of history & the Smithsonian controversy, ed.
Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschulz (Stony Creek: Connecticut: Pamphleteers Press, 1998) for
convincingly debunking the American justifications for the bombings, especially the
Introduction. Also see Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1965) and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the
Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
19

have seen everything. Everythingis a remembering that, ironically, initiates its own
forgetting, which the spectator witnesses in the film later on. Have we ruptured the
responsibility that comes from witnessing in this barrage of images, asks Zelizer in her important
book Forgetting to Remember: Holocaust Memory Through the Cameras Eye.24 Is the barrage
of snapshots of atrocity desensitizing us to the pain of others? She continues, Remembering to
forget suggests that at times this may be the casethe act of bearing witnessruptures the
connection between representation and responsibility.25 While this book has shown how
photography helps us to remember, it also helps us to remember to forget. And forgetting
through images is an idea with a long history, discussed by critics as wide-ranging as Roland
Barthes, Marguerite Duras, and Susan Sontag.26 Andreas Huyssen makes similar observation:
Our fascination with the past, however, may be less than satisfying, for the impulse to
memorialize events like the Holocaust may actually spring from an opposite and equal desire to
forget them, making our attempts to remember an effort to divest ourselves of the obligation to
remember.27
To remember is to forget, as everything is nothing. To accuse others is to hide ones own
crime. This is a line of argument with a long lineage in Barthes, Duras, Sontag, and Blanchot.
The desire to remember, to monumentalize the sufferings of others in some ways, points to a
desire to absolve oneself from the responsibility of remembering or realizing the pain of others.
24

Barbie Zelizer, Forgetting to Remember: Holocaust Memory Through the Cameras Eye
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).
25
Ibid., p. 203.
26
Ibid. Also see Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003).
27
Andreas Huyssen, Monument and Memory in a Post-modern Eye, Yale Journal of Criticism,
Issue 6, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 254. Cited in Zelizer, p. 202.
20

Lifton accuses Resnais and Duras of evading history, but does he claim the responsibility of his
own when he interviewed the Hibakushas (survivors of the nuclear holocaust) and proclaimed
his findings as psychic numbing? It is easy to blame others for the crimes to which we also
bear direct or indirect responsibility. We are not here to accuse or share the pain of others but to
bear responsibility prior to taking a stand as a witness. Murders have been committed, atrocities
have mounted in the age of genocidesthe twentieth centurytenfold more than ever; we are
all the children of the same century that has committed unheard-of crimes, some in the name of
humanity and others in the name of justice. But who takes the responsibility? We live in a culture
that seeks justice while normalizing injustice at every step. This seems to be the reason why
Okada cannot bear the signs of a painful remembering, for he knows that this form of
remembering is a direct road to forgetting. By embalming in images others pain we have left it
for generations to see without knowing that the pain has nothing to do with its duplication. That
does not mean that crimes against humanity should not be prosecuted, but certainly not by
assuming our innocence as the starting point. The crime against the other is the crime not against
the self. We cannot mirror ourselves in the image of the other, and if we do, we see a reflection
in which the other is loved in a narcissistic fashion. That is the reason that when people want
immigrants to assimilate, they want their own reflectionthe true distorted image of the self in
the otherinstead of being reflected by the other (see my discourse of transnational politics in
Chapter Four). Duras and Resnais protect us from this great narcissistic oblivion that captivates
us so fully that we respond to the image as the real. Okada knows the pitfall of this narcissistic
love too well to condone it, to allow the pain of others from being taken and repossessed as our
21

own, as belonging to the great bond of humanity. No living can claim the absolute alterity of the
dead for its own identity. Okada will not allow the memory of the dead to be consecrated into a
discourse, in photos and monuments. He will not allow the dead to be abrogated by these futile
attempts to capture them in raptures of memory. He would then rather teach Riva how to forget
than to remember, for remembering is a sure sign of forgetting.
Here I have tried to establish that the theme of forgetting is already introduced in the
ashen-covered bodies and the archival footage that accompanies, but it is introduced as a secret
and is sheltered within the labyrinth of archioviolithic images.28 The archive is a place of
monumental forgetting, as monuments are themselves nothing but an emblem of oblivion.
Memory is not only custodian of all archives but also controls all that is political. (The theme of
the archive ties in with the discourse archivization of the fairy tales, a Derridean-Focauldian take,
in my discussion of Kluges Die Patriotin in the next chapter). The question of whether
forgetting is truly a betrayal of the past, the bond that one feels deeply within oneself, or whether
forgetting is a constructive way of preserving the self from an entrapmententombment to the
pastis part of a discourse to which I have devoted many pages. The past seizes the present and
holds its sway over it where the future cannot usher anything new. The despair and melancholia,
to which the self in the lack of mourning finds itself tethered, cannot survive the relentless
pursuit of memory that remains constant and anchored in the very core of the patients being.

28

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1996), n. 1, p. 4.
22

The scandal of Hiroshima is not limited to what Michael Roth calls the force of forgetting.29
Behind this scandal of personal forgetting lies a greater and more sinister forgetting, a collective
forgetting of a nation, to confront its own scandalous past, a theme that I pursue rather critically
in the initial part of the chapter. But I also see Resniass point in evoking forgetting as a way to
get out of the dilemma of ethical inaction and spiritual capitulation to moral inertia.
The healing power of forgetting is brought in here through Nietzsche, in the third part of
the chapter, in order to cure not only personal malaise but also the malady of history. A nation
also requires to heal from the excessive burden of history that immobilizes its moral and ethical
being; but what happened in France and also in Germany, as we find in Kluge, Syberberg, and
Edgar Reitz (see Chapter Three), was a refusal to mourn the past and honor the memory of the
victims of twelve million people brutally murdered during World War II. The obfuscation of real
memory of the Vichy period, the lack of mourning for the Jewish victims in both France and
Germany, the lack of concern to explore the nature and history of anti-Semitism in these
countries, is a real disappointment in the works of Resnais and Kluge.
The second act constitutes the trauma and madness of the heroine, which takes the story
back to the French city of Nevers during the World War II. Here I provide a critique of Cathy
Caruths essay by suggesting that the cause of trauma or PTSD is erroneously attributed to
Rivas psychological condition. Caruth argues that Rivas trauma surfaces in Hiroshima as a
repressed memory, whereas I make a distinction between Freuds theory of the unconscious and

29

Michael S. Roth, Hiroshima mon Amour: You Must Remember This, Revisioning History:
Film and the Construction of a New Past, ed. Robert A, Rosenstone (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1995), p. 94.
23

the Proustian dimension of the involuntary memory. I also object to Caruths formulation of the
Freudian theory of belatedness as a symptom of trauma that lacks history. Deleuze, too, rejects
the psychological model to explain the memory world of Hiroshima mon amour to which I have
also referred in this section. I have also argued that Rivas insanity, the defiant and radical nature
of its subversive quality, has a political dimension that has often been not recognized by critics
of the film.
The third act is devoted to the recovery of Rivas memory through a simulation of
psychoanalytical therapy session conducted in the riverside caf. Much has been written about
the discourse of the museum and the touristic curiosity that often masquerades as a genuine
experience. This section is devoted to Hiroshima as an archetypal place that issues the injunction
to never forget. Here I examine the complexity of Rivas assertion that she had seen
everything and Okadas repeated negation that she has seen nothing through many different
possible angles. My reading of memory, in this section, is deeply influenced by the Jungianinspired rhetoric of Michael Perlmans extraordinarily powerful book Imaginal Memory and the
Place of Hiroshima,30 privileging place over site (lieu) (the latter is the privileged trope of Noras
consecration of memory) and emphasizing that the archetypal significance of Hiroshima will
endure through the vicissitudes of public concern about nuclear weapons in our collective
memory even if they were abolished.31 Hiroshima, thus, also stands for the lack in the
Kojvian sense of history that has been articulated primarily in reference to Hegels Master and

30

Michael Perlman, The Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima (Albany: State of New
York University, 1988)
31
Ibid.
24

Slave dialectic of self-consciousness.32 This lack, the epicenter, the hollow and the hallowed
ground where the bomb fell, right in the very heart of Hiroshima, now no longer serves as a
reminder of an imminent threat as it once did (its now both a monument and symbol of pride for
the Japanese) in the fifties during the nuclear arms race between the superpowers. Hiroshima is,
then, first a place of remembering over anything else. A remembering that is ostensibly not
directed as much to the past as to the future.
Riva is the city of Nevers, allegorically speaking, that breaks down repeatedly under the
insistent gaze of Hiroshima. Hiroshima stalks, just like Okada, and follows Riva (Nevers)
everywhere, for Nevers to give up its unbearable trauma by facing the truth of what Hiroshima
(the trauma of all traumas) signifies. Hiroshima, first of all, is a place of healing, a place of
therapeutic value. Its a place for the sacrifice, a sacrifice of personal traumas for the peace and
restoration of the soul, a therapeutic journey through the streets of Hiroshima spills the demons
from the dark interiors into radiant monologues till they no longer remember what was already
forgotten.
The fourth act is devoted to a critique of the dialectics of remembering and forgetting.
The first forgetting, after the madness in Nevers, has the characteristics of the natural process of
forgetting through which memory arisesas Pierre Nora says, dont we forget to remember, or
remember to forget?, echoing Paul de Man channeling Hegel and finally Blanchotalways in

32

Alexandre Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of

Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980),
25

the present, as in the arising of the past, in its always already present form.33 So Neverss
forgetting is remembered in the presence or present of Hiroshima, in the place of memory or the
memory of place, as Edward Casey would say.34
For Riva, telling the story of the past in ethical terms is associated with the betrayal of the
past. History, in that sense, by narrativizing the past betrays the past by rendering it into a
tellable tale. Is there a place in the ethics of memory where history cannot be seen as a betrayal
of the canonical pledge that the past will remain intact? It implies a forgetting of the past in
which her memory is seized by history, as Nora would have it.35 She is caught up in her history
as her memory is relinquished by aligning itself to forgettingthat is always already of the past.
Forgetting comes from the future back into the past where the latters traces are removed from
the unconscious of the mystic-pad,36 from the imprint of the wax seal on the soul,37 to ensure that
the passage to the present is gained with the least obstruction in ones life, which I would term as
the restorative function of forgetting, a homoeopathic treatment, which treats the disease with its
own double, a poison for poison, a pharmakon that is both the disease and its cure. A forgetting
33

Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire, Representations, no. 26
(Spring 1989): 8.
34
Edward Casey, Keeping the Past in Mind, in Descriptions, ed. Don Ihde and Hugh J.
Silverman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985): pp. 35-36.
35
Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mmoire, Representations 26
(Spring 1989): 13.
36
The first technical archive of unconscious as Derrida suggests is the mystic pad, Wunderblock,
that Freud found to represent in the external prosthetic form the working of the unconscious.
Freud and the Scene of Writing, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 196-231. Sigmund Freud, Freud, A Note upon the
Mystic Writing Pad (1925), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), vol. 19, p. 229-232.
37
Plato, Theaetetus (191e), trans. Benjamin Jowett (Rockville, Maryland: Serenity Publishers
LLC, 2009).
26

that forgets is the ultimate forgetting, as in the Nietzschean beast that simply forgets to answer
the cause of its own forgetting, i.e., happiness.38 Rivas forgetting has not yet reached the
monumental forgetting of the Nietzschean history as of yet, but it includes the formulas and
potion of the druid cure that will cure her from the seizure or seize of history that has taken
hold of her on Hiroshimas soil.
Freud, too, talks of forgetting as a means to protect the psyche from the numbing pain
that can be inflicted upon it by the frayage39 (breaching) of memorys lacerating traces. In Freud,
forgetting is a form of memory that generates repetition. This has much relevance to Rivas
relationship to Okada, which appears to have been initiated by her forgetting of the previous
affair with the German soldier. The repetition consists not only in the pattern of the affairs (of
which she had many, as she recounts) but in repeating the affair with a man who was also once
an enemy of her nation. This repetition compulsion is a symptomatology of disassociation of
memory. In Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through, Freud remarks that forgetting
consists mostly of a falling away of the links between various ideas, a failure to draw conclusion,

38

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the uses and the disadvantages of history for life, Untimely
Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 60-61.
39
Derrida in Freud and the Scene of Writing translates the German word Bahnung
(pathbreaking) as Frayage. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1978), n. 2, p. 329.
27

an isolating of certain memories.40 In Rivas case, this forgetting of the causal links,
associations, between various strands of ideas of her life, took place when her memory of her
lover was so forcefully isolated in her isolation in the cave that it became thoroughly
internalized and repressed in her unconscious. Two important categories of Freudian ethics,
memory and repression, are brought in to further explore Caruths critique.
The fifth and last act I have named as Transmemoration, a term borrowed from Kyo
Maclears splendid book Beclouded Visions.41 The prefix Trans- (which means to go across,
border crossing) performs a transcendence of memory into a wider realm of associations not
limited to the remembering of the past only. This section is devoted to the reading of ethical
translation of memory in the name of the other. In the last scene of the film, both protagonists
address each other by the name: Hiroshima and Nevers. I trace the trauma of the name through
Benjamins essay The Task of the Translator by suggesting that the name functions as a transit,
as in transition, between remembering and forgetting. I draw the conclusion that by calling each
other by their individual names as allegorical fiction, the film performs the redemption of
memory through languageas mode of translationin its radical alterity.
Chapter Three
40

Cited in Rose Lucas, Narratives, terminable and interminable: literature, psychoanalysis and
Margaret Atwoods Alias Grace in History on the Couch: Essays in History and
Psychoanalysis, ed. Joy Damousi and Robert Raynolds (Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 2003), p. 178. A slightly modified version of the text appears in Freuds 1914 essay,
Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953),
p. 147. It reads: forgetting is mostly restricted to dissolving thoughtconnections, failing to draw
the right conclusions and isolating memories.
41
Beclouded Vision: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Art of Witness (New York: SUNY Press,
1998), p. 154.
28

The History Lessons For and From Kluge: Memory, i.e., National Identity, Monument,
Archive, Women, and the Other42
Allow me to cite a paragraph of my chapter on Alexander Kluge:
Alexander Kluge, one of the finest and most sophisticated of all filmmakers in Germany, the
architect and the strategist of the new German cinema, has remaineddespite his ongoing
struggle with the German government over subsidizing independent film and television
programs for building infrastructure towards the construction of a public spherethe least
receptive to the question of the non-German in his films. 43 For a filmmaker of Kluges
stature, with his political, aesthetical and legal expertise, a friend of Adorno, how can he
and that is my crucial questionnot address himself to the other, the non-German? Such
lapses cannot be attributed surely to lack of hindsight. Such omissions, unconscionable and
deliberatein terms of the obligation to hear the other, not from one film but from all his
films, the responsibility to face the other, the others face if he/she can have one in
Germanypoints to a systematic exclusion of the other from his politics of cinema. This is
a deeply disturbing aspect of his filmic praxis, which, instead of raising the question of the
other, seems to be more preoccupied with the question of other Germany.
Kluges oeuvre is not only devoid of references to the other but has a few more blind spots that are
as disturbing. Eric Rentschler held a panel at the MLA conference in the early nineties entitled
German Film: National Identity and Multicultural Experience, for which I wrote an unpublished
response that I think is relevant to our topic here: I wonder whether the title, the headline, the
heading, German Film: National Identity and Multicultural Experience, under which the fate of
the non-German, multicultural experiences will gather, or will be gathered, in the presence of
German national identity, evokes, points to, as in heading towards, another bad example? Is it a

42

Parts of this chapters were published as The Intertwining of Memory and History in
Alexander Kluges Films, Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City
Media Inc., 2002), pp. 383-401and as Same Old New German Cinema, Film-Philosophy, vol.
9, no, 15, March 2005
Website: http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol9-2005/n15sinha
43
Kluges television program perhaps makes a small contribution to an oppositional public
sphere, but its engagement with contemporary and historical social issues is distanced, abstract,
and peripheral. Lutz, p. 198.
29

mere coincidence that the question of nation and identity recalls a memory of the past whose
identity reminds us of the consequences of where the politics of identification led to? These initial
hesitations on my part, the fear and trembling before any heading towards the title that heads and
presides over in the name of national identity, must itself at this time, unlike the other time, the
time of the other, be the recipient of its identity, its title, its name as Germany, as a nation from the
others. Do I read an obligation, a responsibility, a debt of a nation to its other? Or shall I say the
question of national identity once again vindicates the primacy and the privilege of a voice, a voice
of unity, united by the urgings of a lack of national identity that it must acquire, in order to sit at the
head of the table of a unified Europe? For what kind of mathematical equation is required to
produce the total sum of a national identity through the logarithm of nation and identity? Isnt it
already extremely difficult (Es ist namlich Schwer, deutsche Geschichte in eine patriotische
Fassung zu bringen, Kluge) to conceptualize, given the status of German history, over which the
fighting seems to never stop, that it is possible to combine the irreducible nature of identity with that
of reproducibility of a nation. That is, identity is constitutive of difference, a difference not from
others only but a difference from and with itself; nation, on the other hand, is governed primarily by
the logic of self-interest, by the rhetoric of self-preservation. Thus it is my objection to any such
bond that passes over the inherent difference between nation and identity and falsely identifies it
under the name of national identity.

30

For example, the question of a German national identity, for Nietzsche, as he deliberated in
the second Untimely Meditation,44 consists mainly of two propositions: (1) Germany does not exist.
(2) Germany does not exist because it has no proper being.45 By proper being I, of course, mean an
identity. In some sense what is determined in the name of Germany, a nation, a people, a culture, is
always already in relation to what does not exist in it, the internal necessities of a proper being that
constitutes the true identity of a nation. The lack of such internal dynamics forces us to recognize
the extent to which the German identity is filled with the philosophy, religion, politics, and culture
of non-German people.46 From Hegel to Heidegger, from Hlderlin to Schiller, the language of
German self-consciousness is constructed on the models of the Greeks. Unlike the Greeks, the
exemplary example of political and spiritual unity of a people, the Germans are a perfect example of
an absolute non-people. Every attempt to discover the true identity of a German people is marked
by the discovery of others, of what others have discovered, which prompted Nietzsche to say that
there are more historians than history in Germany.
The medieval knight of the New German Cinema, Werner Herzog, has trotted the globe
several times to come face to face with his other, and each time one thought he brought himself into
close proximity to a North American Indian, or an aborigine from Australia, or the children in the
sands of Sahara desert, one found that instead of paying attention to the staring faces he was staring
beyond those faces into the infinite space of nature, or searching for the cosmic limits, as

44

Friedrich Nietzche, On the uses and disadvantages of history for life, Untimely Meditations,
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 59-123.
45
Philippe Locue-Labarthe, History and Mimesis, Looking After Nietzsche: Interdisciplinary
Encounters with Merleau-Ponty, ed. Lawrence A. Rickels (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), p. 216.
46
Ibid.
31

Deleuze calls it.47 Ulrike Ottinger, after her four-and-a-half-hour documentary on Beijing, has
focused on making feminist films on the women of Mongolian tribes. Wim Wenders, the
wunderkind, like most of his predecessors found his inspiration in Hollywood films, a self-professed
filmmaker who claims in arguably his best film, Kings of the Road (1976), that Yanks have
colonized our subconscious. What he expressed was not very different from what Adorno and
Horkheimer have been persistently talking about before him about the culture industry.48 The
difference between Adornos and Horkheimers critique of culture industry and Wenders comment
on Hollywood can be understood as a difference between a negative critique and a lack of negative
critique. Wenderss criticism does not stem from a negation of Hollywood; on the contrary, the
criticism is an absolute affirmation of the Hollywood film industry to which he later on develops a
crucial love-hate relationship. In any case, the point I am advancing here is that Germans have
always practiced their culture in relation to some other culture, as Nietzsche argues in Untimely
Meditations, a culture to which they are attracted and therefore want to identify with. And wouldnt
it be better if somehow they could claim the other culture as their own? One must admire in Kluge
this great resistance toward the attraction for the other. Kluge is not only one of the least known
authors in Germany; he is also the least known German filmmaker in America.
In 1990, Goethe House organized a retrospective of Kluges films, for which he made his
first public appearance in North America. He has kept himself away from the temptations of the big
bad films of Hollywood, and consequently has concentrated most of his time making films, writing
47

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2; The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 74.
48
Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: The Seabury Press, 1972), pp. 120-167.
32

books, and fighting for changes in government laws for German cinema. Kluges interest, however,
is not German films as such, but actually the very history of cinema and its representation. That is
what constitutes his revolutionary praxis of film theories that are best exemplified in his films.
Kluge is a filmmaker who makes films not because he does not like films but because the films
he likes are not made by anyone else. So he makes them himself. This activity takes him very
close to how Benjamin once described the condition of being a writer: Writers are really people
who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with books which
they could buy but do not like.49 Kluges film are two things one and the same time. They are
films and they are not films. They are films in the sense that they are projected on a screen and they
normally run for some time with moving pictures and they normally have more than one story even
in his shorter ones. They are not films in the sense that his films are themselves an example of his
theoretical writings on films, which have more in common with literary methods, especially the
essayistic form, than filmic form (if there is one?).
In this chapter on Kluges films the emphasis is on the relationship of memory with
history, archive/documentary and fiction, the problematic of the identity of a nation that finds
lacking a positive articulation of its history amongst the people. The chapter also establishes the
critical significance of the experience (Erfahrung) in Kluges filmography. My attempt here is
to investigate the question of memory, which is of utmost importance for Kluges discourse
about Germanys disastrous history, which he often designates as a catastrophe. Whether his
conception of memory invariably assists a discourse of history that becomes a real and tangible
49

Walter Benjamin, Unpacking my Library, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1978), p. 61.
33

entity that can be recovered as well as distorted by inscribing a certain validity to the existence of
the past, or whether he succeeds in rupturing the fatal consequences of a traumatic history by
counterposing or redefining memorys relation to its own history, remains a question. Both
Benjamin and Kluge oppose the linear model of historiography that presents history in its
contemporary form as the relation to the past. Both prefer the model of history that is based on
the collective experience of the masses that has been mimetically handed over to generations
through traditional means. Both prefer the storyteller above the chronicler.
The first part of the chapter traces the historical circumstances that led to the emergence of
the New German Cinema at the 1962 Oberhausen Film Festival under Kluges leadership. I
examine the American cultural and economic hegemony during the reconstruction period over the
German film industry, which basically dismantled it, followed by the economic, social, and
political circumstances in the sixties and the seventies that prepared the conditions for the Autoren
Cinema to be fully developed in West Germany. The concept of Autoren Kino was defined by
Kluge in the Oberhausen manifesto as freedom from the conventions of the industry and from
commercial interference from the establishment, hence it was conceived markedly differently
from its French counterpart of Auteur Theory.50 This section covers the rise and fall of the New
German Cinema and Kluges significant role as a lobbyist for obtaining subsidies from the
Interior Ministry of the federal government to finance films through the Kuratorium Junger
Duetscher Film, founded in 1965, which led to the financing of some of the most well-known
films of the postwar generation that included Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders. Kluge would
50

For an excellent collection of essays on Auteur theory, see Theories of Authorship: A Reader,
ed. John Caughie (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
34

later abandon the project of the New German Cinema, after making The Assault of the Present
on the Rest of Time in 1985, for a lucrative career in television. A critique of Kluges
interventionist politics in the public sphere of the new media, cable and satellite television ends
this section.
Later sections cover the discourse of the public sphere and the archive, especially the
fairy tales, in Kluges films and his critical essays and books with Oskar Negt. Habermass
widely popular book on the public sphere, during the student protest movement, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere,51was challenged by Negt and Kluge in their book Public
Sphere and Experience.52 The authors provided a critique of the bourgeois public sphere, the
model advanced and critiqued by Habermas as refeudalization of the public sphere, by
developing a middle level theory, based on the context of Marxist analysis of society, which took
into account the transforming nature of capitalist production and the everyday social experience
in the form of, what they referred to as, the proletariat public sphere. Here I also subject Kluge
and Negts reading and interpretation of Grimms fairy tales, and in Die Patriotin, to Marxist
analysis through the writings of Jack Zipes and Fredric Jameson. Other interlocutors are Miriam
Hansen on the public sphere, Benjamin on the redemption of history, Adorno on the culture
industry, Foucault and Derrida on the archive, Thomas Elsaesser on Freudian parapraxis, Anton
Kaes on history, Eric Rentschler on lack of mourning and the Holocaust, Theodore Fiedler on

51

Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
52
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of
Bourgeois Public Sphere, trans. Peter Lebyani, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993).
35

Brutalitt in Stein, Peter Lutz on Kluges television career and postmodernism, and Caryl Flinn
on representation of women.
With Kluges feature film Die Patriotin, I have explored in depth the theme of memory
and mourning in German history from a variety of perspectives, including the question of
national identity, which Kluge seeks to re-inscribe into the history of Germany as a nation that
came under assault in 1933 when the Hitlers National Socialist Party came into power. But in
his zest to overcome the persistence of history of the Nazi period by mourning all of the dead of
the Reich, Kluge makes a blunder by equating the dead Nazi soldiers with the victims of the
Holocaust. Kluge also came under attack by feminists in West Germany after the release of
Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, 1973), which was widely
perceived as an attack on the pro-abortion movement in West Germany in the early seventies. I
have provided a detailed analysis of the feminist criticism, which is not restricted to the abovementioned film. A streak of patriarchal misogyny persists in almost all of his films, which I have
documented in full detail. My chapter ends with an overall summary of Kluges historiographical
project, with its marked affinity with Benjamins philosophy of history, linked to the
storyteller. Kluge as a modern historian of Germanys disastrous history, the archivist of its
pain and suffering accumulated in the fairy tales, in the end appears closer to the backward
looking angel of history that Benjamin found so comforting in Klees painting and was in his
possession for twenty years before his suicide in the Spanish border town of Portbou, where his
grave still exists and a monument is dedicated to him on the Mediterranean sea (which I visited a
few years ago). Kluges films form an ongoing dialogue with the memory of the German past, all
36

its past and not just the aberration of the Nazi era, to redeem the present that he finds so difficult
in the context of the given history of Germany. But Like Gabi Teichert, Kluge is ever so hopeful,
even when the object he seeks has just disappeared from his sight, like the word Deutschland
from the screen in the last shot of Die Patriotin.
Chapter Four:
Memories of a Catastrophe: Trauma and the Name in Mira Nairs The Namesake
Ethnic, national, and racial boundaries are transgressed in Hiroshima mon amour by a specular
violence internal to the mise en abme structure of the film. The shock of the interracial
relationship of Hiroshima is transferred to the amorous/traitorous relationship with the enemy
in Nevers, thus shifting the dynamics of the spectatorial violencethe external hegemonic gaze
of white spectators, for whom the shock of watching an openly physical sexual relationship
between a French woman and a Japanese man was more scandalous, and perhaps more titillating,
than the French womans sexual relationship with her German lover/enemy in the pastfrom the
bodies of the spectacle of history into the memory (i.e., psychology) of the trauma. But in Mira
Nairs films interracial violence is constitutive of identity politics, where the color black is still
mediated by internalized whiteness, that is, it looks at oneself as the other, in the image
(specular) of the Other of the immigrants pre- and postcolonial history, where traces of what
Shohat and Stam call the deformative past still continue in the present.53
Where Durass script erases the differences of race, color, and ethnicity in the broader
mix of the occidental typology, Nairs Mississippi Masala sharpens the racial polarization by
53

Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media
(New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 40.
37

going deeper than epidermal cells into the cultural, historical, and national prejudices that exist in
all classes and nationalities of immigrants. The Indians do not find solidarity with the blacks,
though both groups are victims of racial violence by whitesslavery in one case and colonialism
in anotherbut instead identify with the whites (surrendering to the hegemonic forces of
assimilation),54 who would rather send them back to the reservation. Such paradoxical
identification remainsone can here faintly discern the spectacle of Hegels Master-Slave
dialectics behind the faadea concern in Nairs politics of hybridity and multiculturalism, the
space of in-betweenness, which takes on a rather caustic flavor (masala) in relation to the
American culture in The Namesake.
The politics of transnationalism and the discursiveness of Indianness as a category of
foreignness are thus a part of the discussion in this chapter. Indianness or an ontico-identitarian
concept is a performative concept that has overdetermined a number of radical cultural politics of
gender and sexuality dragged into postcolonial discourse. Indianness is the essence of all that
cannot be represented in a visible form, but it lurks as a sign of all that signifies of a continuity of
cultural space wherever Indians are found. Like the Jews, Indians too are bound by a common
origin of their history and mythology that cannot be excluded from their experience of the
contemporary world. In that sense, like all nationalities and ethnicities, Indians experience the
world framed by the horizon of its ontological dimension.
Ontologizing is a project of legitimization. It is a gesture by which an essentialism occurs
in the mode of difference. Our culture is not different than yours. You have your pedophiles and

54

Ibid., p. 376.
38

you have your homosexuals, so do we (here I am specifically referring to Monsoon Wedding). So

how are we so different from you? Yes, we are different. Look at our culture; its varied and
complex, just like yours. But, yet, we are not different. In a way, Mira Nair is making an
argument for cultural hegemony that seeks validation by resembling itself in the other.
But it is not only the politics of transnationalism and the ontology of racism that governs the
discourse of memory and history in The Namesake, but also the trauma of the name. I have
followed the theme of memory, trauma, and the name from the previous chapter and put them
into another light in relation to the transnational politics of first- and second-generation Indian
immigrants on American soil in the last chapter.
In this chapter, I explore the complex nexus between memory, trauma, desire, and the
name in the Indian diaspora in the United States. It is my contention that the significance of the
relationship between the name and memory cannot be exaggerated in the context of this film.
Through a complex analysis of the significance of Gogols name as the sine qua non of
remembering, the chapter introduces us to a trajectory in film and cultural studies that has been
rarely traversed. The inseparability of the name from its identity is the crux of my thesis here,
which I have mediated through the works of Hegel, Benjamin, and Derrida. The name Gogol
responds, answers to, in the memory of the name, in the absence of the self. It is in that sense, in
its essence, that the name signifies an exteriority, an outside, which resists being dialectically
absorbed by the interiority of recollection. Gogol becomes an exterior sign, tekhn, of
remembering the trauma, both inside and outside of its textual significance, in the allegory of a
father and son relationship, exemplified in the context of literary genealogy between Gogol and
39

Dostoyevsky, the latter acknowledging the debt of his literary father by declaring the often
repeated mantra in the film: We all came out of Gogols Overcoat. I also believe that a film
like The Namesake must also be interrogated from a politicalthe politics of diaspora and
transnationalism, the intergenerational conflictas well as a philosophical and an ethical
perspective, focusing on the bond between name and memory, between memory and trauma.55

CHAPTER 1

55

The above description is an excerpt from the Introduction of the anthology that Terence
McSweeney and I co-wrote in Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film (New York:
Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 8.
40

La Jete and 12 Monkeys: Memory and History at Odds56

Memory is to one what History is to the other.
Chris Marker in Sans Soliel
In this chapter I intend to provide a comparative reading of Chris Markers La Jete and Terry
Gilliams 12 Monkeys (1995), which mentions La Jete in the credits as an inspiration.57 It is not
only undoubtedly a homage to the memory of La Jete, but it also a tribute to the memory of a
memoryfor La Jete evokes nothing but the very act of a memory frozen at the threshold of
consciousness, the latter being the occasion for the transformation of its remembrance into
history. The image that haunts the protagonist, who remains unnamed in the photo-roman of La
Jete, is also the death of the narrative that begins with a memory. Here we witness the fruition
of an idea that seems to imply that memory is anterior to consciousness. Even its temporality is
sort of conceived in the future anterior tense, which makes it an impossible film of an
undecidable origin.58 The structures of temporality in La Jete and 12 Monkeys are at odds with
each other.59 In this chapter, I try to distinguish a set of features that in relation to the dialectics

56

This chapter is a revised version of the article published in The Memory Effect: The
Remediation of Memory in Film and Literature, eds. Russell J.A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty
(Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), pp. 175-193.
57
According to Terry Gilliam, in an interview on Channel Four on BBC, 12 Monkeyswasn't
going to be a remake of La Jete it was going to be inspired by it. La Jete is the Acorn, in a
sense, and 12 Monkeys is the Oak, and they are both finite things and one did become the other.
58
The Overlook Film Encyclopedia - Science Fiction,
http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~b2506017/sf/3.htm (accessed on March 21, 2007).
59
Contrary to my assertion, which will unfold later, that La Jete avoids the trap of linear
storytelling, both Catherine Lupton and Alain J. -J. Cohen in her book and his article respectively
advance the opposite view. They both claim that in La Jete a linear narrative movement can be
perceived through the means of classical norms (fades, dissolves, cuts, etc.) of editing despite the
absence of movement in and between images in all but one shot. See Catherine Lupton, Chris
41

of time brings about different modes of inscribing the passages of memory in these two films. It
appears that Terry Gilliams 12 Monkeys adheres all through the narrative to a conception of
time that can best be described as linear, as continuous, and, in line with Hollywoods penchant
for continuity editing, i.e., seamless flow of the narrative without any apparent disjuncture.
Whereas in La Jete, on the other hand, as David Rodowick suggests, the image of time is no
longer reduced to the thread of chronology where present, past, and future are aligned on a
continuum (emphasis mine).60 In a deconstructive reading of Gilliams film, the ostensible
trajectory of temporality is hewn to this conception of linearity, whose co-extensive presence is
perpetually subjected to the authority of narration. In some sense, the role of memory is eclipsed
by the presence of narrative, which relies on the history of La Jete as a film of exemplary status.
In 1966, reviewer Ernest Callenbach in Film Quarterly, called La Jete a film of heartbreaking nostalgianostalgia for ordinary life, the ordinary loves, of our present.61 Chris
Marker made La Jete in 1961. It is a photo-roman, or else a cin-roman, a science fiction short
film, just about 29 minutes or so (400 shots), which has since its inception captivated the film
viewing public in all parts of the world. La Jete tells the story of a man (Davos Hanich) who is
obsessed with the memory of a womans face he once saw as a child at the jetty of Orly Airport,
just before he witnessed the murder of a man. This is a post-apocalyptic dystopian tale of the

Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Press, 2005), p. 91; and Alain J. J. Cohen,
12 Monkeys, Vertigo and La Jete, Postmodern Mythologies and Cult Film, New Revue of
Film and Television Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 2003):150.
60
D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p.
4.
61
Ernest Callenbach, La Jete, Film Quarterly. vol. XIX, no. 2 (Winter 1965 1966): 50.
42

Third World War after the destruction of Paris.62 The survivors of the nuclear holocaust are
driven underground, below the Palais de Chaillot, where they are ruled by a band of tyrannical
German-speaking scientists, who are desperately seeking a way out from the radioactive
impasse.63 The scientists or torturers conduct terrifying experiments in time travel to find
remedy in the future to appease the wrongdoing of the past. They search for amongst the
survivors who have some semblance of the past still intact in their minds which can serve as an
anchor point for launching them into their past. The idea is to project emissaries into time, to
call the past and the future to the aid of the present.64 The man we spoke of earlier is selected
because of his strong memory of the girl (Hlne Chatelain) he still loves. I must add, since we
know, that memory is selective, but, in this case, the protagonist is selected because of his
memory. The man is sent to the past a number of times as the experiments continue; initially
briefly then progressively longer as his sojourn in the past seems to garner enough success. He
makes contact with the girl from his memory, and soon he spends longer and longer periods with
her present which is also his past, for he comes from the future. His journey to this past becomes

62

Memory is indebted to the ruin, the fall, which accomplishes it. Robert Smith, Derrida
and Autobiography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 164.
63
The historical significance of the location of the prisoners camp in La Jete under the ruins of
Palais de Chaillot is a reminder of the fact that it was once used as a storage space for Henri
Langlois Cinmathque Franaise. Lupton, p. 94. The role of archives and museums and their
relation to memory is perhaps best summed by Marker in the film: the museum that is perhaps
his memory, and a great deal of the film takes place in a natural history museum. The
subterranean cavern of the underworld dwellers has also its analogy in Platos cave. See Sander
Lee. Platonic Themes in Chris Markers La Jete, Senses of Cinema, Issue 4, March 2000.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/4/jetee.html (accessed March 21, 2007).
64
I have throughout this essay used the script of La Jete reproduced from, Chris Marker. La
Jete: Cine-Roman (New York: Zone Books, 1992), the book is out of print, from the following
website: http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/lajette.txt (accessed March 24, 2007).
43

more frequent and his relationship with the girl grows into a solid love affair. As soon as the
realization occurs that he is in love with her, the experiment is discontinued and he is asked to
return to future defended better than the past.65
Before he surrenders himself to the men of future who offer him a possibility of escape,
he asks their permission to visit the girl for the last time.66 When he arrives at the jetty of the
Orly Airport he realizes that the girl, who he had seen at the airport and whose image has been
etched indelibly in his memory, is the same girl of his childhood memory (memory as
recognition, as iteration) and as he runs towards her to warn her of the impending death he is
shot by a man who had accompanied him from the future. It was his own death that he had
witnessed in the past which had come to fulfill its prophecy in the future.67 The moral of the

65

In La Jete, there is a prohibition to provide an image of the future. The future, after the
destruction of WWIII, appears only as the ruins of the present: shots of the destruction of Arc de
Triomphe and Notre Dame. There is no futuristic panorama that the camera captures. The
destruction of the present suffices to picture the future, but the future itself as a sign that comes
only after the present is fully negated, for it never makes the show. The voyage to the future is
summed up with rare discretion in a few shots, a network of abstract lines reminiscent of Henri
Michaux sketches; and in its evocation of the future itself, the film is carefully imprecise, both
realistic and unrealistic. Gilles Jacob, Chris Marker and the Mutants, Sight and Sound, vol.
35, no. 4 (Autumn 1966): 166.
66
For a very interesting reading of the implications of this escape offered to him by the men of
future from a Platonic idealistic perspective, see Lee, Platonic Themes in Chris Markers La
Jete.
67
Here, as in Proust, the precondition of time travel is revealed to be the end of time (): the
protagonist has pre-experienced his own death; or, rather, the entire film can be seen as the
unfolding of the contents of the moment of death, in which memory ranges through time in
search of a way out of the present moment of imminent demise, only to return tohaving
failedto that deferred moment (). Paul Caotes, Chris Marker and the Cinema as Time
Machine, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 14 (1987): 309. I will take the Proustian element of
memory in La Jete later in this essay.
44

story is pronounced by the narrator in the last of shot of the film that depicts the protagonists
death: There was no way to escape Time.68
12 Monkeys, like La Jete, is also a science fiction film of time-traveling set in the
subterranean depths of Philadelphia in 2035, where the entire population has taken refuge after a
deadly virus released in 1996 that wiped out most of the population of the earth. The film
actually deals with an existential crisis of a prisoner James Cole (Bruce Willis), a prisoner, like
his predecessor in La Jete, who is also haunted by a recurring image from his primordial past of
witnessing the shooting of a man at an airport terminal. His strong attachment to this single
source of a traumatized past makes him an eligible candidate for time travel which he undertakes
under the strict supervision of a group of scientists, the rulers of the dystopian underworld. His
mission is to find the cause of the outbreak of the deadly virus in 1996 and the possible remedy.
His journey into the past brings him in contact with Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the leader of a
gang that calls itself the army of the 12 Monkeys. In his many visits to the surface, Cole kidnaps,
befriends, and then falls in love with a psychiatrist, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), who has
written a book on the Cassandra complex (a premonition of future disaster coupled with an
uncanny helplessness to prevent it from occurring). The rest of the film involves a complex

68

The concept of time in La Jete is conceived on the basis of singularity because of its
iterability in death, a singular and unique event whose repetition is nonetheless realizable in the
time (that is, first) of death as the death (that is, last) of time. Thus Derrida intones, each time
its first and only chance. Consequently, each time is the last. Jacques Derrida, Preface,
Politics of Friendship, trans. Georges Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. x. On a different tune,
Jean-Louis Schefer postulate a theory that the death of the protagonist in La Jete marks the
occasion of a reconciliation or a coincidence of time and images. Jean-Louis Schefer, On La
Jete, Passages de l'image (Barcelona: Fundacio Caixa de Pensions, 1991), p. 102. The article
is also available on the following website: http://mason.gmu.edu/~psmith5/jetee.html.
45

narrative of time travel in which Coles ultimate realization of his obsessive past comes to a full
circle of Cassandra like prophecy in the future (his own death and the subsequent death of the
mankind).
What follows after these two brief synopses here is a critical and comparative reading of
the two above-mentioned films along with a disavowal of the premise of the review of 12
Monkeys in Sight and Sound, in which the reviewer, rather puzzlingly states that any comparison
between La Jete and 12 Monkeys based upon originality and statureseems particularly
unnecessary.69 My task is further complicated by the fact that Marker himself has expressed in
an interview published in Film Comment in 2003in a rather truly gracious manner, what one
would expect from a director to his fellow-directora desire that the two films should not be
compared on accounts of merit. Terrys [Gilliam] imagination is rich enough that theres no
need to play with comparisons. Certainly, for me 12 Monkeys is a magnificent film (there are
people who think they are flattering me by saying otherwise [including yours truly] that La
Jete is much betterthe world is a strange place).70 I have a great admiration for Markers
sentiment about the whole thing, but, I am not necessarily convinced by his assertion that we are
merely trying to flatter him. La Jete, in my opinion, is, undoubtedly, a far more complex film
about memory and time than 12 Monkeys.

69

The reviewer states that although the standard response to remakes is to complain about their
lack of originality and stature in comparison with their predecessors, a knee-jerk protest against
all imitations of Chris Markers time-travelling story La Jete seems particularly unnecessary.
Philip Strick, Sight and Sound, vol. 6, no. 4, (April 1996): 56.
70
Marker Direct, Film Comment, Vol. 39, No. 3 (May/June 2003): 40.
46

La Jete plays with different meanings of the French word Jete. In French, the transitive
verb jeter means to throw, fling, cast.71 Jeter un cri signifies to utter a cry, which obviously
would be difficult to register in a freeze frame. Jete in French also means jetty, pier, which
both extends into the sea and also simultaneously holds it at a bay: it functions as a breakwater,
a wall designed to break the continual pounding of sea waves.72 The protagonist is not only
thrown or cast into the flow of time, like a projectile, but, not ironically, his destiny also seems to
be intricately linked to the projection of the film, which gives movement and thus the film a
semblance of life.73 Then another wave of Time washes over him and takes him back to the
future from which he is continuously trying to escape through the obscure path of his memory
which clings to a single image that stands like a breakwater, Jete, against the waves of
Time.
History and Memory
Critics of La Jete have not yet provided a satisfactory explanation for the crucial
distinction between the past and the present. And its significance cannot be exaggerated,
especially since the relation of memory and history hinges precisely upon the differentiation of
past and present. As Jacques Le Goff contends, recent, naive trends seem virtually to identify
history with memory, and even give preference in some sense to memory, on the ground that it is
71

Here I am indebted to Bruce Kawin, Time and Stasis in La Jete, Film Quarterly, vol.
XXXVI, n. 1, (Fall 1982): 16, and Sean Cridland, In the Twinkling of an Eye: Nietzschean
Undercurrents in Terry Gilliams 12 Monkeys, Film and Philosophy, vol. III, (1996): 130, for
their analyses of the different nuances of the French word Jete.
72
Cridland, p. 130.
73
As the film moves through the projector, the images become present or kinetic (the root of
cinema); they give the impression of happening now, which is the time of projection (jeter
is the root of projector, to project a film). Ibid.
47

more authentic, truer than history, which is presumed to be artificial, and above all,
manipulative of memory.74 But why stop here? Why not search its source, its origin in
etymology, history, archaeology, and so on. Does it surprise that the ancient Greek goddess of
memory, Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, was also the mother of history? Let's
investigate the genealogy further.
Etymologically speaking, the story of history (in Romance languages and in English)
begins with Greek historie, in the Ionian dialect. It has its roots in the Indo-European widweid,
see. Both the Sanskrit vettas, witness, and the Greek istor, a witness in the sense of one who
sees are also etymologically related tells Le Goff.75 This conception of vision, he goes on to
say, as the essential source of knowledge leads to the idea that istor, the one who sees, is also
the one who knows; istorein, in ancient Greek, means to seek to know, to inform oneself.76
He concludes by saying that Istorie is thus inquiry.77 In John Aytos Dictionary of Word
Origin history denotes simply knowledge.78 I follow his script here: From hstor was derived
hstora, knowledge obtained by inquiry, hence written account of ones inquiries, narrative,
history. English language acquired it via Latin historia and first used it for narrative fiction
as well as account of actual events in the past. The Latin historia, account of events,
narrative, history, is also the source of English history and story. It had been used for
picture, and may have also denoted a row of pictures in the form stained glass windows or
74

, Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. xi.
75
Ibid., p. 101.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid., p. 102.
78
John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990), p. 282.
48

statues, telling a story, which filled an entire wall between floor and ceiling at a given level of a
building.
Historia already seems to anticipate in its primordiality the spectacle of a film projection.
Where can we find a better historical example of film projection in a theater than this word
historia, especially in a time when its meaning wasnt yet invented? It is only after the
seventeenth century or so that the meaning of history is more or less confined to accounts of
actual events and, consequently, story to narrative fiction. There are further implications.
For social historians, like Le Goff, the relationship between memory and history is already
perfectly expressed in a sentiment like this: memory is the raw material of history and the
discipline of history nourishes memory in turn.79 What it establishes is a connection between
history and memory that the historians must take into account in their project of historiography,
in other words, the history of history. They must remember to go back to the source of memory,
whether mental, oral or written, in order to distinguish it from the project of historical writings as
contemporary, which is to say, that the past must be viewed from the perspective of the present.
For the historical work to continue in an objective manner the opposition between past and
present ought to be regarded as both fundamental and essential, because the activity of
memory and history is founded on [precisely] this distinction.80 If the opposition between
memory and history is based upon the distinction of past and present, objective and subjective,
private and public, then we must also extend this analogy to film studies and apply this
distinction to the genres of fiction and documentary as well. But there is a catch. The
79
80

Le Goff, p. xi.
Ibid., p. xii.
49

etymological net is yet hauled back. The roots of history and story are the same as well. History
and story, too, are mutually inflected in their origin.
I tend to both agree and disagree with Le Goff in that the cinematic exploration of the
relation between memory and history in La Jete is not just simply a relation of identity between
the past, or history, and the manner in which it is remembered, but also a matter of disruption, a
disruption that occurs through memorys effort to escape internalization and confinement
through narrativization in historical discourse. That doesnt imply that I simply do not believe in
the rhetoric of history as narrative and vice versa. Of course, history is often remembered and
mediated through narratives, much too vividly, if I may say, in political and social contexts of
nationalistic and other types of mass movements. The conscious manipulations of history by
political regimes for exploiting the narratives of collective memories is precisely what the
discipline of history seeks to destabilize in the contemporary project of historiography, which
nonetheless believes in some kind of an objective and historical truth.81
The current obsession with memory is an indication of the renewed interest in the
question of history, the representation of which is being increasingly fictionalized, in order to
expose the mythological foundations of its institutional character. The constitutive role of
memory in modern society, according to Pierre Nora, is prepared by history, whose function is to

81

Such a view of history in Derrida is characterized essentially as metaphysical. He writes: The

metaphysicalconcept of history is not only linked to linearity, but to an entire system of
implications (teleology, eschatology, elevating the interiorizing accumulation of meaning, a
certain type of traditionality, a certain concept of continuity, of truth, etc.). Derrida, Positions,
trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 57.
50

organize a past, in a constantly changing time.82 If history, on the one hand, as Nora claims, is
responsible for the conquest and eradication of memory, then, on the other hand, it has also
produced a break in the ancient bond of identity, a break in the equilibrium of memory and
history.83 Such a break has caused us to shift our lives from the endless repetition of ancient
ritual in which each act is the resemblance and remembrance of the same act, to live in a
historically discontinuous spontaneity, or in other words, in history, which appears in the form
of trace, of distance and mediation.84
Memory and Narrative
Terry Gilliams film 12 Monkeys begins with the construction and reproduction of a
normative memory that repetitively haunts its protagonist through the remainder of the film until
its transmigration into a universal catastrophe. It is here that we find the merging of the personal
or private, the singular and thus unique, memory of an individual progressively being integrated
into the collective historical narrative of the future of mankind. History as narrative is
continuously evoked through flashbacks, but the dynamics of the social memory and its
infrastructure (archives, museums, libraries, monuments, and other sites of memory) have not
been fully articulated in the film as its corollaries. Whereas in La Jete, to escape from the
82

Pierre Nora, General Introduction: Between Memory and History, Realms of Memory:
Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996), p. 2.
83
A break in consciousness, that can be easily perceived with the rise of industrialization which
also marked simultaneously the disappearance of the present culture, brought about some very
disturbing factors which resulted in the loss of historical memory. Memory, indeed, as it has
always lived in the experience of pre-industrial culture as collective memory (see Maurice
Halbwachs) found itself displaced by the expansion of democratization and mass culture on a
global scale. Nora, Realms of Memory, p. 2.
84
Ibid.
51

narrative, from his own predetermined history as such, the prisoner will have to use the
loopholes of time which are presented in an enigmatic fashion in the film as dissolves and
fades.85 Rda Bensmaa has stated that La Jete is really constituted by the destruction of what
we would call the drifting [la drive] of the fiction effect.86
Part of La Jete resides in the absence of a narrative because of the existence of the
commentary. The visuals are opposed to the authorial voice in a far more entwined sense than it
has been imagined. The visuals force the commentary to stumble into a false tone of
reconciliation. La Jete in a non-phenomenological sense resides in the structures of absences.
Jean-Louis Schefer has eloquently surmised that the part that makes this story come alive for
[him] remains invisible and necessarily deprived of images.87 The cinematic codes, like
dissolves and frequent fades to black in La Jete, render the status of the photograms, that is,
freeze-frames, virtually indeterminate.88 The indeterminacy of the freeze frame is also the unnameable, like the unpronounceable name of Hitchcock spoken in silence in La Jete as an
indirect gesture and a direct homage to the Sequoia tree in the arboretum in Vertigo. And in
theoretical and aesthetic terms, is the film frame (photogramme), muses Philippe Dubois, not
somewhere near the heart of the fold [in Deleuzes sense], in other words before an un85

Similarly Harvey Roy Greenberg also suggests that La Jete evokes the paradoxes and the
fractures of consciousness. 12 Monkeys: The Rags of Time, Film and Philosophy, vol. III
(1996): 123.
86
Rda Bensmaa, From the Photogram to the Pictogram: On Chris Marker's La Jete, Camera
Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film, no. 24 (September, 1990): 143.
87
Schefer. On La Jete, p, 106.
88
Bensmaa describes the composition of La Jete as a series of heterogeneous photogramsa
succession of images that are frozen, as if suspended in time. 140. Another interesting discourse
of the photograms as freeze frames (the interruption of movement) in La Jete, see Raymond
Bellour, The Stilled Image, Camera Obscura. vol.24 (September 1990): 99-123.
52

nameable object that is simultaneously beyond photography and before the cinema, more than
the one and less than the other, while being a little of both at the same time89 The photograms
themselves are so heterogeneously disseminated throughout the narrative that the efforts to
establish some kind of a linear and syntactical continuity between them might seem a bit farfetched. On the other hand, the affinity of the shots with each other of having similar basis in
photographic representation creates difficulty in breaking down the shots into well defined
segments.90 These dissolves and slow fades to black operate as holes in our perception.91
The dissolves and fades at the intersection of any two images in La Jete are the fusion and/or
tearing away of the past and the future that momentarily appear at a standstill in the
nachtrglichkeit of deferred present.
On the other hand, it has also been argued, rather convincingly by Roger Odin, that the
narrators offscreen commentary, from an elsewhere place, provides continuity to an otherwise
visually fragmented and displaced text, a certain presence of narrative authority that is most
amicably suitable for the spectator's desire for coherence.92 Through the voice-over the film
introjects the need for subjectivity and identification, the apparatus of the cinematic desire that
holds the spectator in its thrall. For Odin, the commentary organizes the totality of the film
89

Philippe Dubois, Photography Mise-en-Film: Autobiographical (Hi)stories and Psychic

Apparatuses, trans. Lynne Kirby. Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Petro
Petrice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 153.
90
Bensmaa, p. 140.
91
Ibid.
92
I am following Bensmaas reproduction of Roger Odins text in her essay here that first
appeared as Le film de fiction menac par la photographie et sauv par la bande-son ( propos
de La Jete de Chris Marker) in Cinmas de la modernit, Films, Thories, Cerisy Colloquium,
organized by Dominique Chteau, Andr Gardis and Franois Jost (Paris: Editions Klincksieck,
1981).
53

elements into a signifying continuity.93 It brings mobility into immobility, transparency into
opaqueness, order into chaos
Memory and Photography
The spirit of La Jete therefore proceeds from the perspective of memory in which time
is continuously brought to a halt, to a standstill. There exists no longer the possibility for staging
of the primal scene of the Lacanian mirror image as its own alterity in the images of La
Jetethe processes of primary and secondary identification through which the homogeneous
subject is constituted in the psychoanalytical discourse of the cinema.94 Such possibility is either
forgotten or renounced in the film, because the filmic itself never appears except in the absence
and the lack of the narrative, which requires our complicity as long as we are completely
removed from it.95 This lack of specularity only proves that in the photographic image there is
no after-life, but only silence.96 As Roland Barthes says, each reading of a photo and there are

93

Bensmaa, p. 141.
On the other hand, Constance Penley argues precisely from a Freudo-Lacanian perspective by
evoking the primal scene fantasy in La Jete, the desire to return to the childhood in an Oedipal
struggle to possess his mother at the Orly airport. The death itself is conceived as a symbolic
castration. Consatance Penley, The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis
(Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 138.
95
Bensmaa, p. 141.
96
Terry Gilliam proposes a contrary view in an interview on Channel Four, BBC, about 12
Monkeys. He says, I think Time Travel allows you to, if you go into the future, to look at
ourselves. I think that it becomes a mirror in a strange way - you go to another time and you look
at yourself in that time. Either the character goes and we see how foolish he is or how intelligent
he is, or we see how we've messed it up, if we're going to the future. I think thats what its about
its a mirror (emphasis mine). Twelve Monkeys: Dream Facts,
http://www.smart.co.uk/dreams/monkfact.htm (accessed March 30, 2007). Also see Nick James,
Time and the Machine Terry Gilliam on nostalgia, Bruce Willis and the look of 12 Monkeys,
Sight and Sound, vol. 6, no. 4 (April 1996): 14-17.
54
94

billions worldwide in a day, each perception and reading of a photo is implicitly, in a repressed
manner, a contract with what has ceased to exist, a contract with death.97
La Jete is a photo-roman; the closest ally of it would be, arguably, the comic book,
which also works on the principles of arrested motion. The subject of photography in La Jete is
not static or still, for that matter.98 It is not the study of features, the art of portraiture, which
demands a perfect stillness from its object, be it a human being or a passing cloudthe subjects
of photography are in dynamic motionthey are caught in the act, so to speak.99 This act of
supreme negation becomes an affirmation of death, in the Nietzschean sense of the eternal
return, in the photographic image.100 In La Jete, Marker endeavors to release death from its
arrestment and immobility due to its photographic origin. To release photography from its

97

Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang,
1985), p. 356.
98
On the other hand, the static quality of the images suggests the stratification of memory. To
remember something is to halt time. Jacob, Chris Marker and the Mutants, p. 167.
99
Benjamin has noted in his Artwork essay that the camera arrests the flow of perception and
captures the subtlest physiognomical gestures. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
1969), pp. 217-251.
100
For an interesting reading of Nietzschean eternal return in 12 Monkeys, see Cridlands
above mentioned essay in which he proposes that it is Friedrich Nietzsches eternal return that
steals the show and provides the tragic and comedic settings that keep the viewer entertained and
terrorized by revealing the absurdity, the emptiness, and, eventually, the of one mans life. It is a
film whose climax is most powerful not for its violence but for its troubling realization that
everything witnessed has happened before and will happen againwithout end. Cridland, p.
130. Thus, for Cridland, the film has a Nietzschean overtone, because its existential crisis is an
affirmation of Nietzsches eternal return that looks straight into the eyes of death.
55

death-like immobility, to release it from the figure of death, photography must, once again,
witness its own death in the movement of memory. The image is nothing without memory.101
The memory as an image has not yet found its voice: it cannot speak of itself in La Jete.
It can only be signified with its association with death. In 12 Monkeys, the consciousness of
the world appears to have existed prior to the destruction of World War IIIor, at least, the end
is already knowndue to the constant emphasis on the boys point of view, which becomes a
part of the narrative strategy for identification and subjectivization, unlike Markers ubiquitous
narrator, whose authority is sacrificed as an autochthonous/autobiographical voice by translating
it into an image/text, that is, writing. Marker has been classified as writer-cinaste, an
essayist, a man who writes with his camera, from Siberia (Letter from Siberia), Africa (Les
Statues meurent aussi), China (Dimanche Pekin), Cuba (Cuba Si), Japan (Le Mystre
Koumiko), France (Le Joli Mai), Israel (Description d'un combat), from anywhere in the world

101

The point I am making here is, perhaps, best enunciated byRoland Barthes in Camera Lucida:
Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: The Noonday Press, 1991).
56

where there is evidence.102 Andr Bazin, in 1958, described Letter from Siberia as an essay on
the reality of Siberia past and present in the form of a filmed report. 103
12 Monkeys instead stays within the realm of perception, that is, presence. The role of
the narrator, who remains a non-diegetic referentially in La Jete, is compromised by the
presence of the young boy in 12 Monkeys, the latters point of view comes to determine the
subjective element of the film. The fact that the psyche continues to exist after the self has been
liquidated (the films last scene depicts the young boy leaving the airport after Cole has been
shot dead) is more of an instance of the teleological summation of the spirit that prevails in the
Hegelian self-consciousness only. The death here figures as an act of a transcendental
consciousness of the Spirit (the mode of becoming History) that recognizes itself in the act of
apprehension rather than a disavowal or an impossibility of knowledge that the experience of
death itself signifies.104 Is it possible to know ones own death as a matter of a continuous

102

Jacob, Chris Marker and the Mutants, p, 165. See also Phillippe Dubois comments on
Markers epistolary cinema: The letter is one of his preferred terms of communication, as in I
am writing to you from a faraway country (Letter from Siberia). With the film letter, Marker
is one of the first to have systematically practiced the autobiographical documentary. But these
films are not about the story of his own life, in the vein of Depardons Les Annes-dclic or
Franks triptych. Marker speaks above all of others, the world, the people and landscapes he
visits, the animals he worships and the societies he observes. It is the way he speaks, the type of
gaze he brings to an apparent exteriority that is distinctive. The gaze of irony and fascination,
love and distance, sympathy and criticism, a gaze that is both wise and partisan, forms the
incomparable, assumed, personalization, the I of Markers documentary approach. Dubois,
Photography Mise-en-Film: Autobiographical (Hi)stories and Psychic Apparatuses, p. 65.
103
Andr Bazin, Bazin on Marker, trans. Dave Kehr, Film Comment. vol. 39, no. 4 (JulyAugust 2003): 44.
104
According to Hegel, Spirits fulfilment (sic) consists in perfectly knowing what it is. In
knowing its substance, this knowing is its withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its outer
existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of
Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 492.
57

awareness?105 What else is achieved, if not this very awareness that one has already witnessed
(historicized), one has already been not only present as a victim but also a witness, istor (and
here we can think of Specters from Hamlet and Macbeth, but these Specters are enigmas of
injustices, not simply a presence of spirits absolute control over its own historical
determination) of ones own death in an outer body experience.106 Furthermore, the insertion
of the spectral voice of the narrator in La Jete into the figure of a young boy in 12 Monkeys, that
is, the substitution of an actor for the narrative voice pushes the film into an anthropomorphic
dimension at the expense of the formal and aesthetic experiments of La Jete.
Memory and Trauma
The most disturbing factor, as far as the subject of memory and its origin are concerned,
is the cause of the memory which is attributed to a traumatic event, the witnessing of the killing
of a man in the broad daylight at an airport. How to underscore the trauma in both these films?
In La Jete the trauma is not instigated by an extraneous causality. This is a story of a man
encountering his own death in the absence of meaning. Because, in any event, the meaning itself
cannot be annihilated in its own presence. The condition of the possibility of the photograph
exists in the absence of the thing that no longer exists. Then how shall one pursue the absence
105

It has been an intriguing problem for me to explain how one can be a witness to ones own
death by actually realizing it in ones life. How can one be both present and absent, live and
dead, at the same time? Constance Penley provides a rational answer for why in the last scene of
La Jete we never see the boy in the present witnessing his death as an adult in the future. In the
logic of this film, Penley argue, he has to die, because such a logic acknowledges the temporal
impossibility of being in the same place as both adult and child. In La Jete one cannot be and
have been (emphasis mine). The Future of an Illusion, p. 138.
106
For an illuminating discussion of the protagonist in La Jete as a specter/revenant that like a
phantom comes from a nameless, distant land, see Coates, p. 311. He is referred at one point
in the film as (mon spectre) my ghost by the girl.
58

that only appears in relation to the non-existent, that is, that which is not yet forgotten?
Moreover, in La Jete, the cause of trauma is not yet marked by a prior event; instead the trauma
and its cause are not determined in the past, but as a trace of memory whose existence is prior to
its realization in the consciousness.
The significant difference between La Jete and 12 Monkeys is that the latter is a
presentation of a recurring nightmare that has already taken hold of the unconscious in a quasinarrative vein. The rest of the film is simply devoted to the explication and restitution of this
dream whose origin will no longer be determined by the cause sui generis; instead its trajectory
would be to progressively track down the motives and thus the principles of the originary trauma
in the form of a story succumbing to the vagaries of memory that work precisely in oblivion of
times perpetual nagging.
The anchor memory or the archaic memory, the memory of memories, this image of a
beloveds face, remains a fixity, a point which becomes the ontological source of the film.107 For
the obsession with the image with which the unnamed protagonist of La Jete both lives and dies
in the end is the reckoning of a premonition that triggers the desire for memory, which is, in
other words, the same as desiring ones own death. Unlike the river of Leth, the river of
oblivion, of forgetting, this fountain, this fulcrum of memory, has strong ties to a fixed anchor
107

Catherine Lupton traces the origin of this image of a beloveds face as a fixation in Markers
cinematic career in his primal childhood memory. In Immemory, she writes, Chris Marker
reveals the origin of this primordial association of a womans face with cinema, in his childhood
memory of the face of the actress Simone Genevoix in Marc de Gastynes La Marveilleuse Vie
de Jeanne dArc (1928). Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, p. 95. Raymond Bellour traces
the origin of the photograph in Jacques Feyders film LImage (1923-1925), which is dedicated
to the image-woman, the object of the strongest desire, the sign of the most poignant reality.
The Film Stilled, p. 119.
59

that serves as the provocative beginning of a desire to become a perpetual forgetting in the name
of the most sacred memory, the memory of all memory, from which the desire to live itself
becomes detached from the moment and becomes a privileged discourse of the Bergsonian
dure, in which time is stretched to its metaphysical limit.108 Face to face with the memorythe
otherhe recognizes, which is the same as remembering, his own death as the signature of a
forestalled image that he was unable to relinquish, for it had already ordained his destiny from
the very beginning: He understood there was no way to escape Time.
La Jete has a relation of absence with itself and an absence of relation with itself
(because as a series of photographs its indexicality is presupposed by the absence of the referent
and an absence of relation here signifies that the film itself is mediated through memory, also
nothing but a trace of the absence). La Jete situates the trauma as the bedrock of its
existence. There is no absolute beginning for a prior traumatic event whose existence becomes
the source of memorys malady. One thing is clear that the time travel into the past is not
determined by his memory; for he is not sent into his memory, rather his memory is used as a
force that helps him enter the past.109 Here it should be also acknowledged that Markers film
clearly marks a difference between the identity of the past and the memory of it. 12 Monkeys, in
contrast, projects a relationship that could best be designated in chronological terms as the
representations of: (a) a past that is present; (b) a present that is already past; and (c) a past that is
already contained in the future (the young protagonist relates to these three stages with his own

108

Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York:

Philosophical Library, Inc., 1961), pp. 56-8.
109
Kawin, Time and Stasis in La Jete, p. 16.
60

perpetual presence). The appearance side by side of the young boy and Bruce Willis in the
present, the latter is also from the future, represents a tragic syllogism of past, present, and
future.110 It is a misfortune to align the radical ruptures of time in terms of its tense, past,
present, and future, in a row. In a sense, the past is regrettably watching the present as the death
of the future. 12 Monkeys is full of these traumatic references that seem to trigger the operation
of memory in a mechanical manner without reflecting on the mechanics of it that both Hegel and
Augustine evoke in their writings.111
Mmoire volontaire and Mmoire involontaire
In La Jete the emphasis, as far as the nature of memory is concerned, is Proustian, the
personal side of the memory; whereas 12 Monkeys seems to privilege the totalizing and
universalizing form of memory that resembles history in a public sense.
In On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Benjamin takes up the issue of aura in relation to mmoire
involontaire.112 He compares the Proustian mmoire involontaire, the most exemplary and
enigmatic experience of auratic writings, with the mmoire volontaire, that perpetual readiness
of volitional, discursive memory, the one that is in the service of the intellect.113 Simply put:
the difference between these two types of memory is that the former has an accidental but full
relationship to the past, whereas the latter, though clearly present in its attentiveness to the

110

Schefer. On La Jete, p. 102.

G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. W. Wallace (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1971), Section 463, 221-222. Saint Aurelius Augustinus (Bishop. of Hippo),
Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Rex Warner (New York: New American Library, 1963),
Book X, pp. 210-284.
112
Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Illumination, pp. 155-200.
113
Ibid., p. 186, p. 158.
61
111

past, happens to retain no trace of it. In historical terms, both these memories imply the atrophy
of experience.114
It is quite possible that without upsetting Benjamin's definition of mmoire volontaire as
the perpetual readiness of volitional, discursive memory, the one that is in the service of the
intellect, we can safely assign Coles persistent nightmare to that category or kind of memory.
Although Coles persistent nightmare is not necessarily, in a strict sense, the effects of voluntary
reproductions of his conscious mind, yet the workings of his unconscious seem to be truly
engineered by the technique of mechanical reproduction.115 Rather than an image, a
photogram, whose identity exceeds the discursive specificity of the narrative, at heart of the
enigma of La Jete, in 12 Monkeys Coles nightmares have the whole narrative of death already
interiorized in a manner that sets a new standard of valuing information over experience. On the
other hand, the protagonist of La Jete betrays all those symptoms that take a Proustian turn
towards mmoire involontaire.116 The contingency of involuntary memory evades the
prompting of the voluntary memory and gives access to a past that is beyond the reach of the
intellect. Benjamin says of mmoire volontaire: it is its characteristic that the information
which it gives about that past retains no trace of it.117

114

Ibid., p. 159.
Ibid.,p. 186.
116 Lupton, too, notes the involuntary nature of La Jetes memory. She writes: La Jetes also
evokes tensions between the action of involuntary memory returning to the past in its entirety,
and the experience of memory as a series of images removed from the continuous flow of time,
Chris Marker, p. 96.
117 Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, p. 158.
62
115

For instance, the difference between a photogram, a frozen image, and the slow motion
sequences, the privileged trope of rendering the nightmares in 12 Monkeys, can best be thought
of in the conceptual treatment of the deaths of the protagonists in both films. It appears that in
12 Monkeys the destruction of the human race is treated in terms of inevitability, as an abstract
and quantitative death. On the contrary, in La Jete the destruction of the human race is already
a fait accompli. The film avoids at all costs any concrete representations of human mutilation and
portrays a concrete manifestation of death, which Marker himself has described elsewhere as a
moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.
But one should not fail to register that the protagonist of La Jete too has access to mmoire
volontaire, and his memory has already been put to the service of the intellect, albeit not his own,
but to the service of the master race, to his tormentors. And if we concede that the image of the
woman that he carries from the past is a sign of that mmoire volontaire, for which Proust had so
little patience, then this has its own peculiar logic in the film. As I stated earlier, the access to
ones own past in mmoire volontaire is limited to the promptings of a memory which obeys the
call of attentiveness. Voluntary memory fails to conjure the image of the past, because instead
of the past, what we get from it is only the image. That is why one encounters in the photograph
a memory that retains no trace of the past. Nonetheless in Prousts mmoire involontaire,
Benjamin finds a redemption and reconciliation of the two elements of memory. In the
protagonist of La Jete, the voluntary and involuntary memory lose their mutual
exclusiveness.118

118 Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, p. 160.

63

In La Jete the memory procedure of the protagonist has much in common with the
ancient art of mnemotechniques: The sites (loci) and images (imagines).119 First the place and
then slowly the images appear, first almost illegible but with time these indistinct mental images
acquire definite imagesic form, true legible image character. And this process is, to a large
extent, reciprocated in Gilliams 12 Monkeys. The dream or nightmare sequences of Cole are
also disclosed in fragmented sequences that only acquire clarity (legibility) in the last dream
sequence which transforms into reality, thus clarifying and condensing the bits of information
strewn across in a rather dislocated fashion.120
This is a fact that while watching La Jete we are seldom, perhaps never, conscious of the
fatalistic encounter with ones own death, which is forever deferred, because it will then signify
the nullification of consciousness that is affirmed in death. And thus the outcome of La Jete, in
this particular situation, is not pre-determined, as in 12 Monkeys, which negates its critical
possibility of creating resistance or at least resulting in a different outcome. Of course, the entire
film is geared towards resisting the meaning of the past through the intervention of the future that
seeks to overcome it by revealing the impossibility of the possibility of memory into history as a
resistive force. Memory fails to disentangle itself from the inevitability of historical time, but its

119

For an exhaustive study of the ancient art of mnemotechniques, see Frances. A. Yates, The
Art of Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966).
120
For an illuminating and detailed analysis of the nightmares sequences in 12 Monkeys, see
Cohen, 12 Monkeys, Vertigo and La Jete, Postmodern Mythologies and Cult Film, pp. 152157.
Chapter 1: The Lessons of Hiroshima mon amour: Evasion of History and the Trauma of
Remembering and Forgetting
64

pockets of resistance lie in the interstices of history itself, which can neither determine nor
predict its originary and fleeting encounter with the other. In 12 Monkeys, Coles hapless death
could be interpreted (by the young boy that is Cole himself, Railley, and scores of other people
on the airport as witnesses) as the transformation from the act of memory to the passivity of
spectating history. Not an act of memory in an affirmative sense, but as a victim of history, who
witnesses his past die with passivityan act transformed into stasis. This culminates in a
passage from observing or experiencing to spectating ones own death as a fate or fact of history.
La Jete struggles against this inevitability of history pronounced as a judgment at the end of the
world, which still continues to exist only historically for all kinds of mediated representations.
To conclude, this is a film not only about the meaning of memory and history, but about their
very possibility in an age where media have become our way of dealing not just with reality, but
with those vanished moments we call the past.

65

CHAPTER 2
The Lessons of Hiroshima mon amour: Evasion of History and the Trauma of
Remembering and Forgetting
The night is long, and I am full of tossing till the dawn. (The Book of Job)
I have always protested against the word memory.121 Resnais.
Act 1: History122

121

James Monaco cites this quote from Resnais in an interview with Dan Yakir in In the
Twilight Zone: 1000 Eyes talks to Alain Resnais, 1000 Eyes (March 1977), Alain Resnais (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 11.
122
According to Resnais, he plotted the narrative of Hiroshima mon amour into the classic
division of five acts. Roy Armes has also stated that the film has a marked dramatic structure
with the action falling into five distinct acts. Roy Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais
(London: A Zwemmer Limited, 1968), p. 70. Sarah French notes as well that Hiroshima mon
amour is composed of five acts that differ markedly in their temporal and narrative structures due
to the characters shifting relationship to memory (from recollection to re-enactment) as well as
to the films shifts in genre. Sarah French, From History to Memory: Alain Resnais and
Marguerite Duras Hiroshima mon amour, emajartjournal, issue 3, 2008, p. 5.
http://emajartjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/french.pdf (accessed January 10, 2015). I
66

Introduction: Evasion of History

Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is one of the most acclaimed French New Wave films,
made by the recently deceased Alain Resnais, who collaborated with the prominent writer and
filmmaker Marguerite Duras for the project. After Resnaiss death, the film has seen a popular
resurgence, as it was shown at the New York Film Festival this year followed by screenings at
the Film Forum in a brand new 35mm, 4K restored print. The renewed passion for this classic
avant-garde film is symptomatic of the auteur syndrome that still dominates the cinematic
horizon. Critics and film scholars have hailed the film for its brilliant artistic achievements, for
its modernist plot, and its anti-war message.123 As a peace film it stands out as one of the
greatest, delivering its anti-nuclear message in an unprecedented fashion to the Western world.
My purpose here is not to contradict the obvious artistic merit of the film and its overt anti-war
message, but to explore critically the issues that the film both raises and obfuscates with regard
to the conflictual treatment of memory and history.
Hiroshima mon amour was commissioned by a co-production of the French company
Argos and the Japanese studio Daiei, filmed in seventeen days in Hiroshima and Tokyo (1958),
to commemorate the twelfth anniversary of the bombing, for which Resnaiss expertise as an
exemplary director was sought after the great success of his first Holocaust film, the
documentary Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955). Apparently, Holocaust fatigue led
have, however, divided the film into five distinct thematic acts: History, Trauma, Memory,
Forgetting, and Transmemoration.
123
See Freddy Sweet for an excellent analysis of the modernist trope of stream of consciousness,
especially of the Joycean techniques, employed in the narrative structure of Hiroshima mon
amour in The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press,
1981), pp. 5-33.
67

Resnais to jettison the original project for a film on nuclear holocaust for a fictional tragic love
intrigue.124 Unlike Night and Fog, for which Resnais enlisted script and commentary from
concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol, and that took the documentary approach to treat the
Holocaust from an objective and realistic fashion (although mixing the chronology of the past
and present in an eclectic fashion, presenting a narrative that privileges the mode of memory
over a straightforward presentation of historical facts, contrapuntal sound, etc.), for Hiroshima
mon amour Resnais decided to abandon that approach in order to do something different.125
Instead of an objective point of view, he decided to approach the subject matter from an artistic
and subjective (literary) point of view, for which he enlisted the collaboration of Duras, one of
the foremost practitioners of le nouveau roman (new novel) literary movement popular in France
in the late 1950s, whose debut as a screenwriter this was.126 Resnaiss association with the

124

After shooting a considerable length of documentary footage in Hiroshima Resnais felt that he
was simply reproducing his earlier Holocaust film thus decided to leave the project.
125
Early in his career Resnais had abandoned a documentary written by Roland Dubillard on Les
Jardins du Paris after shooting 1500 meters of film. He would also later on abandon Cayrols La
Noire after securing the finance for it because he felt that he couldnt use a completed work.
They will eventually collaborate in 1955 on Night and Fog and then on Muriel ou le temps dun
retour in 1962-63. See Roy Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais (London: A Zwemmer
Limited, 1968), p. 35 & 116.
126
Durass inclusion in the project was initially intended as a joke but the Japanese producers
took the bait seriously and fell for it. Here is Resnaiss account: So that film had come to a dead
end. For my own personal pleasure I wanted to shoot Moderato Cantabile in 16mm. Just as a
joke, when I told the producer I was abandoning the whole affair [this is not the first time he had
abandoned an idea for a film. He didnt shoot a film on Paris teenagers after months of
planning], I added: Of course if someone like Marguerite Duras were interested They took it
seriously. A friend arranged me to meet Marguerite Duras. I told her how a film on atomic bomb
itself just couldnt be made. I said to her: What would be pleasing would be doing a love
storyin my head it was something like Moderato Cantabilebut one in which the atomic
agony would not be absent. She began by saying it was indeed impossible. I also talked to her
little about the notion of characters who would not be heroes, who would not participate in the
68

above-mentioned literary movement had its apotheosis later in his collaboration with Alain
Robert-Grillet in LAnne dernire Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961). I have
mentioned these collaborations, not to mention his later collaboration with Jorge Semprn Maura
and the Belgian science-fiction writer Jacques Sternberg, for one specific reason, which is to
outline Resnaiss cinematic approach until Marienbad as motivated by a relationship to
literature, to writing, a kind of cine-criture (Cinematic Literature)127 or literary
composition,128 where the literary voice and the cinematic images run in a collision course
(more Eisenstein than Astruc or Rohmer), and for many at the expense of historical
representation (evasion of history), particularly in Hiroshima mon amour but also in Muriel,
ou le temps dun retour (Muriel,1963), where history is articulated only obliquely.129 Resnaiss

action, but would be witnesses of it, and what we are in most cases when we are confronted with
catastrophes of great problems: spectators. Cited in Roy Armes, pp. 66-67.
127
See Janice Etzkowvitz, Towards a Concept of Cinematic Literature: An Analysis of
Hiroshima mon amour (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1983). Ropars-Wuilleumier, too,
has suggested that with the Resnais-Duras encounter, writing comes to the cinema. How
Hiroshima begets Meaning: Alain Resnais Hiroshima mon amour (1959) in French Film: Texts
and Contexts, eds. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (New York: Routledge, 1990), p.
183. Lynn A. Higgins also mentions that Resnais strives for a literary cinema thus echoing
Durass statement that he works as a novelist. Hiroshima mon amour, New Novel, New Wave,
New Politics: Fiction and Representation of History in Postwar France (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 24.
128
Dudley Anderw, What Cinema Is! (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 47, 93-94.. The
concept of cinema writing originated in the essay by Alexandre Astruc, The Birth of a New
Avant-Garde: La Camra-Stylo, in The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham. Trans. from Ecran
Franais 144, 30 March 1948.
129
James Monaco claims that Muriel has a relevant political dimension as no film of Resnaiss
since Nuit et Brouillard [whereas] Hiroshima mon amour doesnt count as a political statement
since its concerns are so broad. Bad Memory, Alain Resnais, p. 76. I have no qualms with this
statement, because he doesnt claim that Muriel is a historical film. For an interesting reading of
the political implications of still images in Muriel, see Matthew John, Running the Film Against
the Reel: Locating Jean Cayrols Lazarean Figure in Alain Resnaiss Muriel ou le temps dun
69

later approach to the cinema would abandon his literary orientation for a more theatrical mode,
including musical comedy, for example, On Connat la Chanson (Same Old Song, 1997) and Pas
sur la bouche (Not on the Lips, 2003). But one theme that has persisted throughout his career,
from his earliest short filmhis first-collaboration with the auteur of memory sui generis, Chris
Marker, Toute la mmoire du monde (1956)to one of his later films, Les herbes folles (Wild
Grass, 2009), is the theme of memory, especially its Proustian dimension in mmoire
involontaire (Involuntary Memory) and Time (dure in Bergsonian sense).130 The film that,
perhaps, is the most powerful evocation of memory in the Proustain trope is Providence (1977),
which unfortunately is not a part of discussion here. My concern is primarily with the
representation of memory and history in Hiroshima mon amour, for which I would provide a
systematic interpretation, call it a reading, that is inflected with philosophical detours from a
variety of perspectives.131
The film was greeted with thunderous applause at the Cannes Film Festival and was
nominated for the Palm dOr, which went to Marcel Camuss Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus,

retour, Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance, ed. Griselda
Pollock and Max Silverman (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), pp. 83-99. Lynn A Higgins, on the
contrary, suggests that it is Hiroshima whose history is presented obliquely in Hiroshima mon
amour, p. 32.
130
For an excellent reading of the distinction between the Proustian involuntary memory and
Bergsonian dure in Resnais, see John Ward, Alain Resnais or The Theme of Time (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday & Company, 1968). John Francis Kreidl, Alain Resnais (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1977), p. 59. Also see Wolfgang A. Luchting, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Time, and
Proust, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Spring, 1963), pp. 299-313.
131
Jean-Louis Leutrat observed in his Avant-Propos that many excellent review of Hiroshima
mon amour exists, therefore, it would be hard to present a critique from an original perspective.
Hiroshima mon amour: tude critique. Collection Synopsis 20 (Paris: Nathan, 1994), p. 120. This
quote is taken from Richard C. Williamsons book review in The French Review, Vol. 71, No. 3
(Feb., 1998), p. 525.
70

1959). In the United States, the film had a successful run as well due to its complicated narrative
and ambiguous bittersweet ending that set it apart from the formulaic Hollywood film. Despite
its great artistic merit, the film has been criticized for creating a fiction that not only uses
history, but to a great extent subsumes it.132 In Japan, the release of the film met with a strong
disapproval and condemnation. The Japanese press felt deeply betrayed by the film, which was
derisively translated as Twenty-Four Hour Affair (Nijuyojikan no Joji), for trading the immensity
of the nuclear holocaust (its use-value), for a trite love affair (its exchange value) of a French
woman (Emmanuel Riva) with a Japanese man (Eiji Okada).133
Hiroshima mon amour raises important moral and ethical questions, some might even say
at the expense of the politicalsince when is Hiroshima apolitical?,134regarding the
controversial issues of history and memory of the bombing of Hiroshima at a time when antinuclear sentiments, under the dark cloud of Cold War between the superpowers, were becoming
highly politicized in the global peace movement. Chief detractors of the film in the US were
James Monaco, Donald Richie, and the Yale psychology professor Robert Jay Lifton to name
just a few very famous ones. Monaco criticized the film for using Hiroshima obscenely as
background and filler to multiply the drama inherent is this supposedly banal story. 135 He

132

Kyo Maclear, The Limits of Vision, Beclouded Vision: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Art of
Witness (New York: SUNY Press, 1998), p. 150.
133
I shall be referring to this two unnamed characters, who are identified in Durass script as Elle
(She) and Lui (He), in the film by the real last names as Riva and Okada throughout this essay.
134
Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, p. 174. See also Donald Richie who claims Hiroshima
mon amour is apolitical. Mono no aware: Hiroshima in Films, Hibakusha Cinema:
Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, ed. Mike Broderick (London:
Kegan Paul International, 1996), p. 28.
135
Monaco, Alain Resnais, p. 43. Cited also in Kyo Maclear, p. 150, 151.
71

labeled the chapter on Hiroshima mon amour False documentary, echoing Durass own
characterization of the film as such in her Introduction to the published screen play of the
film.136 Bersani and Dutoit skewer both Duras and the film by suggesting that the film
performed the service of helping to make Resnais relatively popularand may also have helped
him to get away from linear form early in his career. But also, thanks to Duras (especially to her
consumer appealing fascination with luxurious masochism of bourgeois love, a fascination
weakly disguised by a great deal of peudo-political intensity about the horrors of Hiroshima and
the Nazi occupation of France), Hiroshima is Resnais weakest film.137 Lifton criticizes the
film, while acknowledging the fact that the film succeeds where Kurosawas Record of a Living
Being (1955)a film about the plague of nuclear terror crippling a factory owner, played by
Toshir Mifune, who moves his family to Brazil from Japanfails for achieving the
universalization of the Hiroshima bombing in peoples mind. But, at the same time, it is also its
biggest failure, because it never really achieves the artistic transformation of A-bomb
elements, which the Kurosawas film achieves, despite its haunting quality.138 Lifton critiques
get even more visceral with regard to the parallel narratives of the film which he claims simply
coexist without any real confrontation. He mentions how the film aroused opposition in
Hiroshima, even while being made, because some hibakusha (people who survived but suffered
from the consequences of nuclear radiation) felt that its sensuality was an insult to the A-bomb
136

Monaco, p. 34. Duras claims that she adhered to the decision to film Hiroshima mon amour
as a false documentary in order to probe the lesson of Hiroshima more deeply than any madeto-order documentary. Cited by Monaco, p. 37.
137
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Stalled Movement, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett,
Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 189.
138
Lifton, p. 468.
72

dead.139 For Lifton, Resnais literally takes the horrors of Hiroshima to the lovers bed,
conflating Hiroshimas grotesque death imagery with the bodily union of the two lovers.
The theoretical answer is that Hiroshima represents an ultimate in mans deadly destructiveness
which Resnais wished to illuminate against the starkness of physical love. Yet the formulation
remains abstract, apart, because the film has recorded but not grasped its environment.140 In this
context, that is, from Liftons point of view, the films romantic love story, according to
Maclear, represents less a surrogate encounter with events too overbearing, too traumatic, to be
faced head on, and more as an evasion of history141 (emphasis added).
Hiroshima mon amour, however, contains an allegory of the French national history
during the occupation told through Rivas tragic love story with a German soldier, the enemy
combatant. Her relationship with the enemy is presented in two fashions: Love and Madness. It
is a symbolic love that leads to madness, which in return is capable of an eventual cure from this
historical malady. As a pure romantic love, this precocious adolescent clandestine dalliance also
serves as a calculated move to spare Frances dark flirtation with Hitlers Nazi party. Some
historical understanding of this love affair requires a deeper exploration of its symbolic
relationship to the history of French-German collaboration before and during the occupation,
when a large number of French joined the Vichy France (tat franaise), officially the French

139

Ibid.
Ibid.
141
Maclear, p. 152.
140

73

State, in the Ptain period. 142 Hiroshima mon amour conceals or veils multiple layers of
narratives of Frances own dark past that wasnt openly discussed till President Jacques Chirac in
1995 openly admitted, for the first time, Frances complicity with the Nazis during the Vichy and
Occupation period: The criminal folly of the occupiers was seconded by the French, by the
French state. Until then and even now with the resurgence of viva Hitler upbringing of the
ultra-Right-wing, Marine Le Pen on the French national scene, this very aspect of history, the
suppression and denial of this complicity, would take the center stage of evasion through a
conscious repression of the embarrassing and shameful episode of history from the national
memory.
The love affair between the French woman (Riva) and the Japanese architect, a French
Revolution scholar (Okada), in the present, is a surreal flight into a fantasy of history that rests
upon dubious ground. By sketching the relationship as a continuity of her disrupted past, in
Deleuzian terms, becoming the present by the activation of memory, which is interpreted as
madness, the film effectively thwarts the exploration of this very theme that a section of French
society and gender, notwithstanding the exigency of war, was fairly enamored by the presence of
the German soldiers. Hollywood, on the other hand, never shied from showing German woman
openly having sexual relationships with Allied soldiers after the fall of Germany, despite the fact
that countless photographs and reports of French women openly having relationships with

142

See Henry Russo for an excellent historical analysis of Vichy France in The Vichy Syndrome:
History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991).
74

German officers in Paris have been seldom depicted or acknowledged.143 Now these allegations
can be refuted on the basis of the fact that what a certain section of French population did was
itself a direct result of the German occupation. For example, the rise in prostitution in France was
a direct result of the occupation, which was even noted by Simone de Beauvoir.144 In that sense,
Rivas memories, fragmented and mutilated, form a context of madness and guilt of the national
conscience that has been able to excise the unpleasant part of history in the rhetoric of the victory
of humanity: Good vs. Evil (the preferred Hollywood model), or some such universalizing trope.
Winning the war gave France and other countries, including Italy, Spain and many Eastern
European countries, the opportunity to dissolve a certain portion of their recent history in the
bigger flotsam of humanitys triumph over evil, in the restoration of faith in humanity vis a vis
the emergent politics of nationalism in the post-war era. The brutalities and the treacherous acts
of the Allies were absorbed in the heat and glow of humanitys triumphant return to itself.
143

The publication of Patrick Buissons 1940-1945: Annes rotiques: Vichy ou les infortunes de
la vertu, vol. 1, has been making waves all around France for its revelation of Parisians
collaboration with the Germans during the Occupation. It wasnt necessarily a time of
deprivation and hardship; on the contrary, the book claims, that it was also a time of much
enjoyment for many. Glen Roberts in a review of the book for the Daily Mail writes: Everyone
was surprised the tall, blond invading newcomers did not set about raping the population as the
French had expected. Instead, they handed out bread and tarts. Moreover, they were so handsome
and so brave in comparison with the drunken French soldiers who had surrendered the fight.
Soon, every French child was crying out that he wanted to be German, while every young French
girl was lusting after the newcomers as though they were allies, not enemies, offering them
oranges and standing on tip-toe to look into the plush interior of their limousines. And French
housewives, deprived of companionship while their soldier husbands were held prisoner, were
happily sleeping with the enemy. The French have long sought to draw a veil over these aspects
of the occupation, claiming heroic acts of resistance during the period when, in fact, they were
little more than collaborators. July 17, 2008.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1035804/Sleeping-enemy-New-book-claimsFrenchwomen-started-baby-boom-Nazi-men-Vichy-regime.html (accessed March 15, 2015).
144
Ibid,
75

Countless films have been made and are still being made by French and Hollywood directors,
including Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds (2009), on the theme of the glorious French
Resistance. France is never depicted as weak or complicit in relation to history, but rather as a
brave nation fully engaged in heroic resistance. There are numerous postwar French films that
attest to this position, prominently amongst them Jean-Pierre Melvilles Larmes des ombres
(The Army of Shadows, 1969) and Robert Bressons Un condamn mort sest chapp ou Le
vent souffl (A Man Escaped,1956), based on the diary of the resistance fighter Andr Devigny.
But very few addressed the complicity and pervasive ant-Semitism of French society during the
war period. In Resnaiss film, however, the heroines history of consorting with the enemy, the
German soldier, echoes and is analogous to this part of French history of World War II.145 As
noted above, a part of France did flirt through the Vichy government with the occupying forces
of Germany. French history has a dark side as all histories do, but its own repression of history in
both historical and Freudian sense is a stunning case of omission of the collaborative nature of its
own disturbing history
Forgetting to Remember
Rivas past association or consorting with the enemy parallels the role of Frances
collaboration with Germany during the Second World War. It is a shameful part of history that
145

Both Naomi Greene and Lynn Higgins have addressed this particular issue of Rivas affair
with the German soldier as symbolic of French women fraternizing with German officers and
soldiers. Not all of those relationships were forced. In Higginss writing, Riva becomes a scape
goat, a substitute victim, for the collective guilt of the Vichy era, while for Greene she remains
a symbol of moral purity and innocence, because thats how Resnais has intended it to be. She
goes onto equate her madness and suffering at the hand of her family and countrymen as
analogous to the fate befallen to the victims of Hiroshima, which is done far more seriously and
imaginatively by Ropars-Wuilleumier whom I have cited many times in this essay.
76

the film both suppresses and illuminates. How does Resnais, the left bank aesthete, recount his
own countrys collaboration, a theme that he had already eschewed in his previous documentary,
Night and Fog? 146 This question surfaces, like a repressed memory, despite the films overt
attempt to negate it in the personal melodrama of Rivas tumultuous affair with the unnamed
German soldier. The punishment of Riva not only exposes the hypocrisy of the French society
(and the internal division that was wrecking France in 1944), but also reveals a strong desire of
the French populace to emerge, like Riva, from the cellar of self-imposed ignominy of the Vichy
period. The desire to survive the recent catastrophe, for both Riva and France, is presented in the
form of a natural/national recovery that keeps the spirit of the individual/national body afloat.
The French survived their own humiliation by descending into their own darkness only to
emerge with all the normal signs of cureforgetting.147 But the body is most vulnerable and
surrenders to the pull of the unconscious when it thinks that the latter has no power over it. Riva
succumbs to her own desire for madness in order to relive her erotic lack in the present. The

146

Resnaiss Holocaust documentary, Night and Fog, does not mention the genocide of
European Jewry. In fact, as James Monaco tells us, the film was withdrawn from the Cannes
Film Festival of 1956. The ostensible reason was that the French government did not want to
offend another participating government [i.e., the Germans]. But the real reason was that the
French censors wanted to suppress the film because of the visual evidence of Frances
complicity and collaboration in the extraordinary crime of the death camps. The shot of a
photograph that barely last for five seconds clearly shows a French gendarme in a control tower
at Pithiviers concentration camp where the Jews are being rounded up for deportation. The
producers of Night and Fog under the pressure from the French government ultimately
capitulated to remove this piece of the visual evidence of history. Monaco, p 22. I personally
am not sure whether Resnais was even aware of the visual evidence, until the censors objected
to it, but that is simply a speculation on my part. However, the shot was removed and thus the
world was spared of the crucial evidence of French complicity in the deportation and murder of
its own approximately seventy five thousand Jews.
147
Lynn Higgins sees here a parallel to the Orphic myth. Higgins, p. 24.
77

present desire brings back both the sweet memories of love and the nightmare of the war. In
Riva, France is at once dead and resurrected, like Lazarus (a protean theme of Resnaiss
collaborator Jean Cayrol).148 That is the reason why the war has to be treated as a backdrop,
much like the political landscape presented in the background of Alfonso Cuarns Y Tu Mam
Tambin (2001).
So, what is the trauma if not the separation of desire from its object? We desire what we
want irrespective of whether it is attainable or not. Rivas desire to possess her memory, which is
now in possession of her, might now allow the desire to function without contradictions. She can,
however, only remember her lover at the cost of losing him through forgetting that arises from
the same lack we call desire in the Lacanian and Kojvian sense. Rivas remembering of her
lover does have psychoanalytical implications in the sense that it relates to Freuds work of
mourning that is essential to the subject to separate itself from the lost objects of love and hate.
As Ricoeur explains, This integration of loss through the experience of remembering is of
considerable significance for all of the metaphorical transpositions of the teachings of
psychoanalysis outside of its sphere of operation. 149To remember is to forget: This is the lesson
that Hiroshima mon amour wants to instill in all of us. Why not forget? What is there to
remember? These questions are not asked by the victims but by the perpetrators.

148

Cayrol published two essays in 1950 as Lazare parmi nous (Lazarus among us) about his
experience in the Concentration Camp by invoking the Biblical figure as an art born out of the
death camps.
149
Paul Ricoeur, Memory and Imagination, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen
Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 446.
78

Resnaiss film Night and Fog elides a history of French anti-Semitism that was still widely
prevalent in France in the 1950s, also among the left intelligentsia, long after the Drefyus affair
was consigned to a historical memorabilia. Deleuze, too, in an eight-hour documentary
acknowledges at one point that anti-Semitism was a commonplace among the middle-class
people during his childhood in Paris.150
Recent works, as I have just indicated with the publication such as annes rotiques, have
suggested that a large section of the French populace wasnt necessarily adversely affected by
the German occupation. Here is a quote from a review published in The New Republic that
implicates the role that the French intelligentsia played in comparison to its European
counterparts: Right at the heart of the murk were Frances intellectuals and artists. Even before
the war, their German and Soviet counterparts had been largely silenced, imprisoned, killed, or
enlisted as totalitarian propagandists. During the war, the Polish cultural elite was systematically
murdered by the Nazis. But the Frenchat least those who were not Jewishhad the luxury of
debating at length, in relative safety and comfort, what role to take after the German victory.
Should they support the Germans and the collaborationist Vichy state? Join the Resistance? Flee
the country? Try, in one way or another, to remain aloof from politics? The occupation presented
endless grounds for dramatic confrontation and moral agonizing.151 Given this background, it is
not surprising that a scholar, especially a non-Eurocentric one, would question the motives
behind Resnaiss sudden decision to opt out of a factual documentary to make a fictional love150

Gilles Deleuze: From A to Z, directed by Pierre-Andr Boutang, trans. Charles J. Stivale,

Semiotext(e). The DVD is distributed by The MIT Press.
151
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books/magazine/83186/nazi-occupied-paris-review
(accessed December 5, 2015).
79

story where the actual victims are replaced by a fictional victim of a French origin. Hiroshima
mon amour is a film that contains both the anti-nuclear message and an Eurocentric bias that fails
to properly address the nuclear catastrophe inflicted needlessly on a largely unsuspecting civilian
population by America.152 Durass lack of knowledge of Japan and Resnaiss avowed lack of
interest in the nuclear holocaust contributed to a film that was heavily influenced by, as both
Ropars-Wuilleumier and Sarah French claim, autobiographical materials from Durass personal
life and her published work La Douleur (1985).153 The precedence of Rivas memory in the film
makes the historical chronology of her narrative take over the space of Hiroshimas own present.
But coming back to our concern with Hiroshima mon amour and the French history of
the occupation, the theme of the film does not simply deal with the folly, using Chiracs term,
of some teenage crush or joyous exuberance of youthful lust that structures its overall narrative,
but instead with the suffering and trauma, not at the hand of the enemy, with whom the self is
united, but from ones own. It is the family and the countrymen who are the worst enemy of this
fragile young girl driven to madness by their cruelty. But this story doesnt do justice to
Hiroshima, whose destruction was caused by the transcendent and omniscient logic of ending the
war. What happened in Nevers, micrologically speaking, or in France, with the German

152

Kowner has also claimed that Hiroshima mon amour turns into an extreme case of
Eurocentrism. Kowner, p. 46.
153
See Ropars-Wuilleumier, p. 176 and French, p. 4. For a critical reflection on the relationship
of narrative testimony to personal suffering, Sarah French, From History to Memory: Alain
Resnais and Marguerite Duras Hiroshima mon amour, emajartjournal, issue 3, 2008, p. 2.
http://emajartjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/french.pdf (accessed January 10, 2015). Also
see Emma Wilson, La Douleur: Duras, Amnesia and Desire, in European Memories in Second
World War, ed. Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett and Claire Gorrara (New York: Beghahan
Books, 1999), pp.141-158.
80

presence, is an important part of history that the film not only deliberately overlooks, but also
effectively represses in the name of individual trauma.154 The trauma caused by history is not
necessarily historical. To displace the trauma of history both from the annals of French and
Japanese history for an inventive tale might, after all, be justified in the name of artistic liberty,
but it nonetheless, remains an evasion.
The Vichy Syndrome
Naomi Greene, in Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema,
also takes up the issue of collaboration in the film. She writes: Behind the heroines personal
trauma one discerns the indistinct shape of scandal, at once individual and collective, that also
involves forgetting, betraying the past, bearing on the national past, thisscandal is not fully
explored, not fully remembered, in the film just as it was not fully remembered in France in
late 1950s. In other words, the public humiliation inflicted upon the protagonist in Nevers
invokes a moment of the French past that, in 1959, was still confined to the buried recesses of
collective memory. Her punishment evokes the specter of all hatred and the abuses unleashed by
the purges that erupted as the Occupation came to a convulsive end.155 Greenes reading is
attentive to the repression of the memory of collaboration in Vichy France and the Gaullist
resistancialist myth at the time when Resnias made the film in the late 50s. The Gaullist myth of
154

What is, then, history? Because there are many histories of history, such as microhistory, that
also must be resisted from being assimilated to the vast narrative of the universal, national, and
human history. For a better understanding of microhistorical conceptions, see Carlo Ginzburg
and Carlo Poni, The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographic
Marketplace in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, eds. Edward Muir and Guido
Ruggiero (Maryland, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
155
Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 44-45,
81

a unified national memory was shattered by the publication of Henry Russos groundbreaking
book The Vichy Syndrome and Marcel Ophulss The Sorrow and the Pity, made in 1969, but
released in 1971 due to censorship. After the war, some sort of purge (puration) was
inevitable, according to Russo.156 The postwar purification led to deep division, to a kind of
civil war, a guerre franco-franaise, as the liberation receded further in the distance.157 The
postwar trials made any intelligence with the enemy a crime, but the sentences that were meted
out didnt have a uniform basis. Individuals were treated differently based on their social status;
for instance, as Russo points out, engineers and scientists were treated differently than the
journalists, because the former were more important for the postwar economic recovery. Military
trials were more lenient to the collaborators because of their right-wing ideologies as opposed to
the civilian trials, which handed harsher sentences including death sentences to supporters of
Milice (Vichys paramilitary arm) and LVF.158 The division between the communists and the
loyalists deepened and the specter of the red scare was induced into the equilibrium as well. But
the normal postwar French citizen clung to the reassuring image of a resisting France [the
Gaullist myth]. The desire for a return to normality and the wish to forget the exceptional
circumstances of the Occupation, however, stood in the way of any real consecration of the
Resistance.159 But what is important for us in relation to Hiroshima mon amour is not only the
fratricidal struggles, guerre franco-franaise, the internecine wars of 1945, but also their

156

Henry Russo, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 20.
157
Ibid., p. 21.
158
Ibid., p. 20.
159
Ibid., p. 19.
82

resurrection in the late1950s with the Algerian War of independence. The weak and ineffective
French Fourth Republic, established in 1954, was falling apart once again as the old
contradictions of Resistantialisme (the right-wingers who resisted the resistance) and the resisters
(resistancialism with a c and not a t) had polarized the French population. General de Gaulle was
once again summoned to rally the nation in 1958. The wounds of political cleavage that had torn
the fabric of French nationalistic unity in 1944 re-surfaced in a rather surrealistic constellation.
The right-wing fundamentalists and the Organisation de l'arme secrte (OAS) regarded Algeria
as an integral part of France (a view that de Gaulle himself held for a long time) and felt that the
action of the French Fifth Republic in 1959 was a betrayal once again by de Gaulle, while the
left (mostly students and intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre) and the rest of the world
including the United Nations were against the prospect of maintaining a French-Algiers. Resnais
doesnt get involved directly in Hiroshima mon amour with that issue, but his later film Muriel
will take the subject, especially of French torture of Algerian civilians, on moral grounds more
specifically.160

160

The dirty secret of French racist violence by the Prefect of the police, the Nazi collaborator,
Maurice Papon, in 1961 against the FLN supporters in Paris is the theme of Michael Hanekes
Cach (2005) that not only indicts a whole country for keeping this shameful and bloody episode
of history under a tight rug, with a secrecy of silence, which was only recently lifted after a small
ceremony of dedicating a plaque on the Saint-Michels Bridge, Ici on noie les Algriens (Here
we drown Algerians)on the river Seine where the murderous Papons police henchmen forcibly
drowned hundreds of Algerian protestors and threw their dead bodies into it after killing a score
of them in the police precincts in cold-blooded murder which would have even made the Nazis
proud. But it also exposes the bourgeois complicity of the French liberal and intellectual
establishment that once again came out in full force against Islamic terrorism without
questioning its own role in the treatment and racial violence against the Muslim immigrants in
France who are subjected to discrimination and racial attacks from the French government,
notably the police and the right wing racist La Pens National Liberation Front party. For a
83

As far as Resnais is concerned, he himself was not entirely innocent during the German
Occupation (1940-1944), as he simply sleep-walked through the period by enrolling in an acting
school, the Cours Rne Simon in 1941, in Paris. As Kreidl reports, Resnais himself, later,
somewhat sadly and guiltily admitted he was so busy absorbing theater that he didnt even know
there was a resistance.161 He was neither a partisan resistant fighter nor a Ptain supporter, but
rather apolitical, a stance that he always maintained, despite the fact that he made many political
films that got into trouble with the censors.162 He was oblivious of the Occupation and
therefore attested to the mild experience the Parisian had of the World War II.163 But Greene
doesnt implicate Resnais; she instead rightly implicates French censorship for the absence of

critique of French bourgeois complicity in Hanekes Cach, see Jehanne-Marie Gavarini,

Rewind: The Will to Remember, The Will to Forget in Michael Hanekes Cach, Millennial
Cinema: Memory in Global Film, ed. Amresh Sinha and Terence McSweeney (New York: A
Wallflower Book/Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 192-208.
161
Kreidl, pp.35-36
162
The French government, the land of Libert, galit, fraternit, seems to be extraordinarily
sensitive to criticism of its past and present policies. After the World War II it imposed strict
censorship guidance on cultural and political materials that might expose its troubled past and
collaboration with the Nazi government. Even a film like Les statues meurent aussi, directed by
Alain Resnais in collaboration with Chris Marker, which was anything but mildly critical of the
French colonial past in Africa was banned. Later on Resnais again ran afoul with French Cultural
Ministry that objected to a particular shot in Night and Fog that clearly showed the presence of a
French gendarme. The real reason was, as Edgar Morin told in an interview, that it was found to
be incompatible with the ideals of the Fifth Republic (Higgins, p. 52), but the official reason
provided to Resnais was that the French government didnt want to offend another participating
nation, i.e., Germany, by showing a film that was critical of the Concentration Camps. Resnaiss
Hiroshima mon amour, too, ran into trouble with the censor and was withdrawn from the official
entry from Cannes in 1959. This time the French governments objection was that it would
offend another participating country, namely the United States of America, because of the
Hiroshima bombing. Nothing has changed especially since after the ghastly Charlie Hebdo
murders the French government has placed strict rules citing new terrorism laws that prohibit
freedom of expression.
163
See Kreidl, Alain Resnais, p. 23.
84

direct political critique of French complicity in Night and Fog and also Muriel. She does not
mention Resnaiss further trouble with the censors in1966 with his La Guerre Est Finie (The
War is Over) this time on behest of the Francoist Spain. Yet she does invoke the Vichy guilt in
Resnaiss films. She writes, Still, one need not deny the memory of the global horrors evoked
in Night and Fog and Hiroshima resonates through Resnaiss cinema to affirm that there are
aspects of his filmsthe particular shapes taken by psychic disorders, the specific contours of
melancholy and repressed memories, the presence of illusions and mysterieswhich point to the
weight of guilt and denial that characterized Vichy memories until the end of 1970.164 But the
emphasis here is not on Vichy guilt as much as on the memory of global horror of the 1940s,
of the monstrous historical spectacles165 embodied in a city like Hiroshima, the setting of
Resnais-Durass film for the unfolding of traumas of personal and global memory.
The Jewish Question
Night and Fog fails to mention the Jews as victims. In fact the word Jew is not even
mentioned except for in shot 22 when Stern is identified as a Jewish student from Amsterdam.
Sylvia Lindeperg, in her research on the genesis of Night and Fog, informs us that the historian
Olga Wormser-Migot, who worked as an advisor on the script in the capacity of a historian, had
explicitly mentioned both the Jews as victims and the final solution in the editorial script, but
this important development in the script was thwarted by Jean Cayrols commentary, which
describes this same sequence in very allusive terms, omitting any mention of the victims Jewish

164
165

Greene, pp. 37-38.

Ibid., p. 37.
85

identity and blotting out the explicit reference to the Final Solution.166 Just to put the record
straight here, Auschwitz-Birkenau was, according to Goldhagen, Germanys largest and the
most notorious extermination site. There the Germans slaughtered approximately 1.1 million
people, a million of whom were Jews,167 and the film doesnt mention the Jews as victims. In
Concentrationary Cinema, the editors, Pollock and Silverman, also take up the issue of absence
of the identity of the Jews in Night and Fog as victims.168 They cite a 1984 essay by Robert
Michael, who found Night and Fog problematic in one particular sense. He wrote: An otherwise
historically and morally valid work, Night and Fog omits the particularity of the Jewish
Holocaust and, in doing so, it emphasizes the universal at the expense of the particularit
silently buries six million Jews in universal genocide. It sinks the specific case of the central
victims in a sea of generalities, and the Jews vanish with hardly a trace.169
Lindeperg blames Cayrol, a fervent catholic who turned his concentration camp
memory into a Christian myth of Lazarus.170 The editors of Concentrationary Cinema wonder if

166

Silvia Lindeperg, Night and Fog: A History of Gazes, Concentrationary Cinema:

Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnaiss Night and Fog (1955), eds. Griselda
Pollock and Max Silverman (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), pp. 59-60.
167
Goldhagen, The New York Times, January 25, 2015.
168
Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, p. 5. See also Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman,
Introduction, Concentrationary Memory: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance, eds.
Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (London: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2014), p. 10.
169
Cited in Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnaiss
Night and Fog, p. 5.
170
Armes, p. 116. Cayrol was captured by the Gestapo as a part of the French Resistance and
sent to the Concentration Camp in Fresnes for nine months and was freed but captured again and
sent to the labor camp in Mauthausen-Gusen for the remainder of the war. Cayrol published two
essays in 1950 as Lazare parmi nous (Lazarus among us) about his experience in the
Concentration Camp by invoking the Biblical figure as an art born out of the death camps. It is
true that Cayrol almost died in the Mauthausen. It was one the largest labor camps in Upper
86

the film doesnt mention the Jews as victims then how can it be called a Holocaust film. They
remind us that the name Holocaust, deriving from the Greek word holokauston, meaning burnt
whole, originates in the Hebrew word olah. Olah was the most sacred sacrifice in which,
exceptionally everything, was wholly consumed by fire so that the scented aroma could rise to
serve the deity.171 So how do we solve this paradox of the universal substituting the
particular? The film avoids the racial exterminatory principles behind the logic of the
Holocaustsomething that Paul Celan would atone for by translating Cayrols generalized
metaphor of old concentration camp monster to the particularized racial genocide of the Jews
as Rassenwahne (racial madness)172 in one of the (West) German translations of the filmbut

Austria near the city of Linz where Germanys political and ideological prisoners were
exterminated through labor (Vernichtung durch Arbeit). Mauthausen complex didnt have an
extermination chamber till 1941. In Mauthausen, the inmates were used for slave labor, a
reference Cayrol repeatedly makes in his commentary in the film. The total death toll in
Mauthausen Concentration Camp complex was, according to the Wikipedia source, anywhere
between 122,776 to 324,000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MauthausenGusen_concentration_camp
The prisoners were sent to neighboring extermination facilities, after they were found to be of no
use to the industrial labor. But due to high transportation cost the Germans built a gas chamber in
December 1941 which could kill about 120 prisoners at a time. There is a general confusion
about the death or Extermination Camps and the Concentration Camps. Extermination Camps
were exclusively used for exterminating the prisoners by gassing installations in camps like
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, etc., where the prisoners were also subjected to slave labor till
they were deemed fit to be eliminated. Concentration Camps consisted of prisoners who were
routinely murdered by Nazis but most of the millions of people died because of starvation and
diseases. For a detailed and thorough examination of the difference between Concentration and
Extermination Camps, see Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, Introduction,
Concentrationary Memory: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance, pp.1-28.
171
Pollock and Silverman, Concentrationary Cinema, p.3.
172
See Lindeperg, p. 65.
87

the editors find a way to rationalize the omission by suggesting that perhaps the film was not
centrally about the genocide at all?173 And there is some truth to it.
Lindepergs article in the volume traces the origin and conception of Night and Fog as a
film that was conceived to commemorate the memory of the deportation of the French resistance
fighters and was not about the killing of 11 million that included Jews (six million), Sinti and
Romani people (two million) as well as Poles and Slavs, political dissidents, homosexuals,
physically and mentally disabled, etc. The editors, on the other hand, take refuge by suggesting
that its generalist outlook could be interpreted as a systemic logic within which such
destruction could have occurred alongside other variants of the same economic and political
logic?174 What they mean by the systemic logic can be interpreted as the industrial mode of
destruction applied to human capital. The film makes direct references not only to slave
laborfor which the able-bodied prisoners were widely used, a major theme of Schindlers List
(1993)but the usage of body parts for the production of capital goods like soap made out of
skin, hair used for making ropes, gold extracted from the corpses for the Reichs coffers to
finance the war, etc. But the destruction of the European Jewry was not simply a product of
Capitalisms systemic logic, but, as Lawrence Langer suggests, it was a systemic use of violence
against a targeted people and thats what is amiss in Night and Fog, an otherwise admirable film.
Even Cayrols epilogue widely acclaimed for its poetic lyricism lacks in any specificity or
uniqueness attributed to the Holocaust (Those who pretend all this happened only once, at a

173
174

Pollock and Silverman, Concentrationary Cinema, p. 5.

Ibid, pp. 5-6.
88

certain time and in a certain place) by the survivors and scholars like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel,
Saul Friedlander, Lawrence Langer, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and others.
If that is the excuse for redeeming a film about the Holocaust to be really not about the
Holocaust but some universal genocide, then Lindepergs objections that the East Germans and
the American media butchered the film for political reasons should be of any concern to us? The
American and the East Germans (under the Soviet influence), all deliberately (mis)translated the
film to advance their own specific political agendas by paying little attention to the integrity of
the filmic construction. The East Germans deliberately mangled Cayrols final warning in the
film that makes an appeal to universal responsibility to their own political ends. For them the
film traced the origins of fascism in capitalism which was emphasized by showing the British
bulldozer pushing the corpses into the ditches in Concentration Camps in Bergen-Belsen. For the
Americans the film represented a warning against the spreading of Communist ideology across
the globe in sync with their Cold War politics. Cayrols epilogue, Those who pretend all this
happened only once, at a certain time and in a certain place, those who refuse to look around
them, deaf to the endless cry, was narrated by the well-known American journalist Quentin
Reynolds as follows: Those who refuse to look around and not see the cruelty of new crimes,
those who refuse to recall and ponder the past and the present for the sake of the future.
Communism is the productive murder. Lenin, revered today as the saviour of Russia, liquidated
millions and allowed millions more to starve.175 The simple irony that the author of the
epilogue was an avowed French Communist and was sent to the concentration camp as a

175

Cited in Lindeperg, p. 67.

89

resistance fighter probably never occurred to Reynolds or to the producers of the independent
chain, Metropolitan Broadcasting Corporation. In Jerusalem, tells Lindeperg, the film was shown
in fragments without Eislers music with American subtitles during the Eichmann trial in 1961
with the prosecutors numerous explanations that emphasized the images relating to the
extermination of the Jews that Cayrol had erased176 from his commentary.
Is Nuclear Holocaust as Unrepresentable as the Holocaust?
The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason. George Steiner
In the film, Hiroshima mon amour, Hiroshima is beyond rational inscription holding dear
to Durass literary strategy and stylistic to offer no direct representation of the events in her
writings. Thus only indirectly can we talk about Hiroshimas traumatic history before realizing
that its not a historical trauma that we are confronting here but an imperialistic warfare that took
hundreds of thousands of peoples lives; historical, perhaps, is the only proper way to address
this mass destruction. The pictures of the mushroom clouds taken from thousands of feet above
in the sky (reminding us of Kluges strategy from above/below) had a mesmerizing and
stupefying effect on the consciousness of the American people, their sublime and terrifying spell
from above fixed the gaze upwards and blurred the reality below. The images of the Second
World War hardly ever depicted the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, except for the stock
footage of the mushroom clouds. The spectacle of atomic horror would descend much later after
the initial fascination had subsided. This was a spectacle created for a public used to responding
in a programmatic fashion. It was a deliberate stunt to obscure the reality. Like Benjamins little

176

Ibid., p. 65.
90

hunchback hidden under the table, Trumans administration was pulling all the strings to win
the propaganda war.177 The purging of the images of Atomic bombings in the US and Western
media twisted the actual event of those attacks to a future foreboding of what was to come. What
happened no longer mattered, because what was about to happen gained more currency. History
was belied in the conspiracy of a future history that is always already to come, thus each and
every instance of atrocity merely points to the major atrocity yet to come. The task of the
historian is to show an uncanny passion that turns into an obligation to tell people the truth about
the past, that-which-was.178 In other words, a historian must contemplate the finality of death
as her starting point. History is bound to the life of the past, which if not regarded or preserved
will inevitably recede into oblivion. Oblivion is the possibility from which the historian draws
her passion for not letting it become the past. At all stages the oblivion must be guarded from the
historians clinical gaze, the Medusan gaze. History does not recover the past; it merely restores
it to the continuum of time.
How does Resnais present the story of Hiroshima? For he does not take recourse in
history, because history, as Hayden White has taught us, is nothing but a technique of narrative
that uses facts and events for determining meaning that is outside and not inside life.179 Such a
technique is postulated by Gertrude Stein in her reading of newspaper articles on crimes. White
quotes at length from her 1936 lectures Narrations, which, in brief, basically imply that in the

177

Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, p. 253.

Edith Wyschogrod, Prologue, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the
Nameless Others (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. xi.
179
Hayden White, The Modernist Event, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, ed.
Hayden White (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 30.
91
178

newspaper crime story it is the crime that is interesting, whereas in the detective novel it is not
the crime but the story, the narrative about the crime, that is more interesting. Newspaper readers
read the crime story because it is immediately present and complete in the story he/she reads.
While reading a crime story or novel, the reader is not seeking the answer to the story because
knowing the answer spoils it. I remember a childhood anecdote. My elder brothers friend was
a big fan of Agatha Christies murder mysteries and whenever he had a fight with his younger
sister he would reveal the name of the murderer to her before she had a chance to finish the
novel. That was his cruel revenge. In a mystery novel nobody wants to know who the criminal is
and how the crime is solved until the story ends. In a newspaper article we are not looking for the
identity of the criminal and the resolution of the crime till the end of the story, because it is given
to us right in the beginning, in the very first paragraph, as a real fact. If we apply that criterion to
Hiroshima mon amour as a litmus test of truth telling of the reason for the bombing of
Hiroshima, then the meaning of the film should have been made clear right in the very
beginning, and should not have been endlessly deferred as Resnais-Duras did. Bringing the
reference to newspapers is important here in relation to the film because when Okada asks Riva
what the bombing of Hiroshima meant to her, she rather sanguinely replies that it was all over
the newspaper (Quand jarrive Paris, le surlendemain, la nom Hiroshima sur tous les
journaux). The meaning was clear, crystal clear: it meant liberation and the end of the war,
which also meant liberation for her from her own personal traumatic history as well, however
short-lived that might have been. When the newspaper tells the story it is complete, the real thing
has already happened, and thus, Stein tells, there is no need to remember it. Because, she says,
92

completed and being completed cannot be remembered because the thing in its essence being
completed cannot be remembered because the thing in its essence being completed there is no
emotion in remembering it, it is a fact like any other and having been done it is for the purposes
of memory a thing having no vitality.180 If Hiroshima/Nagasaki were a historical crime story
then Resnais-Duras combo does not consider it as a newspaper story that has already reached its
completion as being the real thing, as being a fact, as complete and therefore there is nothing to
remember; instead their treatment follows the trajectory of a detective story where the facts or
meanings are deduced from the interpretative acts of readings of signs or symptoms, hence the
psychoanalytical format of the film.
The modernist event, of which Hiroshima mon amour is a prime example, therefore,
aligns itself with the modernist/postmodernist tendencies that immediately become weary of
facts and events and adopts a recalcitrant attitude toward any representational strategy that
purports to engage with them in meaningful terms. Thus the question of historical objectivity
necessarily raises concerns regarding its methodology of dealing with facts and events without
the recourse to some kind of fictional treatment for their representation, and it is equally true that
the modernist techniques of representationfilm, photography, literature, theater, music,
painting, etc.to bring the experience of alienation (fragmentation, non-linearity, disorientation,
etc.) cannot simply do away with the nature and meaning of history.181 But what exactly are
the proscriptions for not allowing any representation, an injunction of Biblical proportion. From
Adorno to Fackenheim, from Wiesal to Friedlander, the call is to not to represent the Holocaust
180
181

Cited in White, p. 35.

White, p. 21.
93

and vulgarize its meaning by making it a discourse that can be fit for mass consumption. But
isnt the Holocaust already an industry, a site commemorating the Shoah as much as elements of
mass tourism, a sort of pilgrimage. People lie in the bunk beds and get their picture taken in gas
chambers and the crematorium ovens. Are these tourists vandals, assassins of memory?
But why not the actual images from the Holocaust? Do they make the event accessible because
they have been presented before being re-presented? Arent they also evidentiary material? 182
They may share the same fate of oblivion that most archival materials and artifacts are ultimately
consigned to, but the objections against their presentation seem a bit odd and inexplicable. The
pictures of the Holocaust did bring notice to a reality that was not even believed by those who
were a part of it. And the same pictures that first introduced the reality of the camps also became
the pictures that erased all its atrocity in some symbolic structure. Soon a picture became almost
like an ad for the Holocaust.183 You want to remember the Holocaust; here is the picture that says
it all. There is always that dread that the picture would be exploited for some other purposes.
The Prologue: Eros and Thanatos

182

With regard to publication of the pictures of the Concentration Camps right after their
liberations in 1945, Zelizer writes, Visual evidence here was crucial. The press used atrocity
photos to stabilize the discourse when it was most shaky, presenting visual evidence so as to cut
remaining ambivalence. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through
the Cameras Eye (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 188.
183
The status of the photographic image shrunk considerably in the aftermath of the Second
World War. The pictures lost their urgency and were hardly put in the context. They were mostly
exploited for advertising, for the instrumental as opposed to be looked as documents and
evidence of torture and atrocity. Their functions were highly subsidized in the market of war
memoirs and journals. Journalists were accredited for the story but the photographer was hardly
ever credited. Zelizer, p. 150.
94

Hiroshima mon amours opening sequence, the preface of the movie, begins with the
haunting sequence of two erotically clenched bodies entwined and smeared with Hiroshimas
radioactive ash in close-ups slowly merging and writhing through a series of dissolves into a
sweaty, drenched, erotic perspiration. A film on Hiroshima begins with sex (Eros) and death
(Thanatos) before a word is said. The first fifteen minutes, containing 133 shots, presents two
off-screen voices, one female, dominating the verbal and visual spectrum, the other male,
repeating the sentences in a metronomic tone. The female voice belongs to the French actress
Emmanuelle Riva, known in French theater for immaculate enunciation of the French language,
the main reason for her selection as the protagonist of the film by Resnais. Her perfect French
presents a clear contrast to the other voice, whose diction is clearly foreign, only after the
prologue to be identified as a Japanese man. These two characters are present in almost every
scene (except for the flashback scenes that take place in Nevers in 1945), and the film follows a
twenty-four hour liaison of the couple in Hiroshima twelve years after the bombing. In the
prologue, the identities of the main characters are concealed from the viewer. Their intertwined
bodies in the throes of passion are present on-screen but their voices are heard off-screen. The
characters are not named until the last scene in the film, when they call each other by the names
of their respective cities. The female voice recalls her visit to Hiroshima and her pilgrimage to
Hiroshima Peace Museum, Peace Park, etc., in great detail, which is visualized and presented in
her first-person account.
The prologue of the intertwined bodies in the very beginning evokes one of the consistent
themes of the film: Eros and Thanatos, love and death. From the ash-covered atomic bodies to
95

the sweat-drenched coupling bodies the theme of private sexual experience with the universal
deathmort et petit mortresonates throughout the film until its apotheosis in the scene of the
quick graphic match cut of two lovers, one in the present (here: time) eroticized in proximity, the
other in death, in absence, in distance (there: space) mourned in memory. So its not the trauma
as such that is the main focus of the film; instead it is the comingling of sex and death as
continuously present in the form of the other as desire that provides the film with more of a
Hegelian structure than has been formally acknowledged. The structure of desire sublimated and
sublated (aufhebt) as both Eros and Death shapes the Spirit (Geist) of the film. The memory is
simply a desire for the past that no longer exists. The film is not wholly concerned with
exploring the nature of memory in the sense whether it is voluntary or involuntary, although both
appear in the film at times side by side, with the idea that what makes these memories a vehicle
for the interminable desire for the other (i.e., Eros) is precisely the other (i.e., Death) that no
longer exists.
A nameless, placeless, timeless, encounter of the bodies, tracing the limits of
communication and correspondence between extreme pain and extreme pleasure, of the
uncanny coupling of nuclear and erotic disaster,184 by its own volition turns into its other. No
longer insignificant, not because meaning is not cared for, but because the very nature of the
encounter is preordained by the spacing of the voice from an elsewhere, outside, offscreen
margin, purposefully designed to alienate the temporalization of the dissolving bodies, its
mutations and paradoxes, to displace/prevent, or better, disorient, any such meaning or memory

184

Roprars-Weilleumier, p. 179.
96

from appearing onto the threshold of consciousness. Whose bodies are presented to us and whose
voices do we hear in this unclassified sequence of dissolving montages? Two strangers in the
throes and paroxysm of erotic passion in an anonymous hotel room in Hiroshima in what appears
to be a comingling of Eros and Thanatos (of love and death, a theme already set in motion before
the story has even begun), the extraordinary nature of its daring, for some shocking, mystery
remains seductive to a level of incomprehensibility only mitigated by its voyeuristic impulses.
We shall remind ourselves that the enduring fascination for the film was, amongst its many other
alluring features, supported by its scandalous unabashed liberated female sexuality that appealed
to a generations longing for the distant and foreign, even exotic, as Stuart Hall has described it
in the case of black popular culture.185 The erotic audacity of the subject matter186 triumphant
over the political exigency of the nuclear catastropheash-covered bodies replaced by sweat
drenched coupling bodieshas remained one of the most significant legacies of the film,
proving once again the old adage: Love triumphs all odds. Thus even a film like Hiroshima mon
amour, considered to be the apotheosis of all the anti-nuclear films, devoted to the ruptures of its
own technique of representation from a modernist angle, nevertheless suffers from the similar
reductionist approach to history as witnessed in most of Hollywoods hackneyed historical
melodramas that routinely exile history for romanticist fantasies. Unfortunately the mystery of
this sort of banal encounter of strangers having anonymous sex in cheap hotels will lose its
radical and seductive quality, which comes from a resurgence of lack in the vortex of desire,

185

Stuart Hall, What is this black in black popular culture, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsian Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 467.
186
Roprars-Weilleumier, p. 173.
97

where bodies embrace in thoughtless thought, as in Bertoluccis pseudo-Freudian The Last

Tango in Paris (1972), which effectively both inspired and denied the essence of Erica Jongs
irreverent and subversive zipless fuck.187 The deliberate un-naming of the protagonist and the
antagonist provides a curious rupture of the image from its identity. We see the couple; we know
who they are: man and woman. We see them first in an intimate sexual embrace, yet we know
not their names till the end, when they lose their particular identities as they merge in the
allegorical names of the cities from which they have emerged.
The synecdocheal voices neither affirm nor repudiate the identities of the speakers, but
act as surrogate replacements of the bodies that lack the agency of individualisms selfpossessiveness. As a representation of the corporeal body lacks the substance of that interiority
that remains consistent in its exterior representation to that interiority of which it is an inverted
reflection. The voices do not indicate the dialogic in the Bakhtian sense or, for that matter,
belong to the intersubjective Habermasian public sphere in so far as they constitute a literary
textualty of non-phonocentric origin. For the voices to address each other without the relative
presence of any intertextual constitutionality, they become both autonomous and curiously
unresponsive to the diegetic realm of the immediacy and hover beyond the abyss of contextual
meaning. The counter tempo of each voice as a sole possession of a particular diaphonic cipher
irreversible in terms of reaching a protean existence, i.e., meaningful exchange, claims and charts
its own sovereign denial of allowing the trespassing and poaching of the other as its own
proclamation in the echo of each others monotone. Each voice remains irreducible in its own

187

Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: A Signet Book, 1973).

98

sovereignty without the conflation of logico-theological model of response. As the edict of God
beyond the expectation of the return of His call in the primordial settings, a call that is set forth
and whose response is not a dialogic reciprocity but a total submission to its authority without
questioning the origin of its necessity.
Resnais presents the events of Hiroshima by making us follow Rivas journey through the
city in a tourist bus and her exertion to the Hiroshima Peace Museum, but he also blocks its
residual efficacy through Okadas curt and definitive rejection of her experience and conviction.
So the visual evidence proffered by the female voice is undermined by the firm and negative
male voice. A womans struggle to comprehend the profound significance of philosophical
principles is illustrated rather tersely and misogynistically in this scene. Male, female, the
dichotomy, the eternal difference (in the 40s and 50s, before the gay and lesbian movement) is
created to lay down the eternal principle of montage, of conflict and contrast. Hiroshima mon
amour centers on a womans pain and suffering during the Second World War that has continued
to haunt her in the present. A Japanese actress, Hidari Sachicko, once proclaimed that If you
want to say something about Japan you have to focus on women.188 The female protagonist of
Resnais-Durass film is not a Hibakusha maiden, but a married French woman with children
traumatized by her past as a young maiden in a small provincial town, which is the main theme
of the film. She is not a victim of the A-Bomb, but actually someone who has benefited from it
because it marked the ending of the war. Resnais went to Japan, to Hiroshima, to shoot a film
about a French woman with a troubled past thus partly remaining faithful to Sachickos claim
188

Cited by Maya Morioka Todeschini in Death and the Maiden: Female Hibakusha as
Cultural Heroines, and the Politics of A-Bomb Memory, Hibakusha Cinema, p. 222.
99

that focusing on women is essential to say anything meaningful about Japan. Instead of women,
in plural, he chose to film a woman, whose interest in Japan seems scant, but the question that
needs to be answered is whether he succeeded in saying anything meaningful about Japan? The
question can also be reversed and posed to Japanese filmmakers, whether they succeeded in
saying anything meaningful about Japan through their female protagonists (unless one is talking
about Mizoguchi and Ozu). Resnais-Durass decision to transplant a French womans history on
Japanese contemporary history, still writhing in nuclear anguish in the late 50s, might appear to
have been perverse and insensitive, and rightly so to most average Japanese audiences, but the
matter seemed to be of little concern to average Western audiences, and also to not so average
Japanese critics, who listed the film as among the ten best of the year.189
The Voice as Spectacle
In the published script the protagonists are identified as Elle and Lui (She and He),190 that
is to say, their names are represented in third person pronouns, but in Elles voiceover, the
perspective changes to the first-person subjective point of view.191 Does the voice here function
as a negation of image, the visual regime as Jonathan Crary has called it?192 Or can it be also
thought of as the cinema that invented the voice? Not logos but phone. There is something about
the voice that is altogether different from the audio diegetic realm of the film. The voice is its
own cinematic truth with sporadic intervention of cathartic visuals as flickers of memory. The

189

See Richie, p. 35.

Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour: Scnario et Dialogue (Paris; Gallimard, 1960).
191
See Freddy Sweet, p. 22.
192
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998).
100
190

voice is introduced as an alterity, in excess (outr) to the image, as an imperative that is both a
command and surrender at the same time. Caruth points to this aspect of interlocutionary address
in her article on the film.193
She, the unnamed protagonist, whose shocking identity will be ultimately disclosed in a
name that will be the memory (more on this point later), asserts in a statement that she has seen
Everything. Her assertion is based on her repeated viewings of newsreel footage, filmic
reconstruction, photographs, and hospital and museum visits, in the city of Hiroshima, in the
aftermath of the bombing. He, also unnamed till the end, refutes her assertion, and inverts it
to Nothing.194 His nullification of her assertion has a simple logic: Her assertion of Everything
is based upon the basis of suppression of technique, the apparatus that transforms them into
images. That the filmic representations of the atomic bombings were nothing like the authentic
experience is corroborated by the following testimony of an elderly hibakusha widow cited in
Liftons book: Later, when I saw movies which showed these scenesand in some cases the
scenes were artificially constructed for the moviethey simply could not portray what I have
seen with my own eyes.195
In the prologue of the film, the visual iconography for Okada is a representation of
spectacle that can be described along the lines of intimacy that develops between the spectacle

193

Cathy Caruth, Literature and the Enactment of Memory (Duras, Resnais, Hiroshima mon
amour), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 25-56.
194
Maclear, p.145.
195
Lifton, Death in Life, p. 453.
101

and the spectator, what Todorov has called the shared convention of codes,196 of generic
expectations between the reader and the writer. What is suppressed is the technique, the
apparatus itself, the mechanism by which the process of narrativization is realized. It does not
efface, as Heath would argue, but contains them. 197 It is not the spectator of whom Heath speaks
of, but the industry, the production. It is not so much as that the spectator is contained within
the fiction, but he/she is the constitution of the spectacle. A spectacle can only take place when
there is an audience. Thus, in Cronenbergs The Fly (1986), the recording of Brundles
transformation and repeated transformation takes place in the presence of the medium,
technology and not human presence.198 What is recorded is the process not an event, which
requires eye witnessing. The testimony of the eyewitness is missing from this account; therefore
the legibility of the video recording is suspect, untrue. Instead of an originary beginning it is
already truly a beginning of a process of narrativization that has deep roots in the practices of
spectatorship. A bond that is formed in the interest of the genre as a recognized is the territorial
bonding. Unlike Benjamins camera the image does not step out but recedes into the false realm
of invisibility, in which media savants like Marshall McLuhan spread the notion of the Medium
is the Message.199

196

Tzvetan Todorov, Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre, trans. Richard

Howard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975).
197
Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981).
198
For a reading of spectacle in Cronenberg, see Amresh Sinha, Cronenbergs M. Butterfly: The
Spectacle of Transvestism, Spectacular Optical, eds. Antelo-Suarez, Sandra and Michael Mark
Madore (New York: PASSIM, Inc., July 1998), pp. 36-41.
199
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (Cambridge,
Massachuesstts: The MIT Press, 1994). For a critique of McLuhan, see Amresh Sinha,
Globalization: Making Geography Irrelevant, Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural
102

All suturing devices of the cinema that bind and contain the spectator in a narrative
logic are sutured with ideological deceptions, on premises that are governed by the principle of
suppression and effacement of the traces of the institutional, ideological practices as Baudry
has argued.200 Heaths and Baudrys arguments echo the objections that Okada voices to Riva as
a dupe to the ideological manipulation of the spectacle. She claims that she actually saw: Ainsi
lhpital, je lai vu. Jen suis sre. Lhpital existe Hiroshima. Comment aurais-je pu viter de
le voir? The voiceover is laid over numerous shots of the hospital, the corridors and the
patients, shots of people visiting the Hiroshima Peace Museum, including the picture of the
mushroom cloud and a replica of the Enola Gay, along with various other artifacts. To which
Okada responds: Tu nas pas vu d hpital Hiroshima. Tu nas rien vu Hiroshima. Riva
again asserts that she went to the museum four times, Quatre fois au muse, to which now a
customary reply: Quel muse Hiroshima?201 Okadas rejection is also the rejection of the
museum and its ideology of representing history in a pedagogical manner. The museum is the
most unhistorical space. In a scene in A Trip to Italy (2014), Rob Bryden asks, after seeing a
human figure transformed into a stone sculpture, how it got in the glass case. This exemplifies
the unhistorical nature of historical discourse in the museum. But, of course, the museum is no

Studies, vol. 24, nos. 1-2 (January-June 2002):181-191.

http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/(jeg3eo45ogxoew451tjjk245)/app/home/contribution.asp?r
eferrer=parent&backto=issue,16,17;journal,13,13;linkingpublicationresults,1:300283,1
200
Heath, p. 107. Jean-Louis Baudry, Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematography
Apparatus, Movies and Methods: An Anthology, vol. II, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University
of California Press1985), pp. 531-542.
See also Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cinema/Ideology/Criticism in Movies and
Method, vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 25-26.
201
Duras, pp. 23-24
103

longer what it used to be. Even in Pompeii, the actual historical objects have been displaced into
a discourse of museology. Okadas persistent renunciations expose a deep void, an utter
superficiality of her discourse. Its not a criticism or analysis, but a response that shatters the
edifice of Rivas pilfered, second-hand, narrative of Hiroshima. Its purpose is to expose the
limitations and gaps in her story by rejecting the institutional background from which her
discourse has emerged.
Okadas solitary rejection of Rivas monologue also constitutes a deeper ethical negation
verging on distrust of the representation of death in the archival footage. He rejects the very
premise of the representation of death for the others greater understanding of the self. He rejects
the premise of representing dead for the living, thus his curt denial to Rivas attempt at selfmythologizing. Her insistent and prostrate remonstrations for her deep sorrow for the Japanese
people and the effects of war that has sundered her soul and left her bereft for some not-soforgotten past have no effect on him. Okada speaks in the solemn pose of a Samurai poet, for he
speaks for the dead and not of them, as she does throughout the sequence. This should give us
a pause to ask ourselves why the woman is being denied the power of representation. Why cant
she address the issues of history without any histrionics?
Anaphora
Apart from the pronouns she and he that the two lovers of the night are introduced to
us as, their deictic function also contains the anaphora (countless reference to herself in the
monologues of Riva):
I saw them. (Je les ai vus)
I saw the newsreel. (Jai vu les actualits)
104

I saw them. (Je les ai vues)

On the first day. (Du primier jour)
On the second day. (Du deuxime jour)
On the third day. (Du troisime jour)202
These two show hardly any serious affection; like any one-night stand couple, they have been
reduced to being inhabitants of an endless melodrama of truth-finding. The experimental
structure helps to build the elliptical and non-chronological structure of memory related through
numerous flashbacks at the expense of linearity and cogency of the narrative function.203 This
disruptive and digressive nature of the narrative only helps to privilege the discourse of memory
in opposition to the narrative that remains anchored to its own principle.
The deauthorial voices locked in a mortal combat for enunciative supremacy through the
logic of presentation and re-presentation decenter the image from its obvious semantic
proposition toward an abyss where language asserts the privileges of speech over the text. By
speaking over the images, Rivas voiceover challenges her own discourse as it strays from its
intended significance dangerously en route to a cataclysm of its own annihilation. Riva uses
language in order to inhabit it and thus live in italmost from a Heideggerian perspective that
we dwell in the house of language204so that she can experience through the alien words a
deeper resonance of her own evicted desires. Language here provides the means to capture the
absence of the real, that is, time, from oblivion. The only way the past can be re-presented to us
202

Duras, p. 27. I am using Caruths translation, Unclaimed Experience. p. 53.

Resnais refutes the usage of flashback in his films. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The TimeImage, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1998), p. 122.
204
Here I am referring to a particular passage in Heideggers essay on Language: To reflect
on language meansthat which grants an abode for the beings of mortal, Poetry, Language,
Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), p. 192.
105
203

is through the means of language. It is only through the language that no longer signifies its
presence in the words that are applied to it that she can rekindle the fire of her youthful life in its
full agonizing potentialities. Rivas past is awakened by and through the language; the images
that her story evokes follow the trajectory of her enunciation and not vice versa. The images lack
coherence and stability but are bound to the vocative.
Why is it only Riva who has both the voiceover and flashbacks, and not Okada?205
Although his character is primarily constituted in the manner of an interlocutor to the French
woman in order to facilitate her reminiscences of her personal trauma during the war, during the
prologue his role is extended to play the antagonist to Rivas protagonist as well. Thus we have
the dialogue in this form: I saw everything. Everything (Jai tout vu. Tout). You saw nothing
in Hiroshima. Nothing (Tu nas rienvu Hiroshima. Rien).206 At this point we are not
witnessing an actual encounter in a dialogic form, either Bakhtinian or Habermasian
intersubjectivity; rather, we are witnessing an interlocution based on the alternate rhythm of a
classical (read Greek) debate, a dialectical principle, in which the antagonist must contest and
refute every point the protagonist makes. This is a staged event to present a certain ideological
angle of denying the visuals the power of truth (verit) or moral conviction.
The Archive Fever

205

Emma Wilson makes an intriguing point that what we think is Rivas flashback of Nevers
might actually be a film that is conjured by Okada. Alain Resnais, p. 53.
206
Duras, p, 22.
106

Riva seems to have been struck by some kind of voyeuristic hypnosis207 or even a
severe calamity like an archive fever. Her account replete with the archival imageries
represents the official brand of history, which I would classify in mnemonic terms as the official
voluntary memory (closer to history than her own personal memory). Okadas rejection can also
be formulated on those terms as asking what right she has to inscribe herself into a witness
position when she was not there. At the core of Okadas plaintive reprieve is the status of the
image as witness or visual evidence.208 Can one be witness to something that one didnt see
occur? To witness an event, according to John Durham Peters, is in some way to be
responsible to it.209 Furthermore, Witness is an observer or source possessing privileged (raw,
authentic) proximity to facts. A witness, in sum, can be an actor (one who bears witness), an act

207

Geoffrey H. Hartman, Cinema Animal, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the
Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 87.
208
According to Guerin and Hallas The encounter with an other is central to any conception of
bearing witness. For a witness to perform an act of bearing witness, she must address an other, a
listener who consequently functions as a witness to the original witness. The act of bearing
witness thus constitutes a specific form of address to an other. It occurs only in a framework of
relationality, in which the testimonial act is itself witnessed by an other. This relationality
between the survivor-witness and the listener-witness frames the act of bearing witness as a
performative speech act. It is not a constative act, which would merely depict or report an event
that takes place in the historical world. In its address to an other, whether a therapist, a jury or an
audience, the performative act of bearing witness affirms the reality of the event witnessed.
Moreover, it produces its truth in the moment of testimonial enunciation. Frances Guerin and
Roger Hallas, eds. The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London:
Wallflower Press, 2007), p. 10. See also Susan Sontag, Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile,
relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image. Regarding the Pain
of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Girox, 2003), p. 106.
209
John Durham Peters, Witnessing, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 23, no. 26 (2001):708.
107

(the making of a special sort of statement), the semiotic residue of the fact (the statement as text)
or the inward experience that authorizes the statement (the witnessing of an event).210
Rivas witnessing of the mediated images further complicates her account of
experiencing the past in its absence, in the presence of the images, as authentic and meaningful.
She cannot claim to be a witness to the horror in the same way as a real survivor of the
Hiroshima bombing, yet she feigns to understand in all sincerity the images that stand for the
real. In a critical sense, she fails to distinguish the image from the reality that never existed in the
images in any case.211 Instead of reality, the world is delivered through appearances and

210

Ibid., p. 709.
In the light of 13,983 people vaporized, vanished, disappeared from the sight after the
first blast, what photographic or cinematographic representation can do justice to invisibility by
an agency of visibility? There are eyewitnesses accounts how the fierce and literally blinding
flash of atomic blasts partially or totally blinded many of survivors (Maclear, p. 32). How
does one photograph that no longer exists, not even a shadow? The shadow of a young boy
forever imprinted on the stone is not a photographic duplication, but a metonymic presence of an
evaporated life, its aura can never be reproduced. The attempts to document the damages in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki through images have faced sustained criticism from both the survivors
and others who have objected from an ethical point of view. But without documentation in
images (which wasnt allowed in the US till 1980) the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will
repeat the same fate of its earlier invisibility imposed by the American Press Code that censored
any form of public discussion or usage of any imagery of the destroyed cities till 1949. The most
memorable picture of the mushroom cloud first appeared in Life Magazine (August 20, 1945),
two weeks after the explosion. It was taken from the cockpit of Enola Gay, thousands of feet
above, and presented a birds eye view without any trace of the city below. Instead of a vision of
devastation, the American public was presented with a spectacle of a mushroom cloud that
would be forever etched in the collective memory and later used as a political football, a
bargaining chip, during the shenanigans of the Cold War. The picture became the representation
of the cool image (almost commemorated into a stamp) that only a McLuhansque medium can
produce for the benefit of human eye.
In general, in the study of a photograph one refers to it not only as an image, but also as a
metonymy, since the event or the causation of the photograph is directly related and cast by the
presence of object from which the light bounces off and is captured by the lens of a camera
through its aperture. But once the photographic image enters the lexicon of cultural, social, and
108
211

representations that make it appear almost against its own free will. As we know, media
transforms reality into images in order to stop the flow of time from being incessantly the same
as a continuation of all existence. From a Platonic perspective, Riva has chosen to express her
idea of reality at least two stages removed from what would be considered as truth. Although
twice removed, she still persists in reiterating her experience as authentic and first-hand. A
witness is someone who has been somehow present to experience the event through his or her
sensory experience,212 and not an experience that is induced by the apparatus into him or her.
In postmodern philosophy, to witness an act means to negate its possibility in the empirical act of
consciousness, by reducing its meaning to that which exists. The iconicity of the image should

historical ethos, it enters into a discursive realm of language where its meaning depends on the
context through which the image is interpreted. The photographic language translates its literal
reality, its metonymic function, into a metaphor, especially if the photograph has historical
impact, or aura. For instance, the photograph of the mushroom cloud, the first atomic explosion
in Hiroshima was a metonymic image; it was created by the materiality of the event through its
apprehension in a technological medium. But the metonymy was immediately translated into a
metaphor. For American cultural memory it became the image of the awesome power of science,
a great achievement of organized science in history, according to President Truman, and a
symbol of wars end. Similar fate was consigned to photographs of the devastated landscapes of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki once they came in public possession. Their metonymic function shifted
into the hard-drive of metaphor. The pictures literal truth of what it was in itself had already
moved into the metaphorical plane that conferred meaning to it. The lesson of the art is that by
not being metonymically associated with the object itself it conveys its meaning without being
consumed by the arsenal of critical language. The art thus creates a new language that needs a
newer form of understanding, whereas the photograph repeats the event by making the spirit of
event disappear in its content. In Kants discussion of sublime, we come to an understanding that
the beauty of nature or space (for instance, as represented in photographs) lacks the quality of
sublimity that an artwork contains. It is not the agency of human or technology, analog or digital,
that determines the translation of metonymy into metaphor, reality into fiction, but the object of
the world in a photograph is associated within the discursive framework of language as opposed
to the object that is only indirectly, only referentially, associated with reality in whatever form it
is articulated in the artworks. Artworks are expressions, photographs are impressions.
212
Peters, p. 709.
109

always be considered with skepticism in any critical examination of a film that pursues the
discourse of memory and history, and the significance of the virtue of the image for these two
disciplines cannot be minimized.
Okadas rejection of the images as reality not only has echoes in the iconoclasm of early
modern Europe, when a wide-scale destruction of images occurred during the Protestant
Reformation from early sixteenth century to late seventeenth century, but is also a rejection of
the Capitalist philosophy that adheres to this brand of iconoclasm. So, he rejects Rivas account
of capitalism and thus indirectly also critiques the United States. In many respects, Okada is an
iconoclast; his thinking is endorsed by the poststructuralist French theory. His distrust of images
follows similar paths of arguments as can be found in Lacans mirror-stage, Debords
spectacular images of commodity capitalism, the colonized French soldier of Barthes
mythologies, Baudrillards tantalizing simulacrumthose theories reflected the iconoclasts
suspicion of images as false, deceitful, deluding, misleading, even treacherous.213 Riva is thus
the Janus-faced witness who says what she could not have seen. She is active where she should
have been passive. She actively appropriates the rights of an authentic witness by ensconcing
herself as a sayer. She speaks of things that she has not seen, but they have been conveyed by the
institutional organs of the state. So witnessing is not limited to a direct sensory experience, as
Peters suggests, of an event but covers the additional discursive spaces of the argument as well.
If it accounts for the medium as the paradigm case for dissemination into the collective body of
the audience, then Okadas objection loses some of its earlier intensity and assertions. It lacks the
213

Ann Kibbey, Theory of the Image: Capitalism, Contemporary Film, and Women
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 5.
110

categorical rejection on the basis of an argument that was based upon a technological state that
had not yet achieved the technological advancement for liveness that is now guaranteed to the
audiences of television and the users of the Internet, which, in Noras opinion, has created a
radical discontinuity between history and memory in contemporary society. 214 Yet, in a pure
sense, Okada is correct in his admonition to Rivas claims of directly experiencing the
catastrophe as the real victims.
I believe the decision to leave Hiroshima in the background is to a large extent a decision
to leave history to its own debris and reconstruction by forgetting its premise as a reckoning for
humanity to take notice of what is to come. Instead of tainting the future with admonitions of
death and destruction, the duo decided to leave the morose site of Hiroshima for the lunacy of
Nevers. Resnais-Duras turned the dilemma of mono no aware into a proclivity of forgetting so
as not to let the audience, their audience, face the moral dilemma beyond a certain degree of
everything that can be translated into nothing, thus the reduction of Hiroshima into a tragic love
story without specifying what really is the tragedy (her tragedy, his tragedy, the dead Germans

214

According to Nora, Our memory is intensely retinal, powerfully televisual. The much-touted
return of the narrative in recent historical writing has to be linked to the ubiquity of visual
images and film in contemporary cultureeven if this new narrative is very different from
traditional narrative, which was episodic and self-contained.Live news broadcast have
accustomed us to a certain immediacy. Between Memory and History, p. 13. Before the
coming of Television age, history was firmly rooted in the experience of the past, but with live
television which concentrates on phenomenon as it happens that relationship to the past is now
being reconstructed by the media as mirror-memory of that which we have truly experienced.
Thus the connection between history and memory, according to Nora, is no longer determined in
a firmly rooted past from a past that we experience in our everyday lives. See also Higginss
comments on Noras critique of the advent of television about how television has transformed
historical thought into an event in Myths of Textual Autonomy, New Novel, New Wave, New
Politics, p. 27.
111

tragedy?). So there is Nothing and there is Everything, according to Monaco in his essay on
the film.215
Death, mon amour
even the dead will not be safe from the enemy. Benjamin216
When Okada speaks of the dead, he is not speaking of Rivas language of trauma, of an
individuals death, but he speaks in the language of dying of those who did not die, echoing
Adorno that in the concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died, but a
specimen.217 In Hiroshimas genocide, the specimens death was unmourned (and it brings to
mind how the victims of bombing were mostly treated as laboratory specimens by the doctors
both in Japan and the United States), but the individual had fallen into a deep sandpit of oblivion
like the school teacher Junpei Niki, played again by Eiji Okada himself, in Teshigaharas The
Women in the Dunes (1964), who cannot escape from the forceful absolute integration and the
leveling off of his identity till he becomes what the other desires of him: a living dead, who can
no longer leave the sandpit, his guilt of survival. Okada speaks for the dead, of the dead, and
from the dead against all living epistemological and phenomenological attempts to integrate and
stabilize what is essentially unrepresentable and non-conceptual. For death is not a phenomenon
like any other, both in nature and technology (in the latter we speak of our watches or cars as
dead when they stop functioning), that can be part of the experience of the living. No one truly
experiences death, though we all undergo its everlasting effect. There is nothing to know about

215

Monaco, p. 37.
Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations, p. 255.
217
Adorno, After Auschwitz, Negative Dialectics, p. 362.
112
216

death because it is what precisely defies the very concept of knowledge (unless you are Lord
Krishna).218 Thus to speak of death, in the name of the dead, in the memory of the dead, we do
not speak of death but instead of that which death has deprived us from knowing and
experiencing. Death is neither a lack nor void nor absence; its simply the end of all experience
and life. Like any game death has a certain claim to that arbitrary temporality that constitutes the
boundaries and contours of all duration. Death is not durationit is un-Bergsonianit is what
comes after duration, after chronology, to mark or offset the limits of life. It is not a negation of
life, which can be attested through the myriad rituals that are devoted to extend its legacy on the
living bonds and cultures of human beings, but its true relevance or meaning can only be grasped
as the limit of the hermeneutic boundaries of time and space. It exists in ceaseless infinity for
itself, by itself, in itself. To speak of the dead, in the language of those who died, will be not only
a colossal hubris but an utter betrayal of speech, for we cannot speak in their tongues through
their silence. If the dead dont speak, then who will speak for them on their behalf? What would
be the act of speech of the dead whose language goes beyond silence and verbalization?

218

In Sanskrit philosophy, especially in The Bhagwat Gita, Lord Krishna, before the
Mahabharata war, explains to a distraught Arjuna, who is dismayed at the prospect of killing his
own relatives, friends and teachers, the true essence of life, about the difference between the
satya, the imperishable and indestructible truth, and asatya (untruth), which doesnt exist, like
the body. The body is mithya, like the universe (Jagat) that appears to be satya at first sight but
is truly asatya. In other words the universe is an illusion (maya) that doesnt exist except in the
satya of the consciousness, the Atma, which is neither born nor does it die ever. It is unborn,
eternal, permanent, and primeval. The Atma is not destroyed when the body is destroyed.218
Thus Krishna counsels: O Arjuna, how can a person who knows that the Atma is indestructible,
eternal, unborn, and imperishable, kill anyone or cause anyone to be killed? The Bhagvada
Gita, trans. Ramanand Prasad. Verse: 2.20, 2.21. http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/gita.htm
(accessed March 6, 2015).
113

Who does Okada speak for when he categorically denies the very existence of any
representation of death? Who is he speaking for? If he speaks from the space of the dead, which
is what Hiroshima is, then where is the limit of this space? Is there a space that the dead can
inhabit without being evicted from the house of language? If their language cannot be heard or if
they cannot represent their own death, are we allowed to then represent them through our
language and our experience of them? If there is, in other words, no self-representation available
to the dead, then what gives us the right to represent them from our own perspective? The dead
are full of protest, says Alexander Kluge. They revolt against the injustice imposed on them by
the living that continues to represent and speak of them in their absence. What moral and ethical
rights do we have to representing them? Okadas decision to deny the living the power of
representation of the other, namely the dead, has profound implications in the culture of human
discourse. How do the dead defend themselves from the constant epistemological assault of the
living, this perpetual poaching of the dead by the living for its precious horns and tusks? Okada
defends the dead from the colonizing regime of visual technology that vitiates the lives of the
dead with its mastery over their state. The dead can no longer remain in that inviolate space. The
visual technology stealthily removes the mortal remains from its sacred burial grounds like a
skillful grave robber.219 It steals the voice of the dead as its own speech. Okadas objection has
an ethical force that borders on to the sovereignty of the dead, who are being spoken for and
judged by those who are not their equals.
219

Regarding the poaching of photographic images of the Holocaust for symbolic purposes,
Zelizer writes: Photographs were used to represent a wide-range of events, not all of them
directly related to what was being depicted, such as when Time used a picture of Belsen victims
to illustrate an article commemorating V-E Day. Zelizer, p.180.
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The living ones have no business to represent the dead, because they do it no favor, but
solely use it for the purposes of lifes own comfort. No more the dead will be used as cannon
fodder for some vague epistemological discourse from which humanity can derive its triumphant
status for the glory of the human spirit. Neither shall it be used for the persistence of human
endurance and spirit in the name of development and progress. The dead refuse to be exploited
any more. They have no exchange value for human progress. Their use value cannot be bartered
for the exchange value of human social organisms. The erasure of the dead, by the living speech
and images, poses a greater challenge to the discursive space of memory. When Okada protests,
then, he is precisely protesting against the prevailing tendency of the modern world to exchange
images for reality. The dead do not speak in a language that is foreign to our living ears. Is this
a command and remonstration against the desire to resurrect the dead for the sake of the living? I
would go on to propose that Okadas responseand it is a response undoubtedlycontains
some of the most enduring techniques of deconstruction. The response can be read as a
deconstructive gesture against the hermeneutics of science and philosophy. If deconstruction is a
movement, essentially political, to destroy the social, economic, political structures of (...)
pedagogical institutions, and if it attacks the internal structure, the semantic and formal
boundaries, then Okadas response contains that very essence of what Derrida has described as
the function of deconstruction beyond the logic of analysis or criticism.220 Okada neither
analyses nor criticizes Riva; he simply doesnt accept her statements, that is, her arguments, as
the given (il y a, es gibt).
220

Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 19.
115

But how do we really interpret this repetitive response (No, you have seen Nothing) to
all her plaintive narration? Is it possible to interject in Okadas curt response a fleeting sense of
the accumulated exasperation at the threshold of an already smeared or besmirched discourse?
Okadas response deflects Rivas story ever so slightly toward its own erasure, and it suddenly
seems to open up a void and a deep abyss in her insistent story, a vague solipsism of tired
yearnings for recognition. Rivas narration starts to deviate in the region where its main
arguments begin to acquire, as Okadas response keeps pushing it into that direction, a dimension
of an alarming superficiality. Okadas purpose is to expose the limitations and gaps in her story
by rejecting the institutional background from which her discourse has emerged. From Derrida,
we have gathered that the basic premise of his critical thinking is geared toward marginalizing
the central arguments of the established institutions of pedagogylike Foucaults positivist
phenomenology that exposes the structural discourse (i.e., representation) of institutional
practices in its genealogical forms from an archeological perspectivewhile keeping the
discourse of margin open and opposed to the center which cannot be appropriated by the
establishment or the status quo. In this gesture lies some very deep and meditative discursive
phases of deconstruction as a political philosophy of the margin against the center.
Deconstruction ever so slightly pits the center against the margin, and vice versa, the aim
being no longer to frame (Ge-stell) the semantic and formal contexts of the text but to undermine
the seduction of the narrative by showing the hidden signifying aspects (sensible) of the signified
(Bedeutung) (intelligible) constitutive of the sentence. Although Derrida claims that
deconstruction is not a form of criticism, he nevertheless, performs the critical operation time
116

and again in his work. Like Adorno, Derrida is interested in reification, which he calls marginal,
supplementary, etc. There is a calculated response to an act of calculation that all official
discourse of history symbolizes. In a sense, Resnaiss Prelude is itself a deconstructive strategy
to marginalize the introductory passage from performing a seductive functionto introduce is
to seduce, says Derridato the rigorous abys to which the episode leads us to. This
introductory passage of the film doesnt perform the introductory or expository role it is
normally assigned. The preface destabilizes the central concern of the text from its meaning to its
utter superficiality, to the deep void to which all openings and closings eventually belong. Its
function is to erase the images from the moorings of conscious and unconscious. Erase what she
has seen and thus reported. She hasnt yet internalized these images of Hiroshima but simply
knows them through the monuments and the media. Her knowledge represents the technological
determination of social formation, not a deconstructive approach. A deconstructive approach
would be an approach that cannot be defined as a part of a system or structure, based on axioms
and principle, but an act that cannot foresee its own outcome or result. Its an act of defiance, not
so much for the meaning but the loosening of the stranglehold of meaning in our understanding
of the structures that operate around us. An act of remembering is different from an act of
knowing. The Introduction or Preface is both internally and externally unstable. It contains two
antithetical forces, locked in battle of wills, the battle of sight and sound. A sight pining for
legitimacy and legacy and a voice reluctant, unrelenting, and uncompromising are performing a
duet. Okadas response contains the seeds of deconstructive strategies.
The Counterpoint of the Voice
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The encounter between the voice and the image is the radical place of a dialectical
infraction. The grain of the voice, of Okadas, has a dialectical quality that emerges from its
tumultuous entanglements with the images, of Rivas, of which it becomes a living contradiction.
The contradiction, the non-identical, of the substantive explication of the encounter mediated
through the rendition of images is being calculatedly challenged by an essentially negative
argument that gradually assumes the formidable tenor of a negative dialectic that Adorno
proffered against the totality of the dialectical method. What disturbs the regime of the visual,
which is complicit in its own totality of meaning as self-evidentially present in its discursive
form, is the absolute negation of that very realitya voice that simply negates what is presented
as visual evidence of what is apprehended as truth. The photographic and archival synthesis of
the visual panoptic with the historical spreads over the critical atonality of the sound for the
mastery of the discourse that is being fissured and assaulted by a systematic negation of its entire
premise through an unrelenting authoritative negation expressed as contradiction privileged by
the word Nothing. Okadas Nothing contains the argument implicit in it that the intense
traumas of the hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is being transferred to the
Western world suffering from the ominous and uncanny feelings like the bukimifear of
anticipatory disasterthat the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki experienced before the
bombings. Therefore, Okadas Nothing (Rien) points to Rivas proclivity for overidentifying
with the bukimi, by folding the nuclear anxiety of the Cold War era onto the historical victims of

118

Hiroshima. In other words, the specificity of the place and violence changes its status from an
event to an eventuality.221
Okadas refusal to accept Rivas claims that she is giving an authentic, first-person
account of her visitations to museums, the Peace Memorial, etc., in Hiroshima, has its roots in
what Derrida would call the phonocentric bias of the Husserlian phenomenology of presence that
refuses to grant writing, like Saussure, the same status as speech.222 It is a false speech, much
like false memory, for it cannot defend itself in its own presence. It lacks the auto-affection of
self-presence in which the object is present in its infinite presentation as self-same: Something
that doesnt belong to the empirical realm. The voice of Riva in that sense is a printed or rather
imprinted speech which lacks the immediacy of its own presence. Her speech is a trace of a
trace, closer to the written or reproduced speech, and, thus, it acquires the form of secondary
memory in which the truth-content of the ideal presence of the life-giving (lebendigkeit) is
absent.
Another reason why Okada cannot accept Rivas proposition of her mastery of the events
to which she claims to be a witness lies in the fact that her position is falsely predicated upon
the unity of techn and phn,223 of signifier and the signified (as signified of the signifier), the
re-presentation as pre-sentation. It takes the form of an apparent transcendence by virtue of
which the signified, which is always ideal by essence, the expressed Bedeutung, is
221

Paul K. Saint-Amour, Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear
Uncanny, diacritics, vol. 30, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 61.
222
Okadas objections can be, metaphorically speaking, traced to Derrida critique of Husserls
transcendental reductionism of phenomenology to the metaphysics of presence.
223
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs, trans. David
B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 75.
119

immediately present in the act of expression.224 That is the essential phenomenological

confusion in which the empirical is defined by the contingency of its origin without prior regard
to the transcendental signification, that is, speech, which the empirical subjectivity intends in its
own self-presence whose mediation, representation, reproduction, etc., remain tied to the infinite
repetition in ideality of its own self-presence. In that sense, the intended meaning, Bedeutung, is
always self-same in the voice in the phenomenological-transcendental metaphysical being as
presence. Okada cannot accept Rivas proposition due to lack of this metaphysical presence of
being that her voice intends to communicate, since the latter is denuded of the selfrepresentationality of the ideal object, the meaning, from the objectivity of the transcendental
subject whose essence constitutes it. The meaning, therefore, lies in the exteriority only in as
much as it presents itself to itself in language determined by the empirical subjectivity. It is not
what is intended that is crucial to the phenomenological understanding of the material world, but
that the very act of intention is possible due to the operation of an activity whose presence is
determined by the consciousness.
It is the phenomenological voice, the ideal phn of the phenomenological order in pure
ideality, which opposes the Bedeutung (the meaning) of the text, which is worldly and
empirically determined, that fails to live up to the sinn (sense) of the ideal expression due to the
lack of interiority, i.e., self-presence of the ob-ject, which objects to textual epigraphy of a voice
that is not self-present. Okadas voice represents the self-presence of the phenomenological
voice (the transcendental dignity) that questions the truth-claim of Rivas speech. Her voice

224

Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs, p. 77.
120

that claims to have seen Everything therefore fails to convince Okada for being the true
phenomenological voice of the signified. The signified, the expressed Bedeutung, which,
Derrida claims in Husserlian phenomenology, is always ideal by essence, because it is
immediately present in the act of expression.225 In other words, Rivas discourse of what she
has seen in Hiroshima (not necessarily of the first order) must, at the same time, possess the
substance of an idealistic operation of meaning that is always already self-same. For Okada, Riva
presents an argument based on an experience that cannot be phenomenologically identical to her
own speech, because the images (signifiers) of which she speaks are not of her own making but
constitutive of her ventriloquism. Her commentary lacks the apparent transcendence that
results from the presence of the signified, in essence the ideal, for it can never have the presence
of meaning (expressed Bedeutung) that is evident in its interiority to itself. It is the lack of
pure presence in Rivas monologue that upsets the phonological voice of Okada that demands a
kind of sincerity that is absent from her speech which in many respects holds the substance of
textual epigraphy of a derived order. In other words, the primacy of the speech is being
challenged by its secondary implication because it is not self-present in its meaning. As a
phenomenologist at this stage, before he transitions into a psychoanalyst, Okada like Husserl
considers both memory and image under the concept of re-presentation, that is, reproduction of
a presence.226The first testimony is false due to the lack of the presence of her voice. Okada, the
phenomenologist, refuses to accept the false testimony. But in the second testimony, at the
riverside caf, Okada the psychoanalyst will help her to find her true voice. Instead of
225
226

Ibid.
Ibid., p. 55.
121

ventriloquism, when an absence is made present, a colloquialism will be the preferred form of
diagnosis.
In the latter half, the film stages a classical scenography of a psychoanalytical theater not
only in terms of analysand and analyst, but also played out as an oedipal theater of Eros and
Thanatos. The famous graphic match cut in the first flashback from Okadas sleeping body in
Rivas hotel bed in Hiroshima to the body of her dead German lover lying face down in Nevers
is an indication of the encounter between an erotic memory and a forgotten death. Resnais here
privileges the cinematographic discourse that manages to transcend the banality of reality, the
one-night stand sexual encounter between the two strangers, into a discourse of psychoanalytical
depth. In other words, the film becomes in a Benjaminian sense an optical unconscious poised
to reveal the depths of suffering unbeknownst to the technique of reproduction.227
An Avant-Garde Cinema
Hiroshima mon amour is entirely set in the present in Hiroshima but dominated by the
events in the past in Nevers, France. It is a romantic story, a brief and haunting love story 228
between a French woman, an actress (Riva), and a Japanese man (Okada), an architect, a French
Revolution scholar. The woman is playing a bit role of a nurse in an anti-nuclear peace
documentary. The story lasts for a full day. It begins in the morning and culminates without any
conclusion at the end of the night. In this twenty-four hour period, the audience is subjected to a
torpid narrative spanning many, many years in the past presented through a blistering and searing
application of flashback technique.
227
228

Benjamin, The Work of Art, pp. 236-237.

Maclear, p. 141.
122

The flashback technique overwhelmingly privileges the visual order in the film, although
the sonic match is also used for such transference occasionally. The visual and audio
juxtaposition in the prologue of the film points to a profound incommensurability and a
sovereign autonomy of the elements that compose the materiality of film, which otherwise have
been, as Stephen Heath has most poignantly demonstrated in his writings, compromised by the
seductive logic of continuity editing through eyeline matches, etc. Here Resnais conducts his
own critique of the general practice of the cinematic apparatus that employs invisible editing for
the sake of continuity narrative privileged by Hollywood and commercial cinema by detonation
(cinema meets atomic explosion) of that particular form. Autonomy of the sound over the visual
(Rivas commentary although lyrical and moving remains subservient or supplementary to the
mastery or the primary status of the visual, as opposed to Okadas vocal tract that asserts its
independence by subverting the authority of the visual narrative). This is the initial violence of
the film against itself. Secondly, with the Nevers story, we begin to realize the relationship
between editing and the process of remembering, the mimetic relationship of remembering with
the technique of filmmaking. Hiroshima as an illegible sign of history is being gradually
transformed into a readable narrative in Rivas voluntary memory preceded by an involuntary
memory of the first flashback.229
The story of Nevers (told in fragmentary flashbacks) is a story of narrativization, that is,
the art of editing. From the beginning we witness a process that through accumulation and
permutations of shot, from their disparate arrangements and confusing chronology, will be
229

See Ropars-Wuilleumier, How Hiroshima begets Meaning: Alain Resnais Hiroshima mon
amour (1959), p. 180.
123

ultimately synthesized and structured into a narrative whole. The film increasingly takes up the
role of a voluntary memory and discloses the traces of editing as its fundamental mode. The
earlier shots of a dead soldier, a balcony, a field, etc., will slowly marshal into a legible whole.
Here the parallel between the cinematic apparatus and the role of memory is most clearly
discernible. What has been implied as a traumatic story that needs to be articulated from a
Freudian perspective to relieve the trauma from its inception is in fact nothing but a blueprint of
how a film is made through the technique of editing, which remains invisible to the eye of the
spectator engrossed in the spectacle of which the cinema is the forgotten trace. From this point of
view, Hiroshima mon amour is truly an avant-garde film that exposes the technique of the
medium to those who are aware of its mysterious language and mystifies those who have yet to
learn the language of film, hence its popularity as a pedagogic film in film studies programs.
Having said that, I would also point to the regions in which the film crosses the boundaries of the
avant-garde and self-reflexivity and enters into the ethico-politico domain of philosophy and
literature. But the psychological reading, based on trauma and testimony, advocated by feminist
criticism simply overdetermines the meaning in the exaggerated and exalted language of
psychoanalysis. This does not mean that the latter is an ineffective tool for cinematic critique and
representation. Both Felman and especially Caruth have read the film from a pre-inscribed
ideological perspective, forced an interpretative strategy of psychoanalysis, and thus have failed
to do justice to the actual text of the film (I will demonstrate this failure later in the essay).
Hiroshima mon amour is not only a film that testifies to the psychoanalytical discourse; it
is also, preeminently, a film about self-reflexivity, ethics and memory, because the functioning
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of cinema is closer to memoryas a confession of amnesia, and a testimony to the annihilation

of memorythan to its interpretation.230 The theme of intertwining of memory and history,
reality and fantasy, remembering and forgetting, etc., primarily works to establish the very nature
of its obligation to a medium unfettered by the objective role it must carry on for the sake of
meaning. The illegitimacy of its formal structure is built upon the rejection of the objective
reality of the medium of film. A simple exegetical analysis of the film reveals the structuring and
combining of the shots in metaphorical terms of an experimental narrative espoused by Duras in
her early career.
The innovation of Hiroshima mon amour lies in the masking and simulation of the
psychoanalytical theater that has fascinated many academic scholars. For non-traditional (theoryoriented) film scholars, the film is one of the most evocative representations of Freudian
psychoanalytical theory of trauma and repression. On the other hand, traditional film scholars
have held the view that the film is essentially an experimental film in the avant-garde tradition.
The problem is that neither side is right or wrong. The film is neither this nor that. It is, in its
own metaphor, neither Everything nor Nothing, but rather in between, as Kyo Maclear has
suggested in his insightful review of the film. Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman carry on a
critique that fails to take into account the cinematic aspect of the film, whereas the cognitivist
film theorists are satisfied with its elliptical and experimental nature of editing, which makes the
apparatus and not the human soul visible.231 It is a work that shows the principle under the guise

230

Emma Wilson, La Douleur: Duras, Amnesia and Desire, p.142.

See Caruth, Literature and the Enactment of Memory (Duras, Resnais, Hiroshima mon
amour), pp. 25-56; Shoshana Felman, Education and Crisis, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing
125
231

or simulacrum of psychoanalysis of how an idea or fantasy is transformed into a story. It

delineates the process in which, if you prefer the metaphor of psychoanalysis, the analyzer,
and if you are partisan to the cinematic idiom, the auteur, transfers a script into a film by
himself/herself getting involved, or if you like, by identifying with the material to the extent that
he or she becomes inextricably involved with both the creation and the interpretation of the
work. Identification can take place on many levels. One of its modes has been formulated by
Freud and has significant influence in the psychoanalytical discourse. The other form of
identification, that is not necessarily cathected by Freudian semiology, and highly effective
and routinely practiced, is the identification of an actor with his/her persona or the spectator with
the former (the secondary identification) and with the cinematic apparatus (the primary
identification).232 The psychoanalytical model is considered an aberration and is associated with
childhood sexual repression, while the theatrical or cinematic simulacrum of an actors complete
merger into the character is considered a great personal achievement. Identification can also have
its most perverse form in its mimetic simulation of a political system. During the Nazi period, a
majority of Germans identified with the Fhrer, which led to the worst human catastrophe in
human history, against which Benjamin had desperately tried to warn us (but that didnt save him
either) in his Artwork essay.233

in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York:
Routledge, 1992), p. 5.
232
Baudry, Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, Movies and Methods:
An Anthology, vol. II, pp. 531-542
233
Finally, the history of the cinema itself could have been redeemed if one had really
understood the implications of its mimetic relation to the audience. Benjamins radical reading
of the Artwork essay, in the light of its unrealized and failed potential, directs us to think in
126

Here in Hiroshima, the Japanese man, according to Ropars-Wuilleumier, can only extract
the information, the data, of the past from the French woman, by obsessively identifying with
the German lover, which also signals the conflation of the past into the present, the German and
the Japanese (both enemies of France and both her lovers). Images in the Prelude of the film do
not correspond to the customary harmony of sound and image. A dialectical tension is sought in
the presentation of this particular episode in which all meanings are created for their ambiguity
and negation as opposed to providing some synaesthetic affect in the viewers startled
consciousness. The harmony between sound and image is broken down in the modern film. It
becomes affected or cathected by the dialectical principles of montage where time no longer
holds sway. Editing is the ultimate form of rejection of any form of continuity that exists in
reality or imagination. Yet continuity editing, ironically, specifies proudly its own demise or
death by proclaiming that the best edit is that which we never see. Film editing reaches its
pinnacle by erasing its own trace to bear witness to its own presence.
Act II - Trauma

terms of a mimetic relation between the spectator and the medium, the former in a state of
distraction and the latter as a principle of shock mediated through technology, which could have
averted the civilized masses from becoming mesmerized participants of the gigantic Nazi
artifice. Even in its technicality, mimesis remains a mode of reproducibility. Mimesis breaks; it
ruptures the rapture of the captivated spectator. If only it had interrupted the rhythm the
rhythm of participation of the masses in the aestheticized politics of the Nazis. This is the
political urgency to which Benjamins Artwork essay responds by politicizing art. Amresh
Sinha, Politicizing Art: Benjamins Redemptive Critique of Technology in the Age of
Fascism, Transformations, Issue no. 15, November 2007.
http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_15/article_07.shtml (accessed December,
20, 2007).
127

Evasion of history is the very mark of the traumatic event that occurs, as Dori Laub
describes, outside the parameters of normal reality, such as causality, sequence, place and
time.234 Similarly, Lawrence Langer has called this phenomenon, the traumatic event, a
durational time that takes place outside the vicissitudes of chronological time.
Chronological time anticipates, durational time shatters and dislocates.235 Trauma is essentially
unhistorical because it lacks what we call a sense of history. Since it continues, thus it is always
present to itself, without a beginning or an endsince those elements would impose a
chronological dimension to itbut in its perpetual presence it defies the coordinates of space and
time, here and there, remains in service without mastery to its own gravitational force, bound to
itself it sinks in the void or the black hole of its own ontological being, but neither drowns nor
surfaces, neither falls nor escapes, neither lives nor dies. The traumatized patient does not live in
the memory of the past; the past is the living memory of the present.236
In the process of the testimony to trauma, as in psychoanalytic practice, in effect, you
often do not want to know anything except what the patient tells you, because what is important
is the situation of discovery of knowledgeits evolution, and its very happening.237 The
psychoanalytic insight or knowledge is gained through the interactive processes of telling and
listening, in the very performance of the act of narration. It is a discovery that is bound to the

234

Dori Laub, Bearing Witness, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis,

and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 69.
235
Lawrence Langer, Memorys Time, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 18.
236
Nadine Fresco speaks of the the gaping, vertiginous black hole: in the experience of children
of Holocaust survivors. Cited in Laub, p. 64.
237
Laub, p. 62.
128

motion of performance. The knowledge is not predisposed to a prior programmatic or regulative

(in the Kantian sense) principle, but happens in the testimony at the level of performance. It
presences, of which it is the cognition, through the trace of speaking of the witness, who along
with the empathetic listener discovers for the first time the truth of it during the event of the
testimony.
Shoshana Felman, in Education and Crisis, writes that the notion of the testimony
turns out to be tied up, precisely, with the notion of the underground.238 Rivas sickness,
manifested as clinical madness in her testimony, too, issues from this underground, from the
vicissitude of her cellar to which she has been consigned in solitary confinement for months,
banished from the sight of the family (except her mother) and society. Her insanity has a
dimension of political oppression239 that has been largely ignored by the critics. Her political
oppression is equally measured by her erotic resistance, the subterranean drift of her insanity
does not translate into ethical condescension, but it flares up in the very symptom to which it
silently testifies. Hence, we must also understand the nature of her insanity in political terms, the
defiant and radical nature of its subversive quality. The most ethical expression of a resistance to
war, to aggression, to killing and rage, is to love thy enemy, and to love ones enemy is truly a
sign of insanity. That is the political crime that her erotic defiance brings in a stark and bizarre
testimony. It is a testimony to a real historical occurrence, a political taboo, a real insanity to
be madly in love with ones own enemy. This erotic and sexual defiance permeates Rivas
238

Shoshana Felman, Education and Crisis, p. 12.

The testimony to the sickness encompasses, in fact, at once the history that lurks behind the
clinical manifestations and the political oppression that signals mutely from behind the clinical
confession. Ibid.
129
239

confession of the real underground nature of her subversive madness, to which she remained the
only witness until her traumatic experience suddenly flared up in Hiroshima in a belated manner.
Using Felmans words, her story in Hiroshima is a belated testimony to a trauma240
Felman uses Adornos oft-repeated phrase, seldom fully cited in its original context, that
To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,241 to defend art against the cultural betrayal of
both history and of the victims.242 It is perhaps more fitting to read Adorno himself as he
reemphasizes his commitment to an artistic process that refuses the temptation of kitsch and
even resists his own verdict against literature that you could no longer write poems.243
Because he still believes in what he meant in his After Auschwitz essay (and there is no need
to soften that tone) when he declares that If thinking is to be true todayit must be thinking
against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the
outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS like to drown out the

240

Ibid.
The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more
paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of
doom threatens to denigrate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final
stages of dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this
corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute
reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to
absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it
confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation (emphasis added). Adorno, Cultural Criticism
and Society, Prism, trans. Samuel and Shirley Weber (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1986), p.
34.
242
Felman, p. 34.
243
Adorno, After Auschwitz, Negative Dialectics, p. 362.
130
241

screams of the victims.244 Adornos fidelity to his Auschwitz statement doesnt flinch a bit, it
still persists, in spite of its widespread clichization, but his conception of art undergoes a
paradigm shift. Once again Adornos mimetic theory of artworks, as worked out fully later in
Aesthetic Theory, as the expression of suffering takes hold of his commitment as he reiterates: it
is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without
immediately being betrayed by it.245 Resnais-Duras stay close to this Adornoian model of art as
an expression of suffering without being tempted by the representation of history that would
firmly place Hiroshima in the conceptual domain by allocating, not eluding, meaning and
understanding, perhaps even a verdict, to a phenomenon, an event, and that would be truly
barbaric for both Adorno and Benjamin. What Benjamin conceived as a history of barbarity is
presented by Adorno in After Auschwitz not as an example of history, but as a betrayal of a
certain mode of historical representation of art whose primary function is to put in shapes and
forms that which is essentially formless, like a puff of smoke.246 The art that survived in the

244

Adorno, Commitment (1962), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato
and Eike Gebhardt, Introduction by Paul Ricoeur (New York Continuum, 1982), p. 313. Cited
in Felman, p. 34.
245
Cited in Felman, p. 34.
246
A puff of smoke here alludes to Albert Camuss The Plague. Camus is referring to the
history of countless wars that have killed more than a hundred million people. But what was a
hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is,
after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a
hundred million corpses broadcast throughout history are no more than a puff of smoke in the
imagination (emphasis added). Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York:
Random House 1972), pp. 36-37. Cited by Felman, p. 97. History is like a sniper shooting from
the roof top at an indiscriminate crowd, standing bewildered, till someone in crowd shouts in
excitement: Its Cottardhes gone mad! (p. 285). Well, the Plague did descend and the
eyewitnesses are both in the puff of smoke and in the bullet-ridden body of a German soldier,
victim of a snipers bullet fired from the balcony, and like Camuss Cottard Rivas gone mad but
131

concentration camps is not the art that we have known, and it cannot be known, for those who
made it made it in a condition that only they had endured. Artwork is constituted by the material
reality of its time and produced by the labor of those whose conditions have been forged by that
reality. The art of Shoah is not the art of the living, and cannot be exchanged for the meaning of
our lives. They are inseparably distant from us and our experience and thus cannot be reduced to
our world of measurement of tragic and comic virtues. What cannot be written in poetry, must be
expressed in poetry, that is the aporetic, and not simply negative paradoxical logic of Adornos
statement.247
And the Band Plays On
Listen to the inaudible silence of the victims who muffled their own babies cries to save
their own and their comrades lives.248 Rivas exhortation that Okada should listen to her, the
silence that is in exile from the visual territory of the image, doesnt demand a hearing; it quietly
whispers it lest anyone hears it. It is a voice terrified of its own echo, a memory unable,
unwilling to remember. We are witnessing not only trauma but the gasping for air of the
inarticulate sounds that no one heard as the SS band outside played on its classical symphony.
Not the pain of six million Jews249 but the Joy of the great composer from Bonn deaf to his
own music. The Holocaust is not the death of humanity, but a species died there; in fact, it is
the only sign of humanity that we have known in its true expression. What the Nazis destroyed
not as the shooter, i.e., history, but as its victim. The dead as victims of history is the tragic
theme of Alexander Kluges Die Patriotin which I discuss in another chapter of this dissertation.
247
Felman, p. 34.
248
See Laub, p. 58.
249
Here is the last sentence of Langers book: The memory of 6 million dead echoes as a
symphony of pain, p. 177.
132

was not the human nature or race; they destroyed concrete, flesh and blood human beings. They
reduced humanity to the stains of human waste that the victims left as they suffocated in those
gas chambers, not dehumanized but their human essence clearly visible in the death throes of
their tangled bodies. These were living human beings who were not taken to any Hell, as Langer
tells us, no vision of Dantes Hell to console the heart of the supplicant. It was a cold-blooded
genocide whose purpose was to erase the European Jewry from the face of the earth and it was a
highly successful operation performed by well-lubricated machineries (some called it
bureaucracy) functioning without a glitch.
So, what lessons do we learn from the Holocaust? One: Not to represent it in a manner
that tells us that it was done by a people who were evil? Two: Can we say that from the
Holocaust we learn nothing, except the fragility of words?250 In fact, there is no lesson here to
be taught to humanity, and there is nothing to see either, as Resnaiss Night and Fog testifies, as
Okada in Hiroshima mon amour tells Riva. It is not the great lesson of from ashes to ashes,
from dust to dust, but masses of petrified bodies dumped into ditches by machineries (always
the machine to take care of genocides for both perpetrating and thereafter cleaning it), such as
the British-made bulldozers.251 We see those bodies not the lives that were removed by the will
of the people who controlled every ounce of their flesh. It was a mass robbery of lives. Their

250

Langer, Jewish Victims and the Holocaust, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 26.
See Langer, The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen, Admitting the
Holocaust, p. 172.
133
251

lives were stolen, snatched way,252 in front of them while they witnessed it helplessly as the
robbers took the skins off their bones (as we learnt from Resnaiss documentary). Killing would
have been merciful to many as opposed to the living that emptied out even the sense of being
alive (and its not for nothing that survivors often have been described as being in a zombie-like
state). The Holocaust wasnt a journey (surely not a journey into Dantes Inferno or a sojourn in
his Purgatory)253 or a lesson from George Santayana to not to forget history at any cost. It was a
warning, cool and calculated (as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were to the Soviet Union), like all
genocides are, to the victims of the future of what to expect, and calling it fate or death as an
awakening254 would be adding insult to injury. I would conclude this paragraph with the
opening lines of Langers Introduction to Admitting the Holocaust255: If the Holocaust has
taught us anything, it is that we were other than we believed, masters of neither time nor space.
One of the lessons of Hiroshima mon amour, following Langers train of thought, is the effort to
transform a forgettable death into a memorable one; but therein lies its greatest irony,

252

Aharon Appefield, After the Holocaust, in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New
York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), p. 92. Cited by Langer in What More Can Be Said About the
Holocaust, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 182.
253
Langer refers to Dantes Inferno which offers the readers the consolation of Hell in
Heavens Paradise. Memory Time: Chronology and Duration in Holocaust Testimonies, p. 13.
254
Yes it was death! I diedand woke up. Yes, death is an awakening! And all at once it grew
light in his soul and the veil that had till then concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual
vision. He felt as if the powers till then confined within him had been liberated. Count Leo
Tolstoy, War and Peace: A Novel, trans. Constance Garnett vol. 3 (New York: John Lane
Company, 1911), p. 1239.
255
Langer, Introduction, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 3.
134

dilemma or paradox: It is the memorable one that is most vulnerable to being the forgettable
one.256
Traumatized Memory: Voluntary or Involuntary?
Cathy Caruths reading of Hiroshima mon amour is established as a seminal study of
trauma in the film from an ethical perspective.257 But before I provide a critique of her reading of
the film, Id first like to present her definition of trauma. In Trauma and Experience, she writes:
The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting,
but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all. And it is
the inherent latency of the event that paradoxically explains the peculiar temporal structure, the
belatedness, of historical experience: since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it
is fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time.258 In the same text
she makes the following observation, The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of
the experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only
belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it259 (emphasis in original). The
rest of the essay goes on to explicate Freuds traumatic neurosis in Moses and Monotheism as
she cites a crucial passage from the book that I present here verbatim:
It may happen that someone gets away, apparently unharmed, from the spot where he has
suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the course of the following
weeks, however, he develops a series of psychical and motor symptoms, which can be
ascribed only to his shock or whatever else happened at that time of the accident. He has
256

Langer, Memory Time: Chronology and Duration in Holocaust Testimonies, Admitting the
Holocaust, p. 20.
257
See Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 26.
258
Caruth, pp. 202-203.
259
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 200.
135

developed a traumatic neurosis. This appears quite incomprehensible and is therefore a

novel fact. The time that elapsed between the accident and the first appearance of the
symptoms is called the incubation period, a transparent allusion to the pathology of
infectious disease.It is the feature one might term latency.260 (Emphasis added)
Here is Caruths take on the above quote:
In his use of the term latency, the period during which the effects of the experience are
not apparent, Freud seems to describe the trauma as successive movement from an event
to its repression to its return. Yet what is truly striking about the accident victims
experience of the event and what in fact constitutes the central enigma of Freuds
example, is not so much the period of forgetting that occurs after the accident, but rather
the fact that the victim of the crash was never fully conscious during the accident itself:
the person gets away, Freud says apparently unharmed. The experience of the trauma,
the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of reality that can
hence never be fully known, but an inherent latency within the experience itself. The
historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its
forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first
experienced at all.261 (Emphasis added)
For instance is not a fait accompli; its not a literal accident, a conceptually loaded word for
Caruth that she doesnt use here but that is seminal to her trauma theory, and I quote here, the
literal return of the event against the will [of the traumatized victim].262 The word literal
doesnt occur in Freuds work in relation to trauma neurosis (and the word neurosis has
obvious medical connotations), but it is attributed to modern analysis by her.263
The hypothetical nature of this theoretical endeavor is transformed by a calculus into a
literal fact. Leaving aside the fact that this entire case of traumatic neurosis is, at least in this

260

Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage, 1939),
p. 84. Cited in Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, pp. 16-17, and repeated in Trauma and
Experience: Introduction in Trauma and Exploration in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore,
MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 3-12.
261
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 17.
262
Ibid., p. 200.
263
Ibid., p. 201.
136

case, a figment of imagination, and cannot be taken literally as a scientific conclusion, Caruth
nevertheless forces an interpretation of Freuds fictional scenario by conflating it with the
clinical research of Dori Laubs psychoanalytical works on his patients traumas, which is
heavily influenced by Freuds theory of latency, as a symptom of belatedness. My quarrel is
not with Laub, who follows Freud, and Freud himself is not following his fictional scenario of a
traumatized accident victim, but making connection between his analogy and the data of medical
science. Freuds theory rests on solid ground, because he uses not analogy but science to prove
his point, except in some cases like, for instance, the Mystic writing-pad.264 He uses the word
incubation period, and clearly associates his theoretical speculation with the symptoms of
infected disease, unlike Caruth who, in my opinion, (mis)translates the word incubation into
forgetting and the return of the repressed. Freud, in the above paragraph, doesnt mention
either repression or a complete forgetting. Actually he insists on the word shocking, not once
but twice. And anybody who is a victim of a shocking experience has probably not forgotten the
shock, but, as Freud suggests in his other works, he or she might resort to unconsciously
repress the unpleasant memory, Screen memory, which in this case was normally applied to
sexual and child abuse cases of incest and other victims. Latency and forgetting are not
interchangeable phenomenon. Forgetting can be defined as a loss that can be recovered by the act
of remembering; it is often bound to the structure of the will and also related to old age as
memory fades with time. Latency, on the other hand, is a temporal phenomenon, as Freud

264

Freud, A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad (1925), The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), pp.
207-212.
137

describes it, something that lies dormant till the opportune moment when it flares up. It appears
much after its inception. Most people are not aware of the infection, as it became recently
evident in the Ebola virus crisis, until the symptoms show up. To confuse latency with forgetting
is definitely problematic, and to come out of a shocking train accident, even unharmed, with a
total amnesia of the incident is quite mind-boggling.265 In other words, the patient hasnt
forgotten the incident, and, moreover, he doesnt experience the event literally for the first
time in its belated appearance in some form of trauma; in fact, as Freud describes in the above
passage, the affliction of trauma results in psycho-somatic turbulences whose origins have novel
characteristics.
Since Caruths analysis of trauma as a delayed response has direct and intimate
connection to Rivas first flashback, Id like to make a few observations on her claims
regarding the belated response of the event in the traumatized person. The trauma is
constituted after its inception in the patient in whom it appears in the aftermath of the event.
Caruth claims that the effects of the trauma are realized only later as the first time
unbeknownst to the patient, who simultaneously becomes aware of its existence without any
prior experience or history.266 If the trauma, strictly speaking, is a factor related to unconscious
repression, as Freud theorized, in order to shield the patient from its harmful effects, then is it
really applicable to Rivas particular trauma that seemed to have already taken its effect and hold

265

I discuss the case of a traumatized patient of a train accident in Mira Nairs film, The
Namesake, in another chapter of this dissertation.
266
For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it
is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped
only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 18.
138

in not so much her unconscious but her conscious life? What happened in the morning of
Hiroshima, when the image of her dead German lover flashed through her mind, was because of
the similarity on many levels, between the posture of her present lovers body to that of the body
of her dead lover in the past, the similarity between the two lovers belonging to the same Axis
alliance, Germany and Japan, and also between sleep and death. Caruths reading privileges this
mode of memorys inducement, which one can similarly contest in terms of whether it is truly
involuntary, because, as I have suggested, the so-called involuntary nature of the memory
seemed to have been induced by the promptings of the voluntary memory. The fact that she
remembers her dead lover could possibly be also due to the voluntary agency of her sleeping
lover who has involuntarily assumed the same pose as the dead lover. Thus to inscribe it as
purely involuntary, a petite madeleine moment, is debatable. But even if we grant the slippage of
involuntary and voluntary memories, because they are always already intertwined in a chain of
associations, in this case as preceded by an involuntary memory, to claim that the nature of the
trauma inflicted by the involuntary memory is a delayed response to an unconsciously repressed
event is highly problematic. 267

267

Mary Warnock makes a similar observation with regard to Proustian involuntary memory that
it is certainly not experienced at the level of unconscious. For it essentially consists in the
relating of a present felt experience to another similar experience in the past, which brings to the
surface with it, when it is recalled, a whole train of related sensations and emotions. Involuntary
memory brings sudden and intense significance to ordinary, even trivial things in the outside
world.So although the beginning of the memory sequence is involuntary, and cannot be
deliberately sought, it will hardly count as memory at all unless it is followed up, quite
deliberately, and the associated feelings, the conjoined explicit recollections of the past, dragged
up to the surface of mind. Memory into Art: Paradise Regained, Memory (London: Faber and
Faber, 1987), p. 94.
139

If we recall Rivas narration of her past insanity in Nevers, it is quite clear that the effects
of the trauma had already settled in her condition, described by her as madness. Caruth doesnt
discuss Rivas insanity in Nevers as an effect (madness) of a trauma (cause) from which she has
never completely recovered. It appears that in her reading, Caruth inverts this relationship
between cause and effect. She makes her madness the cause of her trauma (effect). Riva never
claims that she doesnt remember; instead she is reluctant to recall. I will explain that in a
moment, but suffice it to say that it is not psychoanalytically inflected.
To suggest that Rivas trauma is a delayed response to her past, thus a first time event,
is theoretically from Caruths own point of view quite unacceptable. What is also unacceptable,
which leads us back to Proust himself, who first differentiated between voluntary memory and
involuntary memory, the latter exalted for its purity, is the way involuntary memory is defined in
the literary field. Rivas recollection is neither a sign of an involuntary or suppressed memory,
nor an effect of unconscious forgetting. It is a conscious, voluntary repression of a memory or of
a troubled past that is immensely painful, since it includes a collective family trauma that she has
been reluctant to share with anyone, least of all a stranger with whom she had had a one-night
stand. I am not trying to suggest that Caruths understanding of the theory of trauma itself is
faulty, as LaCapra does when he openly voices skepticism of her claim to literality, to her
advocacy of the theory of trauma as the condition of first-time appearance, but I do believe her
theory is misapplied in the context of Hiroshima mon amour.268

268

Dominick LaCapra writes: Whether or not the past is reenacted or repeated in its precise
literality (which Cathy Caruth and Bassel van der Kolk at times maintain but that I doubt), one
experientially feels as if one were back there reliving the event, the distance between here and
140

This is a classic case in which a theoretical stance, a pedagogic and epistemological

phenomenon, a conceptual order (Adorno accused Kant of the same fallacy in the Negative
Dialectics), subsumes the object of its study in its own image.269 Caruth is blind to this
irreducible nonidentical aspect of the object. Her own argumentation cannot be made identical
vis--vis the object with her already predetermined position. In other words, Riva is not an
instrumental piece for her theoretical enterprise. Caruths theory ought to present itself a
posteriori and not a priori. It ought to ensue from Rivas history in order to become a theoretical
explanation as opposed to making Rivas history an exemplification of her already established
theory. In her theoretical pursuit for opening the gaps and ruptures in the narrative, Caruth
herself closes those gaps and ruptures by finding an overall theoretical paradigm to explain the
nature of trauma. Lyotard and Adorno were vigilant against the theoretical paradigm, the
language-game (a la Wittgenstein), conscious or unconscious (Lacanian or Freudian), to impose
a conceptual rigor on the matter, the object, that they both claimed to be outside the theoretical
grasp. Critics who have decried theory have used it underhandedly in the name of ruptures and
gaps that neither rupture the semantic hold of language nor allow the somatic gap to be widened.
Freudian trauma theory becomes suspect as soon as it leaves the psychoanalytic couch and settles
into the blank pages of literature or in the transparent projection of the cinematic image.
One has to be careful in rejecting the conceptual domain within which our system of
language functions. Caruth ignores the context in which Rivas suffering exemplifies the
there, then and now collapses. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2004), p.119.
269
See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School (New York: The Free Press, 1977), p. 91.
141

sufferings of all those who have suffered due to the inhumanity and the savagery of war by
focusing on a phenomenon of repressed trauma that does not take into full account the
accumulated trauma of which Rivas trauma is an indirect witness. Caruth launches onto an
imprecise analysis of the film privileged by a discourse of trauma imposed from a conceptual
domain that has little to do with the reality of the film. By suggesting that Caruths diagnosis of
the film is incorrect, I am not putting forward the argument of intentionality of the co-authors,
Resnias-Duras, but I am claiming for the anonymity of a discourse in which the familiarity of the
psychoanalytic foundation is made to become estranged from itself, to make the hypothetical
data of psychoanalysis foreign to its own therapeutic syndrome, of allowing suffering to unfold
without the logic of pre-inscribed cure. I cannot cure or understand the suffering and grief of
Takashi Nagai, who wrote furiously in a small hut with his son and daughter, after his wife was
incinerated in the blast of Nagasaki, the apocalyptic tale of a divine retribution before he died of
radiation, of Leukemia, a disease he contracted prior to Nagasaki event, ironically, as a
researcher in radiology.270 Nagais religious poems, essays, reminiscences,271 and other Japanese
artists like Iri and Toshi Muraki, Takako Araki, etc., do not need the helping hand of
psychoanalysis to be cured from the Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Liftons psychic numbing.272

270

John Dower, The Bombed: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese Memory, Hiroshima in
History and Memory, ed. Michael J. Hogan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.129.
271
Takashi Nagai, We of Nagasaki: The Story of Survivors in Atomic Waste! (Boston: E. P.
Dutton, 1951).
272
Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York:
Basic Books, 1979), p. 367. Commenting on Liftons book, Death in Life, Paul Goodman writes:
The survivors of Hiroshima, Dr Lifton has shown us, are certainly fucked up, but they are not so
fucked up as Dr. Lifton. After all, it is rather much to drop an atom bomb on people and then
come to ask them how they feel about it. Stoicism and the Holocaust, New York Review of
142

Nor do they need the human-interest inspired journalistic third-person accounts of six Hiroshima
survivors in Pulitzer Prize winner John Herseys monumental Hiroshima273 that not only made
the human sufferings from the bombings real to the somnambulistic Americans, still mesmerized
by the sublime beauty of the mushroom cloud, blissfully sedated by the hypodermic metaphor of
scientific triumph, but also led to what Paul Boyer called the cathartic end-point.274 A deeply
political, journalistic piece of evidentiary text became a runaway bestseller, stacked in
bookshelves in ordinary American households: depoliticized at the very moment whenit was
being lauded for its humanity and aestheticized for its style.275 Instead of deepening a political
and ethical response, Herseys book succeeded, Maclear writes, more in arousing the
conditions necessary for a reaffirmation of American moral conscience and humanist
sympathy.276 Once we realized what happened in Hiroshima, once its history became

Books, 28 March, 1968, p. 17. Lawrence L. Langer also doesnt mince words when he describes
Liftons psychological method of doubling to understand the Nazi perpetrators mind as
opposed to take into account the survivors oral testimonies. He writes, Liftons massive study
of Nazi doctors is only one example of researchers willingness to listen patiently to voices of
Holocaust collaborators and to study their motives. The category of doubling that Lifton
proposes in order to explain how professionally trained physicians managed to separate their
gruesome duties in the camps from their normal life outside suggests a process of moral
differentiation that perhaps satisfies the analyst-researcher more than the actual facts. Admitting
the Holocaust, p.182. Both writers take umbrage, although from a completely opposite angles,
with Liftons approach to the victims of the two holocausts. Another disturbing formulation of
Lifton occurs when he lumps together the Nazi era of German history, disturbed schizophrenic
and suicidal individuals under the same category of extreme cases of life destroying, aberrant,
human capabilities in Death and HistoryThe Nuclear Image, The Broken Connection: On
Death and Continuity of Life (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, Inc., 1979), p. 285.
273
John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946).
274
Cited in Maclear, p. 44.
275
Ken Ruthven, Nuclear Criticism (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1993), p. 39.
Cited by Maclear, p. 44.
276
Maclear, p. 44.
143

apparent, once its story was told, it was promptly forgotten. It is now here at this point that
Rivas agony of forgetting, her lament (I am forgetting you. I have told our story to the
stranger) not only becomes too poignant but also transforms into a historical fact, a reality that
needs no psychotherapy. Like Emily Apter, I believe that not everything is translatable.277
Hiroshima is a not a translatable narrative, just like the Holocaust is not a translatable narrative.
Yet, the Hollywood melodrama of the Holocaust, a television series starring Meryl Streep,
gained immense popularity in West Germany,278 as did Herseys Hiroshima, in Japan, after its
publication in Japanese in 1949 (it was not translated for three years due to American
censorship).
Part III Memory
Hiroshima: A Site or Place of Memory?
The discourse of memory itself is historical as we know of it through the ancient Greek
and Judaic (Zakhor) texts. On what ground does a place receives its historicity and at what stage
it is conceptualized as site in a collective sense? Which leads me to ask, rhetorically, what is a
site and how is it different from a place? The site (Le Lieu), although it can also be translated as
place or location, is the privileged trope of the French historian Pierre Nora, whereas Edward
Casey as well as Perlman have found place to be the more appropriate designation for memorys
277

Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York:
Verso, 2013).
278
Holocaust was television (miniseries) in four parts, directed by Marvin J. Chomsky, first aired
on NBC in 1978. It gained immense popularity in West Germany in early 1980s but was vilified
by the critics and filmmakers, especially by the German director Edgar Reitz, who responded to
the series by his own television series, Heimat (1984), which attempted to white-wash the Nazi
atrocities and the murder of millions of Jews from the ordinary experience of decent Germans
living normal lives in a small Bavarian village of Schabbach in Hunsrck region.
144

commemoration. In a simplistic sense, site is the clearing for the thing to come, a park, a
monument, a building complex, etc., at the expense of the place (space) that existed in its own
right.279 In Perlman, memory is a means of experiencing vertical connection between
worldsthe linking of the heights and depths, heaven and earth, above and below.280 The
choice of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or Kokura) as the targets of the bombings revealed a clear
understanding of the vertical metaphor that is attached to a place of higher designation than to
ordinary and unimportant sites; both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were insignificant cities compared
to Tokyo and Kyoto. In fact the latter was the city chosen by the Manhattan Project for the first
atomic attack instead of Hiroshima. What saved Kyoto was Secretary of War Henry Stimsons
particular attachment to the citys rich cultural heritage. But this place is not a horizontal space,
as Perlman suggests, its verticality lends its theological, celestial, and astral significance to the
heights and depths of the Renaissance soul, to the Dantean descent into memoria, to the
archetypal image of the nuclear destruction of places like Hiroshima and Nagasaki wrought from

279

I am using site as location in a Heideggerian sense in Building Dwelling Thinking:

Raum means a place cleared or freed for settlement and lodging. A space is something that has
been made room for, something that- namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not
that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which
something begins its presencing. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon,
the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its
bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by
virtue of a location, that is, by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their being
from locations and not from space. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971), p. 154.
280
Michael Perlman, The Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima (Albany: State of New
York University, 1988), p. 89.
145

the sky. We remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they are places of remembering (loci
memoriae), sites (lieux) of memory, and places of placelessness.281
Is Hiroshima, the name and the place, an injunction to never forget or a carefully
articulated system of, what Lifschulz and Bird call, the collective historical amnesia?282 Which
leads us to ask the obvious: Is Hiroshima a site that represents the historical memory (future
anterior) or the collective memory? Is there any real difference between Hiroshima, the site of
the historical memory as the universal discourse of memory, which can only be recalled after the
event, a future that has no past, and the re-membered (particular) identity of the collective
history, which existed before the event, in the past without any future, that is essentially Japanese
in nature?283 This is a point that comes up in the film quite poignantly when Okada asks Riva
what it meant for her when Hiroshima was bombed? Rivas answer is liberation, freedom, the
end of the war. Thus the two memories, of the East and the West, are essentially not only
opposed but distinctly at odds with each other. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to ask the
following: Which would be the right category to explain the nature of Hiroshima as a place of

281

Perlman, p. 91.
Lawrence Lifschulz and Kai Bird, Introduction: The Legend of Hiroshima, Hiroshimas
Shadow, ed. Lawrence Lifschulz and Kai Bird (Stoney Creek, Connecticut: The Pamphleteers
Press, 1998), p. xliv.
283
I am fully aware that there is no such thing as homogeneous Japanese cultural or racial
identity to which the bombing of Hiroshima can be attributed for its destruction. Japan, with all
its multiple internal contradictions of racial and ethnic differentiations, behaved most
abominably against the subaltern and marginalized Korean migrant workers. Thousands of
whom vanished after the bombing and those who survived were found to be on the lowest social
strata for radiation treatment. The hibakusans were also subjected to social and economic
discriminations, especially in matters regarding marriages and/or jobs, in the Japanese
hierarchical culture because of their damaged and diseased status.
146
282

remembering? What would be the actual historical nature of its memory? In other words, why
must history become a necessary concept for Hiroshima in contemporary memory discourse?
For Nora, the sites (or realms) of memory, lieux de mmoire, the commemorative
memorial sites integrated in traditions and ritualsthe un-self-conscious and inherently-present
mindeda memory without a pastis also a memory that has been re-placed, dis-placed,
swept away, by history; in other words, memory stands for its lack, for its placelessness, in
modern history.284 For Resnais-Duras, Hiroshima is merely a site of collective memory, in the
sense of Nora, as also in Kowner, that privileges the symbolic memory in the collective body, 285
in the commemorative site (lieu de mmoire),286 to which Neverss memory is opposed as the
place (locus) of memory, where the congealing, the synthesizing element of temporality seizes
the effect of memory in the subject.287 The temporal synthesis is the function of memory in
alliance with a place of, what Casey calls, its inherently sheltering roleits capacity to have
and hold memories, to hold them togetherin enhancing the power of remembering.288 In

284

Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History, Realms of Memory, p. 2.

Hiroshima stands as a symbol rather than a place name. It has acquired a firm position in our
collective memory. Kowner, p. 38.
286
Nora, in the Preface to the English-Language Edition, defines Lieu de mmoire as any
significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the
work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community ().
The narrow concept had emphasized the site: the goal was to exhume significant sites, to identify
the most crucial centers of national memory, and then to reveal the existence of a history of
France through memory. Nora, pp. xvii-xviii.
287
From Aristotle speaking of the distinct potencies of place in anamnesic recall to Yatess ars
memoriae, to Prousts Combray, Venice, Paris, for Benjamin the Berlin of his childhood, for the
Indian immigrants the Bollywood films, the place, the place of dwelling, is considerably more
influential than time, which instead of flowing congeals, also known as nostalgia, the pain
(argos) about not returning home (nostos)in the mnemonic arts. Casey, p. 197 & 201.
288
Casey, Remembering, p. 202.
147
285

Nevers, memory and place reinforce each other in contradistinction to Hiroshima, where time
and site are preoccupied with each other without the Aristotelian containing or nostalgic
congealing.289
Remembering Hiroshima = Forgetting Nevers
A counter reading of the film tells us a different story. It seems that Hiroshima is the
place where the trivial, banal love story that took place in Nevers needs to be forgotten. On the
one hand, the triviality cannot be recalled unless it is also at the same time consigned to the fate
of total forgetting or oblivion. On the other hand, Hiroshimas tragedy dwarfs the banality of a
singularly trite love tragedy. How can Nevers compete with the magnitude of Hiroshima? What
else can Riva do after being snubbed by the authoritative voice of the monumental suffering but
to reconcile with her own monumental tragedy that reflects the individual madness as opposed to
a world gone mad of which Hiroshima is a continuous reminder as well as the remainder as long
as mankind still exists? The historical disproportionality of the two discourses articulated in
terms of finite and infinite representations of the individual and universal madness creates an
abysmal dissonance, a caesura, between them that engulfs the relative significance of each
tragedy as purely autonomous. We are thus symbolically introduced to a place that signifies
nothing but the madness of the world where we are subjected to witness collectively a crumbling
or shattering ego as it progressively and decisively descends into a discourse of madness from
which the woman, the protagonist, thought that she has been cured only to realize that the trace,
i.e., the past, is impossible to erase from the memory. Both the history and the madness find

289

Ibid., p. 203.
148

equilibrium and correspondence with each other in recognition of each other. If Hiroshima is
preeminently a place of remembering, then Nevers is forever a place of forgetting, or a place that
cannot be remembered. The story of Hiroshima should have never been forgotten, despite the
fact that it is mostly forgotten (Great events in which we are not personally involved are almost
invariably forgottenwith the passage of time)290 as the world is racing toward acquiring an
even bigger nuclear arsenal as we speak, whereas Nevers would never be remembered, because it
even lacks the possibility of forgetting. The inexperienceable aspect of memory in Hiroshima
resists its absorption in a larger narrative whose structures are built through the events of real
experience both in quantitative and qualitative terms. Rivas experience of the war lacks the
moral conviction of a nation. She lives ahistorically in her own world hidden from the stern gaze
of the nation as the family. She has no concern for the war or the enemy, because she can live
with both without a conflict.
Since memory is rooted in concrete,291 as Nora claims, then how do we still remember
Hiroshima, and what is at stake in this remembering? For the Japanese, the memory of
Hiroshima was deeply rooted into a war that they lost and its consequent trauma. The meaning of
Hiroshima for them had a teleological significance. But for Resnais-Duras, the remembering of
Hiroshima isnt to serve a purpose for preventing future nuclear war, but rather to remember
Hiroshima, as Perlman suggests in another context, for [its] own sake.292 Only through
Imaginal memory that which, according to Perlman, goes deeper than the usual prudential
290

Ward, p. 17. See also Mircea Eliade, who also speaks of the intense fear of a Catastrophic
End of World brought about by thermonuclear weapons. Myth and Reality, p. 72.
291
Nora, Realms of Memory, p. 3.
292
Perlman, p. 10.
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view that remembering nuclear images is primarily a means to the avoidance of a nuclear end
that an active engagement with the realities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be inaugurated
through a deepening of memory. The intensity of this remembering of images reveals it as a
form of commemoration, the root meaning of which is precisely an intensified remembering.293
Hiroshima is, therefore, a place that embodies both the concrete horror of nuclear war and also
the psychological component of that madness weaved across the memory driven narrative. This
is the unsuspected psychological value Perlman refers to in Imaginal Memory.294 The sickness,
the malady, and the cure; these are all intimate aspects of imaginal memory, which seeks to cure
the sickness by a violent remedy. The cure is consistently offered to get rid of the malaise, often
the people, the Jews for the Nazis, the Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovina, Yazidis in Iraq, etc.,
were seen as sick, for which a violent cure was needed, that is, death. Only death can cure us
from death. Thus the amassing of nuclear arsenals, the harbingers of death, has become the cure
from further nuclear annihilation to which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the first witnesses.
Stubborn, un-healing Wounds
Perlman mentions that one of the victims of the Hiroshima bombing, Dr. Takashi Nagai,
who died in 1951, wrote about the stubborn, unhealing wounds that the survivors carried
within themselves.295 The actual unhealing wounds of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
who were condemned to their own hell, is replaced, in the film, by the metaphysical unhealing of
the soul, a soul in torment. The real damage done by the wounds opened up by radiation,
293

Ibid. Perlman is citing the meaning of commemoration from Caseys chapter on

Commemoration in Remembering, p. 217.
294
Perlman, Preface, p. viii.
295
Michael Perlman, p. 86.
150

Perlman writes, can only be experienced by those who were present at the time to face its full
ferocity and experienced a widening and deepening of the wound from the body to the soul. The
images of the destruction of the cities have become traceless in a world far relieved from the
suffering of the un-healing of the wound by marginalizing its relative importance, at both the
individual and at the level of the psyche, for us in a global scale. Perlman alludes to the mythical
status of the images of the atomic bombings in our culture, where they have become merely
images, to mark a moment of history that seems to have no contemporary currency in our present
state of the affairs. Rivas case can be compared to Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, who is described
in Herseys Hiroshima, as Perlman reminds us, as a mythical character of the nuclear age, who
upon his return to the site of destruction carried the same open and deep wounds of victims as he
walked around the site, the place of the bombing.296 Riva, too, like Father Kleinsorge, returns to
the site to experience the opening of the sores of her wound deeper and wider as she wanders
around the city in the night. Her wounds are deeper than her flesh. The flesh has healed like the
once-open cut skin with new tissues and membranes, but her soul is still afflicted by the pain of
the other. She talks of the open bullet wound of the German Soldier as he lay dying underneath
her. It is at this point that she will suggest that she could no longer feel the difference between
her own body and her lovers. Like Father Kleinsorge, she experiences the pain as a mythic
character faced with a journey that can only be undertaken by the other who had never been there

296

Ibid., p. 87.
151

before. She becomes the representation of what it is to be an open wound.297 Riva is riven by
the stubborn unhealing wounds within her traumatic experience that allows no escape from the
hell into which her soul has been cast for an everlasting and eternal torment. The themes of
wounds contain the other tropes connected to the imageries of hell, according to Perlman, to the
Jungian archaic sacrificial imagery, particularly flaying, dismemberment, torture, burning,
death and transfiguration.298
Writhing in the streets, flushed with memories of her own, Riva is no longer a person
with petty mindless concerns. Her life in Hiroshima acquires a mythic proportion, one that is
close to a spiritual agony than simply a trauma of a past madness. In this mimetic moment, when
her own wounds can no longer be separated from Hiroshimas wound, we transcend into another
sphere of literary and cinematic construction. What opens the wound in Hiroshima for her is the
form of a body aligned closely in her subconscious memory with another archaic trace of a
murder. The wound surfaces only because it persists in the trace, what the ancients would call
the psyche. An uncanny flash gives the most elusive and hidden image a faint recognition outside
cognition. It is not yet formulated but clearly enunciated without language via cinematic
language.
Okinawa, mon amour
Those who have seen Chris Markers Level Five (1997) will remember that the battle of
Okinawa, a prelude to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was fought as a sacrifice for
297

Rivas character here resembles Yasuko, the protagonist of Masuji Ibuses novel, Black Rain,
who is fascinated with the horror of Hiroshima and cannot stop herself from looking at three
dead woman in a water tank. Perlman, p. 114.
298
Perlman, p. 87.
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the heroic ideal of Japan in an island whose inhabitants were not Japanese. In other words, the
Japanese made examples of exemplary behavior of citizens by forcing them into mass suicides.
Hundreds of women threw themselves down from a cliff, young teenagers tore off branches from
trees and used them as sticks to beat their mothers, sisters, and little ones, so no one would fall in
the hands of the Americans, who were still going to win the battle at this time.
The battle of Okinawa, by some estimate, had a casualty rate of 150,000 for the Japanese
and 50,000 for Allies. It was not only one of the costliest but also, perhaps, one of the most
brutal battles, described as the typhoon of the steel, was fought for 89 days on the Pacific
Coast. The battle began on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945 and ended on June 22, six weeks before
the lightening flash over Hiroshima. A substantial number of US troops had also lost their lives
in the invasion of the island in October 1944. Markers film on the (his)story of Okinawa has
many parallels to Hiroshima mon amour.299 At one point, the lead actor tells us that she calls her
story Okinawa mon amour. Like his predecessor and collaborator, Marker has many shots that
are normally defined as archival footage, including a tourist bus drive through the streets of
Okinawa, shot exactly from the same distance and composition as in Hiroshima mon amour,
except the tourist guide here sings a popular song. The visit to the Okinawa museum, walking on
the sites of mass suicides, etc., feels as if we are walking in our memory in the lanes of
Hiroshima. Without the scenes of Hiroshima appearing on the screen it appears on our mental
screen, and like in Resnaiss Hiroshima mon amour, where Nevers and Hiroshima appear side-

299

See Johnathan Kear, A Game That Must Be Lost: Chris Marker Replays Alain Resnais
Hiroshima mon amour The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, ed.
Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), pp. 129-142.
153

by-side, when the wall between the present and past no longer intervenes, we walk with
Resnaiss Hiroshima in Markers Okinawa.300 It becomes both a tribute and a memoir. We are
simultaneously a voyeur and a fellow-traveler. Markers film looks at the archival footage with a
greater degree of reverence and respect than Resnais for the archival footage. Marker pauses at
the pictures and sites of unheard-of cruelty and violence, gives us a full testimony of an
eyewitness who as a fourteen-year-old boy killed his own mother with a stick along with his
sister and younger siblings. Marker stays with the atrocities and violence, his glance is not
negative toward history but rather a move to install history into a niche of our collective
memory. Marker is not, in other words, averse to the use of prosthetic memory for some pure
claim for unspoiled memory.301 Both Marker and Resnais object to museums and monuments as

300

Kear states that the formal resemblance of the two films is overridden by a deeper, more
nuanced historical investigation, in which the relationship of original to copy is reversed, p.
131.
301
Prosthetic memory is defined in most illuminating terms by Alison Landsberg in Prosthetic
Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004). For a definitive reading of collective memory, see
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1992). I have my own definition of Prosthetic and Collective memory which is as
follows: The discourse of prosthetic memory dislocates and disembeds memory from its interior
location to an external agency. The content of the memory essentially remains the same but now
the access is no longer to be had in the interior or subjective consciousness but in technologies of
reproducibility outside the soul in a mechanical form or a recording instrument. There might be
an authentic history of its nature in the form of its recording, but the truth of experience loses its
centrality. The prosthetic memory and collective memory are also located in the external forms,
but they cannot be confused as one. The collective memory of a nation or people is not exactly
the same as the official or historical memory of a nation. Despite sharing the ontological basis of
memory in external objects prosthetic and collective memory differ from each other on many
points. The collective memory lives and is transmitted through a living culture that is shared on
moral, ethical, social and political grounds. It is shared and reciprocal, binds people and their
community by a shared historical experience which includes many of the elements of prosthetic
aids of memory to prop up and update its data. Reproducible or prosthetic memories contained in
154

places of memory. Resnaiss and Markers objections follow a secular mode of representation of
memory outside the official annals of history. Its residue should be found in neglected and
repressed zones of our psyche and not in the official inscriptions of political and social
institutions. Theirs is inherently a counter-memory, a memory that is premised on the basis of
its opposition to the statist memory, a memory that is closely aligned to forgetting. Here I am
simply invoking the left-liberal criticism that mostly involves both Markers and Resnaiss
careers and their close associations in the early days.
The reason why Marker has gone back to Okinawa time and again, and most memorably
in Sans Soleil (1983), clearly stakes out the importance he puts on this issue. The traumatic
history of the battle of Okinawa has not only suffered an almost complete blackout in the
international sphere, but its repressed history in Japanese official memory is a matter of grave
concern too. Okinawa has always been a disputed Island, and the inhabitants of the island were

books, museum, photographs, films, etc., are not always related to the living tradition. They can
exist independently after the community no longer exits. Collective memory requires a living
community. Prosthetic memory is a technological form of memory unlike the collective memory
which is essentially social and historical in nature. But collective memory depends on the
existence of prosthetic memory for its own existence. Without the memory aid of prosthetic and
external recording mechanism it wouldnt be able to preserve its own identity. Collective
memory is collective only to the extent that it is also a form of prosthetic memory, externalized
in its manifestation as shared continuities and yet internal to the very identity of its community.
A constructed and reconstructed form of memory that can be heightened, manipulated, and
reproduced in the social and political world. Collective memory like prosthetic memory is not
simply given but is always-already produced in a contestory environment. There is no stable
identity to be found in collective memory because of its historical nature; on the other hand, the
prosthetic memory being technological in its essence doesnt only affect the memory through
reproduction, but alters its very mode of production in whichever form it is reproduced. A
photographic reproduction of an image is not the same as a film still, or a tape-recording is not
the same as a record player. The individual and social level of consumption of the same
prosthetic memory has different meanings and values in individual consumption.
155

not considered Japanese citizens. Okinawa was of the utmost strategic importance, since it was
chosen by the Allied forces to be the place of launching attacks on Japan in the future. Marker
recalls the painful history of Okinawa, where the citizens killed their own kith and kin, in order
to avoid being taken prisoners by the Americans. The mass killing of ones own was prompted
by the exhortation of the Japanese imperial troops that claimed that if the island fell in the hands
of the American soldiers, the inhabitants would suffer indescribable indignities and torture,
unspeakable horror, including the rape of all women. It would be better if the inhabitants killed
themselves than be captured alive by the American troops. As a consequence, instead of avoiding
unspeakable horror, the islanders unleashed unspeakable horror on themselves. The site is now
converted into a monument for tourists, who are initially shocked at the site, after learning the
fate of those hundreds of women who killed themselves, but gleefully pose for pictures. This is
also true about the Holocaust memorials at Treblinka and Auschwitz.302
Marker analyzes a particular frame with great precision. The shot shows a woman who is
on the way to the rock to jump to her death, suddenly catches the gaze of the camera, stares at it,
acknowledging its presence and the presence of the cameraman, and then walks with a greater

302

There is no poetry after Auschwitz, but the tyranny of vulgarization and cheap popularization
of tourism from Disneyland to Auschwitz has standardized a format that eradicates the
singularity of an event (that which is always already happening, a state of presencing which
effaces itself, as in Night and Fog, from the cameras/tourists Medusan gaze; like a revenant
that does not appear in the mirror image or in the lens of the camera; that which cannot be
captured by sight or the technological medium) into a spectacle (which has already happened in
its representation) for mass consumption. In other words, the specter refuses to turn into a
spectacle. All representations of holocausts are spectacles of melodrama, whose purpose is to
expose the hegemonic tyranny of logical and historical forms of representations in order to
foreground the illogic and fragile compensations of feelings and emotions from its background
and exiled existence.
156

determination in her resolve for jumping to her death. This suicide is viewed by Marker as a
murder. He argues that if she hadnt caught the gaze in reciprocity she might have changed her
mind. The fact that the camera was witnessing this supreme act of self-sacrifice, which, actually,
was truly a collective murder of hundreds of women, was goading her, daring her to do it. There
she was caught by the image of herself as a victim of history, a transformation of the self into the
image, achieved by the destruction of the real. Marker makes the camera into a witness that is
complicit in this official discourse of history that keeps engulfing the individual memories.303
Marker asks this question a few times. Is she looking so she can be saved? Or is she looking
because, now that she has been caught on camera, she must go ahead with her action. Would she
have reconsidered it if she hadnt been caught in the gaze of camera? Did the presence of the

303

Now this catching the gaze of the Other is highly significant in Sans Soleil as well. In a scene
from this film Marker describes an encounter, of a flirtatious nature, with a Burkina Faso woman
in the marketplace. He says although she doesnt look at me, she knows my presence, that I am
filming her, without ever making eye contact. The power to see without really looking astonishes
Marker in terms of understanding the level of complexity that the presence of the camera can
bring into the real as it turns into an image. This looking freezes the look outside the visual into a
phenomenological space of self-consciousness, because the camera creates the opportunity for
self-consciousness to emerge. We are always already conscious of the camera without noticing
it, but when the camera becomes visible, not what it makes visible, it not only changes the
subject into an image externally, but, in turn, also deeply affects the psychological being of that
person. Peoples senses change when they are confronted by a camera. A camera is a powerful
tool in creating divergent discourse in media politics, and it is an instrument of forensic
pathology of great neuro-scientific value. The penetrating gaze of a camera pierces (like
Barthess punctum) the senses of human beings, perhaps of other creatures too, into selfconsciousness, into a self-reflexive gaze that sees itself as being seen as an atrophied image; both
Mulvey and Berger have come to a similar conclusion. This self-consciousness of the woman
stopping to look at the cameraman taking her picture as she is about to kill herself contains both
moral and ethical implications. Is it ethically and morally sanctionable to take pictures of great
tragedy as a bystander to benefit the ones who didnt witness the crime? Or is this effort
primarily to document a historical moment for posterity?
157

camera stiffen her resolve and seal her fate in a decisive manner?304 Markers repeated
gravitation to Okinawa is predicated not on some monumental grief to pay homage to the site of
historical atrocity but rather on a historical sense of justice to continuing investigation of a scene
of crime that has been virtually reduced to a touristic curiosity.305
One must not also forget that Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Nagasaki, are not
only sites of monumental mourning for humanity to gather and pay homage to the memory of the
dead. One must always remember, and never forget, that these places are first and foremost also
scenes of crime, of historical crime. Lanzmann speaking about Shoah compared to a scene of
crime: The film is at moment a crime film...(on the mode of) a criminal investigation....When I
returned to the small village of Grabow or Chelmno...I am the first man to come to the scene of
the crime, where the crime has been committed.306 Like the traumatized victim whose memories
and nightmares keep returning her to the primal scene of her trauma, we the spectators have to
return to the scene of the crime as witnesses, to give our testimony, and to pay homage to the
dead. Like in Hitchcocks Vertigo (1958), Scottie must go back to the scene of the crime to learn
the real truth, must reenact the crime to convict the criminal, similarly the spectators journey is
not to learn some great lessons of history from these sites where crimes against humanity were
conducted in broad daylight. We had Nuremberg trials and most found guilty hardly faced any
sentences (in 1951, under the behest of Adenauer, US Assistant Secretary of War, banker John
Jay McCloy commuted, reduced or paroled 79 of 89 convicted, and released Alfried Krupp, the
304
305

Kear, p. 137.
See Kreidl for an interesting comparison between Vertigo and Hiroshima mon amour, pp. 62-

63.
306

Cited in Felman, The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmanns Shoah, n.34, p. 256.
158

industrialist who used slave labor in Auschwitz). In Japan, the American war trials convicted and
hung many Japanese for their war crimes, but when it came to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
American imposed a complete moratorium of any mention of the bombings in public. No one
was convicted and no one has ever been prosecuted. The lesson of Shoah and Vertigo is to
always return to the scene of crime and re-prosecute the criminals.
Chronology vs Duration
Lawrence Langer, in his book Admitting the Holocaust, writes about the American
television drama Holocaust (1979): The first is the question of whether that ontological event
[Elie Wiesel used the words against the film for trivializing the Holocaust] can be transformed
into a form of artistic experience carrying it beyond its historical moment and making it
accessible in all its complexity to those who have not directly experienced it.307 This is the same
statement that is often used to defend Resnais-Durass film for not corroborating the images of
Hiroshima for cheap public consumption, for making the complexity and the horrors of the
nuclear blast accessible to all. But Langers objection has ethical weight, for he rejects the
dramatization, the narrativization, but not the actual documentary evidence. He does object to
using the Holocausts real imagery in Stanley Kramers Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) as
background material for turning it into a melodrama of political expediency and moral justice.
The documentary Night and Fog received universal approval from both the public and the critics.
Resnais-Durass objection perhaps takes us deeper to another dilemma that Langer also considers
while discussing the Nuremberg film, which has to do with the fact that the documentary

307

Langer, p. 174.
159

footage, what he calls the screen within a screen, creates a psychological distancing; I think
LaCapra is succinct in his observation that when scholars, including Adorno, Caruth, ResnaisDuras, Lanzmann, Wiesel, Langer, etc., object to any form of narrativization to work through the
posttraumatic disorders as a betrayal, a loss of meaning of the event that has almost scared
and religious connotations that cannot be shared or compromised through mediation or
communication, then there is an aesthetic of sublime in play.308
The bilderverbot is announced, a religious proscription is invoked. Langers point of
representation has largely been misunderstood. He writes, Can representation rival the
immediacy of contemporaneous photographs, diaries dug up after the war in the ashes
surrounding Auschwitz, or even survivor accountsunromantic emotions recollected in
disquietude?309 So Resnais-Durass objection to all forms of representation is questionable, but
their objection to Rivas assertion that she has seen it all has legitimacy. The fact is, however,
that she is the one who is the represented, and thus objecting to her for usurping the reality of
Hiroshima is like destroying the straw man that you created yourself. Of course, Riva has no
right to say what she says, and she belongs to a large mass of tourists who do not differentiate
between tourism and knowledgethats why they need a guide or a guidebook.310 Just because I

308

Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit, p. 122.

Langer, p. 174.
310
This point of cultural tourism of commemorative sites is discussed both by Kear and Maclear.
Resnais too had already posed the same dilemma in the opening sequence of Hiroshima mon
amour where the actresss Japanese lover contradicts her assertion that she has seen and
understood Hiroshima. He questions her because her knowledge is based only on the visual
evidence of newsreels, newspaper reports and belated visits to the sites of devastation. Kear, pp.
140-141. Resnaiss attempts to capture the elusive relationship between vision and knowledge
in Hiroshima mon amour is a way of indicating the hubris of the all-knowing eyea fast tourist
160
309

have been to the Coliseum doesnt make me an authority on the Coliseums history or
knowledge, but, at the same time, the significance of the Coliseum is not denigrated because of
my uncleansed presence. I think Resnais-Durass objection to trivializing Hiroshima by recycling
those images has some validity, but they ignore the potential of those visuals that for many stand
as the only truth about the film. It is also true that the only way we get closer to the fact is
through fiction, a clich. No photographic or cinematic representation can ever truly re-present
the event that was the Holocaust, because the pictures commit us back to the chronological time,
to the mediation of historical consciousness at the expense of the durational time, the time that
marks the discontinuity, the displacement, of the chronological time.311 Historical memory is
objective, social, and political, also chronological despite the multiple flashbacks. Hiroshima
mon amour doesnt subscribe to the chronological form of historical memory, but rather it
adheres to a form of durational time.
A Masochistic Tale
vision that might rein in the ruins. In questioning how our historical knowledgeour image of
the pastgot to be constructed from a given perception, before the watchful gaze of a camera, he
opens up a space in which to consider the importance of perceiving anew. As such, Hiroshima
mon amour provides a possible incentive for viewers to question the image repertoire that
constitutes our sense of consciousnessor what we know. In gesturing toward that stubborn
fissure that mushroom between images and meaning, the film registers how the perceptual
experience of viewing recorded documentation of event may not be commensurate with the
intelligibility (the meaning) of the event. Maclear, p. 149.
311
Langer in the first chapter, Memorys Time: Chronology and Duration in Holocaust
Testimonies, differentiates the two in the following manner: Durational time does not believe
in or allow for any sort of foreclosure towards the past: its foreclosure expels the future (p. 20).
But chronological time anticipates something, perhaps a future that seeks to rescue the victim
from that mute fate p. 19).One is a catastrophe, where nothing is anticipated, for it has already
happened, but, the other is a fiction, where the meaning of death shall be rescued in the
mythology and narrative of sacrifice and hope and justice, in the timebound catharsis of
historical imagination. Admitting the Holocaust, pp. 13-23.
161

Maclear claims that many critics have found it rather objectionable how the film through
cinematic resolutions of camera angles and placements revels masochistically in her sad
story312 (emphasis in original). I agree that the film has a masochistic bend, but not necessarily
in a negative sense as the unnamed critics suggest. To me Hiroshima mon amour is a tale of
masochistic desire in a sense that transcends the meaning of the term masochism translated as a
symptom of clinical pathology, first crafted by Krafft-Ebing in 1866 and later adopted by
Freud,313 to the true spirit in which Sacher-Masoch created it and its affirmative resolution in
Deleuze.314 Masculine violence (history) and feminine anguish permeates the structure of the
film in a masochistic fashion. Rivas relentless desire for suffering and elevating it to a state of
pure poetic reverie is a sign of an acute self-abnegation in light of the delayed pleasure it holds
for her. The pain has its own erotic counterpart in that of acute pleasure. The sadistic impulses of
her familys cruelty are internalized in her masochistic desire for her past lover, which is
transformed into historicized/eroticized lassitude in the onanistically inspired posture (during her
312

Maclear, p. 150.
R. Kraft-Ebbing, Psychopathia sexualis: A medico-forensic study (New York: Putnam, 1965).
Freud on masochism, sadism, and aggression says that: We are led to the view that masochism
is older than sadism, and that sadism is the destructive instinct directed outwards, thus acquiring
the characteristic of aggressiveness. For masochism has the more primary relation with the
instinctive desire for death. Freud writes: And now we are struck by the significance of the
possibility that the aggressiveness may not be able to find satisfaction in the external world
because it comes up against real obstacles. If this happens, it will perhaps retreat and increase the
amount of self-destructiveness holding sway in the interior....Impeded aggressiveness seems to
involve a grave injury. It really seems as though it is necessary for us to destroy some other thing
or person in order to not destroy ourselves, in order to guard against the impulsion of selfdestruction. A sad disclosure indeed for the moralist! New Introductory Lectures on
psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1964), p. 105.
Cited in Perlman on p. 145.
314
See Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty &
Venus and Furs, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
162
313

madness in the cellar) that shows her reclining in the bed with one hand covering her genitals,
like Manets Olympia, defying the worlds gaze. Okada wants her for his own souvenir, while
she shows no remorse in leaving him. The present she can leave as long as she keeps her past,
her memory. Okada needs a memory for his own posterity by aligning himself into her past
which she refuses to part with as a gift to him. The very act of remembering brings to life events
that were supposedly forgotten in a delayed response. Has she been waiting for this to happen so
that her madness could once again unfold in its utmost agonizing delicacy as the very condition
or symptom of a masochistic desire?315 She does not only reveal her past, a traumatic past
indeed, but also revels in it. Her narratives frequent recourses to flashbacks in fragmentary
constellation take on increasingly a masochistic bend in which self-flagellation becomes a ritual
for cleansing as well as lucidity.
Riva finds her voice in the language of madness that alienates her from Okadas world, a
world in which the truth stares so hard in ones face that one is immobilized by its sheer
ferociousness. The stern admonishing of the historical memory only rekindles the desire to
displace or defy such authority in the soliloquy of a misogynistic/masochistic tale. Rivas
masochism comes as a rescue from the overbearing monumentality of Hiroshimas dour and
towering presence. The historical site commanding to remember the monumentality of its
presence obliterates the absence or void of memory, the lack, if you will. Against this
stupendous force of conscience Riva can do nothing but attempt, although unconsciously, to take
control of her story, to wrest it out of the grand narrative (rcit) of Hiroshima, by lulling her
315

The womans masochistic pleasure can be linked to her narcissistic obsession with
mourning (emphasis added). Sarah French, From History to Memory, p. 8.
163

consciousness in the delicious pain that she suffers from by her own volition into the private
sphere of indolence and indulgence. The voluptuous route of her memory is saturated with erotic
propensities in a place where death has complete dominion. A place that is sacred in its
relationship with death can only intimate death.
The World of Memory
For Deleuze Hiroshima mon amour is a film that constructs a memory of two people
whose memories are incommensurable regions of the past, the region of Nevers and the region
of Hiroshima.316 As the film proceeds, the personal memories of Nevers and Hiroshima begin to
detach themselves for a memory that is becoming the memory of the two.317 Each character
forgets his or her personal memory, forming the basis for allowing the other to enter into a
sharing of the sheets of past. By narrating her story of Nevers, Riva, unconsciously, draws
Okada into her memory with his more than willing consent, and thereby, ironically, suspends (or
sublates) the antithetical dialectical operation of everything and nothing. Deleuze goes onto
speculate whether this action of hers doesnt create the possibility of the memory becoming the
world detaching itself from their persons?318 Herein lies the paradox of memory. Resnais, as
Deleuze points out, started his career with the exposition of collective memory, especially in his
short films on the Bibliothque Nationale, Guernica, and Auschwitz, but with his features, for
example, Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, he concentrated more on
316

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 117-118.

Deleuze, p. 118. See also Emma Wilson, who provides an intriguing interpretation of the
flashback memory that is becoming the memory of both, which suggests the possibility that the
story of Nevers could have been imagined by Okada who relentlessly pursues Riva to tell the
story. Wilson, Hiroshima, p. 53.
318
Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 118.
164
317

individual memory whose veracity remained ambiguously vague. So how does the memory
become the world (Toute la mmoire du monde)? Perhaps the answer lies in Bergsons Matter
and Memory.319
Resnais like Bergson, as John Ward points out, never tires of affirming, memory does
more than preserve, it also creates.320 Deleuzes reference to memory becoming the world has
an obvious connection to Bergson, whose theory of memory encompasses the world. Like
Derridas famous statement in Of Grammatology, there is nothing outside the text, similarly,
for Bergson, there is nothing outside memory: Thus through memory the world becomes my
world.321 This suggestion that there is in memory a world in the making has much to do with
what I have suggested above with regard to sheets of the past in which the individual memory
becomes virtually acquainted with the others past that has physically ceased to exist. In
Hiroshima mon amour, although Rivas past tragedy is not something to which Okada can have
direct access, by experiencing the memory 322 virtually with her (Quand tu es dans la cave, je
sui mort? When you are in the cellar, Am I dead?), with someone he loves, he is no longer
eternally separated from her by his own memory. Their separate memories not only draw them
together, but also make a different whole, a dure, which is a world of its own, a memoryworld, without separation and fragmentation or serialization. As long as Rivas memory of
Nevers is hers only, she remains fragmented from the present and the future. But by dislocating

319

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone
Books, 1991).
320
John Ward, p. 14.
321
Attributed to Bergson by Ward, p. 15.
322
Ward, p. 19.
165

the past, that is, her monumentalized and frozen memory disassociated from the flux and
continuity of time, she participates in a realm of a life of freedom where meaningful relationships
are becoming a true and an enhanced possibility. The point here is not that she has been released
from trauma because she has been able to tell her story, which is, of course, true, but Deleuze
flatly rejects the premise of any psychological interpretations of Resnaiss films. In Resnais,
Deleuze writes, it is timethat we plunge into, not at the mercy of psychological memory that
would give us only an indirect representation, nor at the mercy of a recollection-image that
would refer us back to a former present, but following a deeper memory, a memory of the world
directly exploring time, reaching in the past that which conceals itself from memory.323
Much later in Cinema 2, Deleuze reiterates this point once more but this time more
directly in association with memory that too repudiates the premise of psychology as a proper
mode of its conditionality. He repeats almost verbatim his earlier statement: Throughout
Resnais work we plunge into a memory which overflows the conditions of psychology, memory
for two, memory for several, memory-world, memory-images of the world.324 The cascading
memory of the radioactive Ota from Hiroshima (collective memory/voluntary memory) has
already overflowed into the Loire (personal memory/involuntary memory), flooding its valleys
and fields. The uprooted and deterritorialized memory has begun migrating from one world to
another, from Nevers to Hiroshima and to elsewhere, to a memory-world, from a world of
memory to a memory of world.325 From a Bergsonian point of view, Rivas confession has

323

Deleuze, p. 39.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 119.
325
Ibid., p. 122.
324

166

now managed to unfreeze her Time from the division of self, which kept her rooted and isolated
to a moment, an instant in her life restricted to an experience of death, and reintegrated it into the
wholeness of dure, to pure memory. With pure memory, Bergson writes, the totality of our
past is continually pressing forward so as to insert the largest possible part of itself into the
present action.326 Resnaiss film is thus about unleashing the power of memory in its purity,
what Badiou calls the the qualitative, indivisible duration from the external, constructed
time,327 in which the meaning is transfixed in a historical sense, to a perpetual flow, into the
continuum of memory in which the past is redistributed according to the total density of
remembering, which includes all avenues from every possible direction as in a map. In
Hiroshima mon amour the memory of Nevers once released from its catalepsy and moribund
state flounders on the streets of Hiroshima without its previous and parochial intensity and thus
becomes bereft and orphaned in a foreign territory. What will become of it now? Lost and
untranslated, Rivas memory must relocate itself back to Nevers by rerouting itself through
Hiroshima, that is, in order to come back to itself it must move away, like the Elder Brother in
the Biblical parable,328 to a distant land from which the possibility of return is already precluded.
It, indeed, would be the true ethical move to lose her tragedy in the tragedy of others, in the
responsibility to others suffering, by hearing the other before she herself can speak. Listen to
326

Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 219.

Alain Badiou, Cinema, trans. Susan Spitzer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), p.213. Badiou
unlike Deleuze does not believe that cinema maintains the Bergsonian division between
constructed time and pure duration. He suggests that there is the possibility of the synthesis of
pure duration within temporal construction. Ibid.
328
For an illuminating reading of the parable of the Prodigal Son and Elder Brother see Jill
Robbins, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka,
Levinas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).
167
327

me, would transform into a silent cartographical sojourn of an afflicted sensibility, into an
aimless wandering, i.e., mapping, of a distraught soul in a foreign city, no longer needing the
comfort or benevolence from a fellow traveler but restless in a peaceful night for the agony that
the daylight will bring.329 Thats how Resnais-Duras solve the contradiction of memory from
Nevers in the recollection of Hiroshima; neither will remember the other nor forget the other.
Writing history is like telling a story, Hayden White has argued.330 According to Ian
Hasketh, History becomes what actually happened rather than the story of what actually
happened, a subtle distinction that has immense consequences.331 Hiroshima is not a history
whose story can be told, but an event that cannot be stated in a narrative form or allegorized or

329

See also Emma Wilson for her interesting analysis of Riva as a transgressive flneur, as a
streetwalker, which is confirmed in the scene in which a passing motorist stops to pick her up as
is she walking down the street at the dead of night. Wilson finds here an analogy between
Certeaus theorization of walking in the city and Resnaiss tracking shots of city. She writes,
her encounter with the city is, like that of Certeaus walker, bodily, sensory, blindly
corporeal. Emma Wilson, Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Alain Resnais (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 61. Certeau compares walking in the city with the speech
act. A speaker can use myriad possibilities of speech from the given system of language so does
the pedestrian who is continuously improvising the space of walking on the basis of
contingencies, seductions (for instance, window shopping, etc.), detour (spontaneous choices)
and transgressions of the officially intended space as in the map. Michel de Certeau, Walking in
the City, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 98.
Rivas transgressions of the erotics of walking approximate the status of the streetwalker, but she
lacks the figure of the transgressive prostitute that Benjamin sketches in relation to the culture of
capitalism with heightened sensibility of plying her trade while simultaneously being conscious
of the police at the same time. Instead of a streetwalker, Riva is more like a sleepwalker with a
sense of her place as her aimless wanderings inevitably culminates in her destination to the New
Hiroshima Hotel.
330
Hayden White, The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory, History and
Theory, vol. 23, no. 1, (February 1984): 1-33.
331
Ian Hesketh, Forum: Writing History. Editorial Introduction: The Burden of Writing, Left
History
10.1 (Fall/Winter 2004): 9.
168

naturalized in a logical manner through the mediation of causality. It is an event that recurs, will
be always already recurring, both before and after, unlike history whose trajectory takes a
cognitive glance toward the past for acknowledging its presence as a continuation. Hiroshima
can be only remembered both in its presence as its absence and its absence as its presence. By
narrativizing Hiroshima, Resnais-Duras spare it the fate of historical monumentality, the inert
passage of time enshrined in its eternal fixity. By not telling the story of Hiroshima, ResnaisDuras inoculate its memory from scattering into the debris of recollection that history collects,
sifts through time, for introspection and progressive telos.332 By leaving Hiroshima outside the
scope of the historical gaze, the photogenic displacement of temporality in the immobile
presence of space, they have deprived it of eternal presence for an everlasting forgetting, from
which all the memories of the future derive their inspiration and imaginary transit point. As Riva
realizes, through a shattering of her love as a monumental sign of her personal grief, after telling
her story of madness and love to the stranger, the foreigner, being herself a foreigner in his
presence, she has squandered not only her loveexchanged it for a story, transferred it into a
history, that is, of an origin in a chronological matrix of beginning and endbut, most of all, the
ability to remember, which is akin to writing, criture, and transformed it from telling into a told,
into a reading (lessen), from performance to spectacle.
No one should ever tell the story of Hiroshima, Okada implies in his harshness, in his
infinite loneliness. One can only remember Hiroshima in the absence of its story: the mode of its
experience is neither in the place nor in the form of its articulation. Hiroshimas presence is no
332

See the Kojve inspired Francis Fukuyama essay, The End of History?, The National
Interest (Summer 1989).
169

longer determined by the consciousness but in the very loss of that consciousness in which the
origin of Hiroshimas story is ultimately located. We think by going to Hiroshima on a
pilgrimage (think of the abandoned peace film in the docu-mimetic mode, remaking, rewriting
Night and Fog), we are honoring the memory of its claimed and unclaimed dead; yet, in most
accounts, we neither remember nor forget ourselves in its presence as, first and foremost, already
dead. Hiroshima, Resnais-Duras claim, is not a sign, or a lack, or even death or absence; it is
the absence of meaning that places it in the vicinity of all those semiological and linguistic
hegemonic categories where silence has been disposed, forever exiled.
History as Montage
Why does Okada repeatedly ask Riva to stay in Hiroshima? After all, he is a married man
and she a married woman. What is the appeal of this extramarital infidelity for the post-war
generation long fed on a strict dose of morality from Hollywood and from its own national fares?
The normal explanation is to praise the film for its repudiation of traditional eschatology that had
broad appeal to the postwar generation tired of the previous generations morality, which many,
rightly or wrongly, thought to have had a direct link to the war. Apart from that, one can also
assume, given the psychotherapeutic nature of the film, that the relationship between the analyst
and the analysand has a radically untraditional form that doesnt fit or conform to any other
traditional model of relationships. Hiroshimas exorcism of Neverss haunting requires a
persistent treatment and care that cannot be left to the one who is possessed. The patient cannot
offer her own treatment based on her own inclination and preference for the cure. The radical
nature of the relationship between the patient and the therapist underlines its forbidden and
170

subversive nature when the boundaries of separation of patient-therapist bond are violated
through the cathexis of transference, since a trespassing of those boundaries has already
transpired at the beginning of the film, which further complicates this analyst-analysand model,
whose ultimate restoration will take place in the mutual recognition of each other at the end of
the film. Until then it maintains the asymmetrical imbalance of a traumatic relationship that also
goes through various stages of transference during the course of therapeutic simulation. In fact,
Hiroshima mon amour breaches all sorts of boundaries: the boundaries of morality, the
boundaries of nations and languages, the boundaries of hate and love, the boundaries of space
and time, remembering and forgetting, madness and sanity, documentary and fiction, cinema and
literature, and above all, history and memory, making its transparency (remember that a
photograph is also technically known as transparency) so porous that the meaning of it filters,
seeps, through every pore of its ruinous faade till an overwhelming emptiness (that which we
call the Image) fills the (w)hole: some call it Epistemology and others Eikonology. If one looks
for substance in the meaning of Hiroshima that its historicity seems to proffer to the mechanism
of sightan all-seeing, encompassing, and omniscient sign from the watch tower of the Peace
Memorial that fortuitously guards its secrets in the vault of its museum for our saturnine
glimpsethen we have really seen Nothing. As Robert Musil reminds us, monuments and
memorials are themselves nothing but an emblem of oblivion, a place of monumental
forgetting.333 Pierre Nora has also cautioned that in our attempts to enshrine the past through

333

Robert Musil in his famous essay on Monument in 1972 wrote that there is nothing more
invisible to the human eye than a monument. The remarkable thing about monuments is that one
does not notice them. There is nothing in the world so invisible as a monument (translated by
171

material forms of representation (i.e., monuments and pictures), we may truncate memory,
creating ultimately, the conditions for forgetfulness, He warns against the venerating
traces.334 Nietzsche has come to the same conclusion, after a long meditation on variegated
forms of history (Monumental, antiquarian, and critical), that monumental history is a farce; it
deceives by analogies.335 His conclusion is close to Benjamin, who also declares that
monumental history is much closer to forgetting than to actual remembering. It gains no currency
in the real sense of making remembering, anamnesis, the real essence of the people; instead it
interjects an obligation to remember that by its very nature is opposed to the historical process
of remembering. It glorifies the past through making the deeds of great man exemplary while
leaving the nameless, the anonymous, to the wastebasket of history. As Benjamin says, it is
more difficult to honor the memory of the anonymous than it is to honor the memory of the
famous, the celebrated, not excluding poets and thinkers.336

Peter Carrier).Robert Musil, Denkmale, in Nacla zu Lebzeiten (Hamburg: Rowholt, 157), p.

59. Cited in Peter Carrier, Monuments in History, Holocaust Monuments and National
Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the
Vel dHiv in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005),
p. 15. See Andreas Huyssen, Our fascination with the past, however, may be less than
satisfying, for the impulse to memorialize events like the Holocaust may actually spring from an
opposite and equal desire to forget them, making our attempts to remember an effort to divest
ourselves of the obligation to remember. Huyssen, Monument and Memory in a Post-modern
Eye, Yale Journal of Criticsm 6, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 254.
334
Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mmoire, Representations 26 (Spring
1989): 13.
335
Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 71,
336
The sentence appears etched on glass in several languages on Walter Benjamins memorial by
Dani Karavan in Port Bau, Spain, which I had the privilege to read in August, 2013. It is also
cited by Esther Leslie, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin: Memory from Weimer to
Hitler, Memory: Histories: Theories: Debates, eds. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 133.
172

The Official/Monumental memorywhat Benjamin calls historicism, a history that

empathize(s)with the victor 337is both selective and destructive; it is also a directive and an
imperative. Monumental history, in other words, not only systematically represents falsification
and calcified glorification of the past from a partial and also often partisan point of view, but also
has an inherent deficiency in renouncing its invalid claims for objectivity and truth. Furthermore,
it also in its language symbolizes the past as dead and epic. The fetid vapor of monumental
history deprives and de-saturates the fluidity of memory by turning it into a concrete object of
veneration for generations to come, which may or may not be able recall a single incident of the
bygone past except for the symbolic presence to which it has been destined. As a creative sign
memory furthers the scopes of meaning without arriving at a single instantiation of its realization
in any given form or instance.
Okada knows this too well. He would rather have Rivas tortured and truncated
unmourned memory from which he can build his own personal monument than the glittery neonlit monumental glory of Hiroshima advertising its tragic past with an unconcealed pride.338
Okada is trained as an architect and has also studied the history of the revolution (the revolution
of all revolutions, the date is July 14, 1789), and he knows that the revolution doesnt belong to
the sight, to the spectacle (the date is October 6, 1945); instead, it belongs to the fragmented,
337

Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations, p. 256.

Paul Boyer writes about his personal memory of visiting Hiroshima in 1958: As my train
entered the station, several Japanese passengers around me, smiling and apparently full of civic
pride, repeated Hiroshima: atomic bomb. Hiroshima: atomic bomb for the benefit of the
visiting American. How to respond? Boyers response was apparently of acute
embarrassment, but his fellow passengers, on the other hand, seemed clearly pleased to
remind me of the event that had made their city famous. Exotic Resonance: Hiroshima in
American Memory, Hiroshima in History and Memory, p. 143.
173
338

torn, and incoherent pieces (as in Rivas memory) that someone else, unlike him, the real
architect of the cinema (whose name will remain silent and untranslated in Hiroshima) dedicated
to the other revolution (the date is October 25, 1917) in the other film and called it a Montage.
ACT IV - Forgetting
The Awesome Power of Forgetting
The repressed memory of Nevers in its many discursive formsfor example, the shot of
the balcony, the field, the soft and delicate light on the Loire valley, etc.has metonymic
significance for Hiroshima. As a multiple sign of infinite variations, its meaning is later made
apparent in the transparency of Hiroshimas historical presence, which is to say, in other words,
that the historicity of the city has nothing to do with it.339 It is not simply a matter of
coincidence that Rivas repressed memory suddenly surfaces in Hiroshima. This raw
manifestation of memory is, however, not a result of an accidental conflation and/or exchange of
present and past lovers identities as enemies of her nation, but instead one must realize that it is
the historic site of Hiroshima, the place itself, that exerts a powerful suggestion (not false
memory as such) that creates the condition of possibility for such conflagration. This
suggestibility is partly responsible for the metonymic shift of memory from Hiroshima to
Nevers. But its also the textual strategy of the film to translate itself from its cinematic Being to
a literary Becoming in order to make the images resemble the process of writing itself, to create a
monstrous synthesis of memory-oblivion that truly provides the rationale for the encounter of

339

By historicity I mean a discourse of history that has developed as an official form of

memory, mostly commemorative and monumental, which is closer to forgetting than actual
remembering.
174

Resnais-Duras. For clarity, the encounter of memory-oblivion and its counter tempo in the
encounter of Resnais-Duras is rendered explicit through the designation of the cinema as the
apparatus of memory, here epitomized by Resnais as its main conductor, and of writing as the
apparatus of oblivion, or forgetting, as has been done since the Socratic dialogues in Plato,
especially in the myth of the Egyptian god Theuth in the Phaedrus.340 Hiroshima mon amour is a
film of remembering and forgetting, of Hiroshima and Nevers, at the threshold of writing and
cinema. On the one hand, cinema is a mnemonic device, while, on the other, writing is a recipe
for forgetting.
340

The cryptic, internal nature of memory, i.e. recollection, is cleverly presented in the famous
Socratic tale, that equates writing with externality and assigns it the role of forgetting: The
story is that in the region of Naucratis in Egypt there dwelt one of the old gods of the country,
the god to whom the bird called Ibis is sacred, his own name being Theuth. He it was that
invented number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of droughts and dice,
and above all writing. Now the king of the whole country at that time was Thamus, who dwelt in
the great city of Upper Egypt which the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes, while Thamus they call
Ammon. To him came Theuth, and revealed his arts, saying that they ought to be passed on to
the Egyptians in general. Thamus asked what was the use of them all, and when Theuth
explained, he condemned what he thought the bad points and praised what he thought the good.
On each art, we are told, Thamus had plenty of views both for and against; it would take too long
to give them in detail. But when it came to writing Theuth said, Here, O king, is a branch of
learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discovery
provides a recipe for memory and wisdom. But the king answered and said, O man full of arts,
to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of
profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reason of your tender
regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If
men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory
because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within
themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for
memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its
semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem
to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom,
but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows. Plato, Phaedrus, line
275a, trans. R. Hackforth, in Collected Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1972), p. 520.
175

In the Phaedrus, writing is associated with the decline of memory. These marks which
are outside the mindthe writing, mark as the erasureallows forgetfulness to infiltrate into
the soul through amltsia mnmes, that is through a lack of exercising the memory.341 Derrida
has observed that writing as such (in Plato) is opposed to itself in the forms of internal memory,
mnm, and external memory, hypomnsis (connected to the Archive in Derrida). Rivas story
and the story of the inventor of writing, Theuth, in the Phaedrus, have much in common. Her
story initiates a transition from the private secret crypt, like the sacred Pyramidal crypt of the
ancient Egypt, of her traumatized/interiorized memory into the archival domain, where her story
is now accessible to the public that has the sovereign power to exercise a full control over the
inscription and distribution of her trauma. By transcribing the personal story into a narrative
structure Riva has now effectively translated it into an external form that can be printed and
reproduced at will. So what was forgotten by virtue of being remembered, albeit in a traumatized
form, shall be forgotten again because it is no longer an impression in the soul but instead has
become an expression, a repertoire of representation, a format and genre called (hi)story that can
be endlessly circulated and consumed, just like the history of Hiroshima is endlessly reproduced
in the archival footage that she had witnessed and claimed to be her own memory. It is important
to note that Riva quite deliberately raises the issue in her confession to Okada of turning her

341

Vernant, Myth, p. 111. Amresh Sinha, Forgetting to Remember: From Benjamin to

Blanchot, Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique, issue 10 (November 2005): 23-24.
http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/colloquy/download/colloquy_issue_ten_/sinha.pdf
176

memory into a dime-store (cheap) novel (Histoire de quatre sous, je te donne Ioubli), a story
that can be told and forgotten.342
I told our story.
I was unfaithful to you tonight with this stranger.
I told our story.
It was, you see, a story that could be told.
(Jai recont notre histoire.
Je tai tromp ce soir avec cet inconnu.
Jtai recont notre histoire.
Elle tait, vois-tu, recontable.)343
Rivas memory erupts at the unforeseen moment as a trauma (a la Caruth), which will take her
on a journey through which her memory will be given a precise narrative form, which Hayden
White would perhaps call a historical form, the recipe for forgetting. I would, on the contrary,
suggest that in Rivas narrativization, in her story that she ultimately bemoans as a quatre sous
novel, the actual blocking of history takes place. Her narrative of her lover, her collaborationist
actalthough she has been given a squeaky-clean political and moral carte blanche by RenaisDuras, within the symbolic or allegorical realm of the story, fraternizing with the enemy has
only one meaning: treason344doesnt make her forget as much as make her regret the parting of
a secret, an intimate memory. Yet she is not a traitor but a victim, and the German soldier is not a
342

Duras, p. 118.
Ibid., p. 110.
344
According to Enzensberger, everyone is a traitor one way or the other in an occupied country.
To argue the point decisively, he says, it must be shown that under certain historical
conditions everyone must become a traitor. For example, the entire population of Norway,
Holland, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia consisted of traitors (always in the technical-legal
sense of the word) during the German occupation of these countries. No matter which
government each individual considered to be his, there existed always another in whose eyes he
was committing treason. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Toward a Theory of Treason, trans.
Michael Roloff, Critical Essays, ed. Rienhold Grimm and Bruce Armstrong (New York:
Continuum, 1982), p. 80.
177
343

Nazi either in Resnais-Durass concoctionnot a revisionist history but an obliteration of

history. Her will to forget him, the dead, has this Nietzschean core, because the resurrection of
his memory is a sign of the determination that extends to Okada and to all her future lovers in
that they too will be destined to oblivion (oubli). Riva has now confronted and thus recognized
the awesome power of forgetting.
As Hayden White shows, when Nietzsche opposes the power of forgetting to the power
of remembering, his main objection to the latter is that it transforms the image of the present into
the image of the past.345 In the power of remembering the present must reflect the past in its
rearview mirror, instead of the future that which it must face ahead. Rivas present has been
inundated with the recapitulation of her past, where the future which is the provenance of
forgetting lacks any appeal, and that is what I have earlier noted as her masochism. Rivas
recollection is presented as pieces of fragmented memories in the form of an involuntary
memory that produces a chain of involuntary and voluntary memories that finally terminate,346
through the long journey of a night, in a total retrieval of her past that can now be integrated or
incorporated as voluntary memory that can be reproduced by will. Once she succeeds, with the
help of her quasi-therapist, Okada, to structure the elements of her fractured and shattered
memory into a well-defined whole, a clear-cut narrative that tells the story of her past, then she is

345

Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 331-374.
346
John H. Mace has described this as a process of chain involuntary memory which leads to a
chain reaction of involuntary and voluntary memory productions that keep generating until the
process terminates. John H. Mace, Involuntary and Voluntary Remembering: How different are
they?, The Act of Remembering: Toward an Understanding of How We Recall the Past, ed.
John H. Mace (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 44.
178

relieved not only of her past but also of her memory. Her memory is transferred to a well-known
pattern of a story, into a form of reproducibility, a copy that no longer has the aura of her
bygone past. It is this uniqueness, the aura, the distant past, the mark of authenticity
(historicity?), whose demise Benjamin simultaneously celebrated and mourned,347 to which her
memory was tethered, that has now become unhinged, leaving her floating senselessly as a
signifier in the simulacrum of language without a signified. Her past that had no future is no
longer present, not even in her. Without a memory of her own she has become timeless in a zone
where the time has come to a standstill. Hiroshimas memory is timeless, whereas Neverss
memory is pointless, insignificant, worth forgetting, so the process of mourning, the pure form of
remembering, can at last begin. The detour to Nevers is necessary for the betrayal of Hiroshima.
It allows the betrayal for diverting the story in a discursive form, by making it tellable in its
presence.348 The betrayal of Hiroshima through the endless discursivity of Nevers, diverting the
historical, what others have referred to as the evasion of history, into the countless mediation
of discursive form makes it seizeble for the subject to enunciate at the expense of historicizing
Hiroshima.349 The ultimate aim of the film is to expel the narrative memory and exchange it
for the history(city) of modern Hiroshima, a betrayal of the discursive continuity that telling
implies into the oblivion of an indescribable sight.

347

See Benjamin, The Work of Art on the Age of Mechanical Reproductions, Illumination, pp.
222-228.
348
Ropars-Wuilleumieur, p. 181.
349
Ibid.
179

This is not an erotic betrayal,350 but a betrayal of the past. Her story, or rather the
telling of the story, is the invasion of history, which is what betrays her past to the stranger, for it
no longer constitutes a memory in becoming a common knowledge. Thus, Hiroshima mon
amour doesnt belong to the realm of historiography as an epistemological project, dictated by
the methodologies of the aesthetics of visual technique normally ascribed to film criticism, nor as
a cumulative accumulation of a knowledge-building enterprise; rather, it is an ethical exercise in
dealing with the body and its trauma. In that sense, the prologue already sets the ethical agenda
of the mutilated bodies, deformed and destroyed by the power of knowledge inflicted upon them
from a space above. Memory here gets the privilege of a personal trust and is deemed as sacred
and secret. With the story begins the story of the archive, the technique of reproduction, the mark
of exteriority that reproduces the interior speech into writing, the sign and symbol (even Hegel
conflated the two terms after distinguishing them in the Encyclopedia)351 of forgetting. Here lets
again recall, call it to our memory, the primal/primordial story of writing that Plato, the archon
and the architect of archiviolithic tradition, the custodian, the anarchivist352 of Socratic
dialogues, first told us in the Phaedrus.
Forgetting Histoire/(Hi)Story
Je toublierai! Je toublie dj! Regarde, comme je toublie! Regarde-moi!353

350

See Caruth, p. 27.

G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. W. Wallace (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1971), Section 463, pp. 221-222.
352
Archiviolithic and anarchivic are the violence inherent in the archive which Derrida compares
to the Freudian death drive. See Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 10.
353
Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, p. 124
180
351

After the translation of the work of memory into the narrative structure, Resnais-Duras
introduce the note of forgetting as a decrescendo in the finale. In my earlier works, I have
ventured at great length on the problematics of memory and its close association with forgetting,
so I will only briefly discuss the role of forgetting that is central to any discourse of how memory
functions and vice versa. 354 Hiroshima mon amour ends with a plea for forgetting as a way to
survive, cope, against the numbing and crippling effects of excessive memory in a traumatized
human being or for that matter a nation as Nietzsche would maintain in his essay, On the uses
and disadvantages of history for life. Rivas hysterical/historical (the link between forgetting
and history will become clear soon) outburst at the concluding moments of the film testifies to
the power of forgetting, employed by her as a strategic defensive mechanism against the threat of
an all-consuming memory that has spilled over from the deep recesses of her past, her history,
into the present. Her defiant statement in the final scene to Okada, who has followed her to her
room in the New Hiroshima Hotel, is an appeal to the healing power of forgetting: I am
forgetting you. Like him, I will forget you too. (Je toublierai! Je toublie dj! Regarde,
comme je toublie! Regarde-moi.) Anne Muxel explains that forgetting plays a consistent role in
how memory works [and] is used as a safeguard. It allows the individual to evacuate painful
elements from memories of personal experience which provoke suffering. Psychoanalysis has

354

Amresh Sinha, The Intertwining of Remembering and Forgetting in Walter Benjamin,

Connecticut Review, vol. XX, no. 2, Fall 1998, pp. 99-110.
181

identified these self-protective mechanisms. One cannot continue to remember excessive

suffering. In this sense, forgetting is a way of taking care of oneself.355
The act of remembering inevitably progresses towards its own forgetting as the
remembering process initiates the process of monumentalizing or embalming the past, but it
loses the initial lack of remembering to now having been remembered and thus already being
forgotten. In Hiroshima, Riva initiates, rather unconsciously, the active process of forgetting that
is important to healing in general at both the personal and the national level, in both the Freudian
and the Nietzschen sense of releasing from unconscious repression and by forgetting that very
repression in order to begin healing by instituting the cyclical process of time that Derrida calls
the unhistorical in Nietzsche. By monumentalizing her love beyond monumentalizing, she begins
to dismantle this edifice of a subterranean memory and actively engages in the recovery of her
lost past through anamnesis, in the Aristotelian sense, of that which is no longer present in her
consciousness.356 Thus by keeping her lover deeply buried inside her she had become a

355

Anne Muxel, The Functions of Familial Memory and the Processes of Identity, Peripheral
Memories: Private and Public Forms of Experiencing and Narrating the Past, eds Elizabeth
Bosen et all (Bielfeld: transcript Verlag, 2012), p. 30.
356
Aristotles De Memoria et Reminiscentia: Recollection is neither the recovery nor the
acquisition of memory. For when someone first learns or experiences something, he does not
recover any memory, since none has preceded. Nor does he acquire memory from the start, for
once the state or affection has been produced within a person, then there is memory. So memory
is not produced within someone at the same time that the experience is being produced within
him. Further, at the indivisible and final instant when the experience has first been produced
within, although the affection and scientific knowledge are already present in the person who had
the experience (...), none the less remembering itself, does not occur until time has elapsed. For a
person remembers now what he saw or experienced earlier. He does not now remember what he
experiences now. Cited from Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (Providence: Brown
University Press, 1972), p. 53. Aristotle distinguishes between remembering and recollecting in
the very opening of his treatise on memory. He seems to accord the verb anamimnskesthai,
182

monument to herself for that love. In other words, her love, therefore, is the monumental aspect
of her history that her memory actively engages in dismantling as she recounts her narrative to
Okada. The monumental miasma of her love has to be squandered in the long night of
transmemorization. This archivization and private monumentalizing of her past is both her access
to her trauma as well as history and a way out of them. In the archive things are drained out of
their being-for-itself and become being-for-other. In other words, being-for-other connects the
memory to history through the (dis)play of its shapes and contours in genealogical and
typological form, but the object is no longer a member of a living community of exchange. This
private archive, though not on display for others, is still beyond the grasp of living beings and
thus mortified in the confines of a solitary consciousness that holds it more preciously than any
other affectations of the soul. The tormented memory is thus shielded and buried in the grave of
ones life/body.
The first forgetting comes to Riva prior to remembering. That forgetting occurs as she
leaves her parents place in Nevers for Paris as the war ended.357 The remembering of her dead
lover actually occurs for the first time in that fated flashback in Hiroshima in the morning (and

which means to recollect, with activity, whereas remembering (mnmoneuein) or memory

(mnm) is consigned to passivity, state or affection. Etymologically anamimnskesthai can
be broken into the prefix ana-, which means again, and mimnskesthai, which is simply related
to Aristotles two standard verbs for remembering.
357
The story of Nevers contains scenes that are devoid of human sound but suffused with lyrical
music and overshadowed by the voice of the present. Like photographs the images are silent
behooving to their past existence, but the metonymic narration, according to Kreidl, is
seductive in its musicon an aural level which constantly substitutes for the present tense of the
plot, p. 61.
183

mornings in Hiroshima always bring back the memory of the first bombing).358 Until then she
hadnt forgotten him; she merely didnt remember as she has got on with her life, much like how
the French did not forget their troubled past of the collaborationist Vichy era but simply didnt
come to terms with what Germans call Verganganheitsbewltigungmastering the pastwhich
requires the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit). Instead the French bought the exculpatory lie of
General de Gaulle, the mythology of national unity that he peddled in his address to a gullible
nation in 1944 after the liberation of France.359 It was a convenient lie not to remember, just like
the Germans who didnt want to be reminded of the immediate past of the Nazi era and
participated with full conviction in Stunde Null (zero hour) ideology in the Konrad Adenauer era
that declared Germanys complete rupture from her immediate past, a new beginning, a clean
slate, of Germany year zero.
The Malady of History
Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. Michel de Montaigne.

358

The flashback produces a disturbance in Rivas expression. She is distracted by a reverie of

correspondence. What is in that flash of reverie prompted by a graphic match cut: a mere
coincidence? The quick cut between the posture of the sleeping Japanese man and the dead
German soldier reveals an image whose meaning is unclear, especially to us as viewers, but
faintly troubling and disturbing to her. What is this disturbance that has the power to open the
discourse to a space that is no longer accessible to us? Her flash of memory creates a powerful
disturbance in the spectator also. Although, we don't know anything about the couple, because
Durass modernist narrative does not abide by the law of exposition of who, what, when, and
where, but we soon learn that she is a French actress in a documentary being shot in Hiroshima.
359
For a most comprehensive history of Vichy collaboration and anti-Semitism in France in
1940-1944, see Henry Russo, The Vichy Syndrome, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991). See Naomi Greene, pp. Battles for Memory:
Vichy Revisited, Landscapes of Loss, pp. 64-97. See also Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Voice of
Vichy, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust, pp. 72-81. Philippe Burrin,
Vichy, Realms of Memory, ed. Pierre Nora, pp. 181-202. Ricoeur, pp. 450-452.
184

Europe doesnt have an amnesia problem; they have an anamnesis disorder, a reluctance
or interdiction (imposed by the generations on their children) to remember, not because history
hurts, as Fredric Jameson would say, but because the past has not become the past, it still
persists, it is still too much a living part of the present. There has not been enough distance or
temporal separation between the past and the present to begin the process of remembering and
mourning. Since the publication of The Inability to Mourn in 1975 by Alexander and Margarete
Mitscherlich, which examines the issue of collective mourning for the victims of National
Socialism for the generations born before and after the Nazi era, the psychological dimension of
this problematic has been in the foreground of national debate. 360 The question for the
Mitscherlichs was whether the Germans had come to terms with their past despite all the political
developments.361 Margarete Mitscherlich came to the conclusion that Even those in their
twenties today, whose parents passed along their own defenses against the past, continue to live
in the shadow of denial and repression of the events that cannot be undone by acts of
forgetting.362 In a similar vein, Lyotard asked the same question: Can there be progress without

360

Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective

Behavior, trans. Beverley R. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975).
361
The neo-Nazi movements are once again in the forefront of German politics. The persistent
anti-Islamization rallies in Dresden by Pegida (Patriotische Europaer Gegen die Islamisierung
des Abendlandes), the Islamophobic organization, was recently countered by a massive rally in
Hamburg for racial tolerance and diversity, which tells us that not all is well on the racial front in
Germany. The brutal and violent xenophobic attacks on the migrants, mostly refugees, in
Rostock by the neo-Nazi mob in 1992 is a constant reminder of the continuing racist tendencies
in Germany among the right-wing giving a black-eye to Adenaeurs proclamation of a cleanslate Germany in 1948.
362
Margarete Mitscherlich, Erinnerungsarbeit: zur Psychoanalyse der Unfhigkeit zu trauen
(Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1987), p. 114. I have cited the translated phrase from Eric. L. Santer,
185

anamnesis?, which is quite a different proposition than the Nietzschean prescription of

forgetting for curing the sickness, the malady of history, for the sake of a healthy national
culture and life. Resnais seemed to have some inkling of this as well, when he speaks of
forgetting as a necessary condition for advancing into the future without being emotionally and
psychologically bogged down to a past that could only be debilitating to the spirit. In Nietzsches
defense, we could argue that he didnt have the hindsight to predict the movement of historys
vituperative trends in the twentieth-century, but he did foresee the future impasse of history in
some cases.
I invoked Nietzsche because he offers the strongest affirmation of forgetting when it was
not fashionable to admit forgetting as a virtue, and especially nowadays, in the information and
digital age, it is increasingly becoming symptomatic of a general malaise in our society.
Forgetting is not something that we encourage in our young ones and its definitely not
something that pedagogy aspires to instilling in them. Forgetting, Ricoeur says, is
experienced as an attack on the reliability of memory. An attack, a weakness, a lacuna. In this
regard memory defines itselfas a struggle against forgetting.363 Man is by nature a forgetful
being (animal obliviscens), says Herald Weinrich.364 Since we all know what forgetting is (who
hasnt forgotten a thing or two that one thought was unforgettable), thus, the definition of
forgetting hardly needs our attention at this point, but suffice would it be to say that, as Weinrich

Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany, (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1999), p. 34.
363
Ricoeur, p. 413.
364
Herald Weinrich, The Language of Forgetting, Lethe: The Art and Antique of Forgetting,
trans. Steven Rendall (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p.1.
186

rather jocularly suggests, it is the thing [forgetting] that we are least likely to forget.365 In
Forgetting to Remember, I wrote the following: In a world that is perpetually mourning for
the loss of memory, it is, then, not easy to write a few words in praise of the power of forgetting.
And especially to inscribe in writing what itself is seen as one of the fundamental reasons for the
historical decline, or, if you will, neglect of the mother of Musess, Mnemosynes greatest gift
memory.366 So why sing the praises of Lethe, Mnemosynes twain, the spring of
forgetfulness?367 The Greek word for truth is altheia, which is what remembrance recovers
from Lethe, from the river of forgetfulness, from oblivion. Lethe can be conceived as lethargy,
slowness, forgetfulness, as something that has slipped out of the mind and thus is absent from the
presence of the self-presencing mnm, and also as death, sleep, and oblivion.368 The Loire is the
Lethe of Nevers whose waters have already singed the soul of the young woman who had
experienced death, sleep, and oblivion in that very hysteron proteron (dis)order. And now she is
365

Ibid.
Sinha, Forgetting to Remember, p. 23.
367
The location of Lethe in the underworld, in classical and Gnostic imagery, originates from the
oracle cave of Earth-deities (Chthonioi) at Lebadeia, where an individual made elaborate
preparations to enter down into the dark pit to learn his fate through things seen or things
heard. Among the preparations, he has to drink of the water of Lethe, in order to achieve
forgetfulness of all that he has hitherto thought of; and on top of it another water Mnemosyne,
which gives him remembrance of what he sees when he has gone down. Classical writers made
Lethe one of the principle rivers of the underworld, along with Acheron, Cocytus, Phegethon,
and Styx, Lethe, The Mystica. http://www.themystica.com/articles/I/Lethe.html (accesed
March 15, 2005). For an illuminating discussion of river Lethe and the lake of Mnemosyne see
Jean Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1983), p. 81 and Mircea Eliade in Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (Prospect Heights,
Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 1998), pp. 119-125. See also Karl Kernyi, Mnemosyne
Lemosyne: On the Springs of Memory and Forgetting, An Annual of Archetypal Psychology
and Jungian Thought (Spring 1977): 120-130.
368
See Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsey et all (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989), p. 51.
187
366

stranded on the banks of the river Ota, the river of remembering, Mnemosynes gift, around the
epi-center of the self-presencing mnm of the bomb in a city that never sleeps, never forgets.
Riva asks Okada late in the film: The night, does it never end in Hiroshima? (La nuit, a ne
sarrte jamais, Hiroshima?) The sentence can also be idiomatically translated as Does
Hiroshima never sleeps at night? Lets not ever forget the phonetic echo of Nevers in never.
They echo in other ways too. In other words, Nevers is what does not sleep in Hiroshima and
vice versa. From the gentle and sanguine waters of death, sleep, and oblivion of Loire/Lethe (Je
quitte la Loire), Rivas memory (the Platonic imprint of the wax seal on the soul) is jolted by
the nocturnal violence of Hiroshimas epi-center, by the everlasting sleepless nights of
Hiroshimas vigilant memory against the worlds forgetfulness; her lulled consciousness is
obliterated, smashed, has blast[ed] open the continuum of history, to use a famous
Benjaminian metaphor,369 by the shock of what she had seen from visiting the museum and
monuments in Hiroshima, a catastrophic history has taken its toll on her Lethe-inspired forgotten
memory through the rupture of the protective coating of years of unconscious repression.
The breaching of memory is partly due to the alignment of their causality and the
identities of her two lovers, both belonging to the other side, the wrong side of history, as
enemies of France, which induces a strong suggestion of the manifestation of the metonymic
shift from Hiroshima to Nevers. The two are joined by the relentless trespassing and
transference, secret associations of personal and public horror, and through the chain of
associations linking the two rivers, Ota and Loire, Lethe and Mnemosyne, pouring and

369

Benjamin, Theses, Illuminations, p. 262.

188

overflowing into each other as the memories swell and floods their banks. The soft memory akin
to the soft light that touches the Loire valley in a lyrical glow hardens in the harsh light of
Hiroshimas historical and dour presence. Silent, untamed, errant memory freezes like a
frightened deer caught in the headlight of history: here I am referring to a poignant image in the
film of a distraught Riva crouching on the roadside in Hiroshima as she is literally caught in the
headlight of a passing car after the betrayal of her dead German lover to her present Japanese
lover, Okada.
Rivas disconsolate monologue after the betrayal:
Oui, cest long.
On ma dit que vait t trs long.
A six heures du soir, la cathdrale Siant-tienne Sonne, t comme hiver. Un jour, il est
vrai, je lentends. Je me souviens lavoir entendue avantavantpendant que nous nous
aimions pendant notre Bonheur.
Je commence voir.
Je me souviens avoir dj vuavantavantpendant que nous aimions, pendant notre
Bonheur
Je me souviens.
Je vois lencre.
Je vois le jour.
Je vois ma vie. Ta mort.
Ma vie qui continue. Ta mort qui continue
Ah! Cest horrible. Je Commence moins bien me souvenir de toi.
Je commence toublier. Je tremble davoir oubli tant damour370
370

Duras, p. 98, 99.

My hair is growing back. I can feel it every day, with my hand. I dont care. But nevertheless
my hair is growing back
At six in the evening, the bells of St. Etienne Cathedral ring, winter and summer. One day, it is
true, I hear them. I remember having heard them beforebeforewhen we were in love, when
we were happy.
Im beginning to see.
I remember having already seen beforebeforewhen we were in love, when we were happy.
I remember.
I see the ink.
189

The first forgetting, after the madness in Nevers, has the characteristics of the natural process of
forgetting through which memory arises; as Pierre Nora says, dont we forget to remember, or
remember to forget?,371 echoing de Man channeling Hegel and finally Blanchot,372 always in
the present, as in the arising of the past, in its always already present form, so Neverss forgetting
is remembered in the presence or present of Hiroshima, in the place of memory or the memory of
place, as Edward Casey would say.373 But the need to forget the personal trauma need not
transform the need to remember Hiroshima, which in this case has already been forgotten. That
is what Resnais forgets when he says that one must forget the past in order to live and act,
embarking on a Nietzschean solution. But he is besotted by the horror of oblivion as well. After
making Night and Fog Resnais apparently felt that building a monument to the dead wasnt
sufficient for him, for he had to think of the present and the future. This was his dilemma: The
problem came up for me when I made Night and Fog. It was not a question of creating one more
monument to the dead but of thinking of the present and of the future. Forgetting must be

I see the day light.

I see my life. Your death.
My life that goes on. Your death that goes on
Oh! Its horrible. Im beginning to remember you less clearly. Im beginning to forget you. I
tremble at the thought of having forgotten so much love
371
Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire, Representations, no. 26
(Spring 1989), p. 8.
372
Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Proust, Blanchot, Lyotard, Paul de Man, they all
have praised the power of forgetting over memorys domain to the extent that in Blanchots
words, as if forgetting were the very vigilance of memory. Maurice Blanchot, Forgetful
Memory, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 315.
373
Edward Casey, Keeping the Past in Mind, in Descriptions, ed. Don Ihde and Hugh J.
Silverman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985): pp. 35-36.
190

constructiveDespair is inaction.374 With regard to Nietzsche, Resnais is his most apt pupil
(channeling Scottie in Vertigo to Judy at the climactic stairwell vertigo scene). Forgetting is
important, especially against the pharmakon of remembering, against the baroque archival dose
of Toute la mmoire du monde, the excess or surfeit of memory. I have written elsewhere on the
importance and anteriority of forgetting in the role of remembering.375
Forgetting is an essential stage in overcoming the painful and sorrowful history of
mankind, which Nietzsche contrasts with the unhistorical forgetful happiness of the beast, the
cows grazing in the meadow in On the uses and disadvantages of history for life.376 For
Nietzsche the beasts happiness comes from its inability to remember, thus it lives in a state of
unhistoricity, in a state of now, in the present, by forgetting the dimensions of the past and the
future. For Nietzsche, there is a dual nature of forgetting, one that comes naturally to the beast,
prior to remembering. The other kind of forgetting has a historical origin which proceeds from
remembering how to forget. To forget what lies in memory is the active part of the human will
which confronts history. For forgetting is not merely a learned device for coping with the past,
but is also an active engagement of the will.377 The power of forgetting...the capacity of feeling
unhistorically that Nietzsche finds so essential for the state of happiness is in some sense
reciprocated by Benjamin in The Image of Proust, where he speaks of the Proustian desire for

374

Cited by Greene, p. 44.

Amresh Sinha, Forgetting History: Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, Memory, Mimesis, Film.
Ph.D. Thesis. York University (1995), pp. 36-61.
376
Nietzsche, On the uses and disadvantages of history for life, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.
J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 59-123.
377
Sinha, Forgetting History: Nietzsche, Derrida, Freud, p. 40.
191
375

the elegiac concept of happiness.378 What makes happiness, as it were, tick, is none other than
this power of forgetting, a power that is reminiscent, for both Nietzsche and Benjamin, of the
great reliever, sleep. Neither Zarathustra nor Proust can prophesy or write without the aid of
forgetting, without the assistance of darkness, without the power of slumber. At the bottom of the
feeling of happiness forgetting always provides succor.379
What is implied and what can we read in Rivas evocation of the power of forgetting at
the end of the film? Is that simply an assertion of an afflicted soul lashing out at the possibility of
more suffering and pain that might be stored in the future of her history? Or, is it history itself
that has been a continuous source of pain of which Hiroshima is a stark witness? The allegorical
summation of the film that calls for the true mnemonic aid, the power of forgetting, to relieve
this world from the malady of history, as Nietzsche called it, is also expressed by Derrida as le
mal darchive, the archive fever. Nietzsche stresses the prerogative of forgetfulness as a sign for
the transvaluation of memory. In transvaluing memory, Nietzsche calls for a strictly new order
of experience, the goal of which is no longer to remember the ghastly details of the
degeneration of history, but, on the contrary, to manifest itself through the process of
forgetting. In order to cure the malady of history the antidote must be history itself,380 which
is to say that the cure of the historical disease of remembering must be found in forgetting (its
antidote). Needless to say, in order either to remember or to forget, mankind needs a heavy dose
of pain. This is the conclusion that the mad doctor of Nagasaki, Takashi Nagai, also comes to but
378

Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust, Illuminations, pp. 201-215.

Sinha, Forgetting History: Nietzsche, Derrida, Freud, 1995.
380
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 335.
192
379

from an opposite angle, through the redemption of guilt. Rivas memory of her dead German
lover is not only a symptomatic of her repressed trauma but a kind of Socratic forgetting that
induces the search for a lost memory. It is a search, as Ricoeur suggests, that moves against the
currents of Lethe, and for Riva against the currents of the Loire, to reclaim what she assumes has
been forgotten forever in the cellar of her familys home.381 This is also the Aristotelian
anamnesis whose movement is toward recovery through recollection of the lost object from the
consciousness. The whole narrative of Riva is in search for the moment when the forgetting
occurred, which has to be traced to the erasure, the time (which stretched out to infinity)382 when
her lover died in her arms, which slipped away unnoticed as she later recalled to Okada (la
moment de sa mort ma chapp).383 The moment of death is the instant of forgetting that her
remembering must restore to the continuum of time, a point that Kreidl makes quite forcefully.
Hegels Gedchtnis (thinking memory), etymologically related to Denken and Andenken,
is also closer to forgetting (vergessen) then remembering, a theme that I explore in greater depth
in my next chapter on Mira Nairs The Namesake. Paul de Man has also evoked forgetting as a
central motif in Hegels philosophy of Gedchtnis, when it comes to the actual exercise of

381

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 27.

Rivas lament for how long it took her German lover to die in her arms beneath her body
(once again the doubling of Eros and Thanatos) is one of the most poignant moments of her
witnessing the erasure of time in death experienced through the body as history. She says to
Okada: Il est devenu froid peu sous moi. Ah! qu'est-ce qu'il a t long mourir. Quand? Je ne
sais plus au juste. (Little by little he became cold beneath me. Ah! How long it took him to die.
When? I do not know exactly.) This is a perfect example of death which defies the jurisdiction
of temporality. The elements of time in Rivas lamenthow long (duration) and when
(instant)are precisely the elements that are not registered by the experience of death. Duras,
Hiroshima mon amour, p. 100.
383
Duras, p. 100.
193
382

remembering,384 as in remembering by heart, by rote, the Periodic Table or the names of the
deities in the hymns, which operates like a machine (computer?) without recourse to Erinenrung
(interiorized memory), a prosthesis of the mind. Prousts Involuntary memory (memoire
involontaire), petite madeleine, is according to Benjamin closer to Penelopes work of
forgetting in his essay on The Image of Proust,385 which I have examined in detail
elsewhere.386 But nobody took a greater mouthful, a bigger gulp, from Lethes fountain than the
one who had a history of madness and who died in Weimar in the beginning of the last century,
Friedrich Nietzsche. Both The Genealogy of Morals387 and the earlier On the uses and
disadvantages of history for life in Untimely Meditations are virtually a paean to the glory of
forgetting with limited abuse in some specific cases when memory ought not to be forgotten by
the generations whose predecessors have committed unprecedented historical crimes against the
other (a history lesson for Alexander Kluge).
Nietzsche-Freud: Pleasure and Pain
Repression and memory are two very important categories of Freudian ethics too. What
must be remembered must also be forgotten. It is in the centrality placed on forgetting that the
Nietzschean and the Freudian concepts of memory seem especially close: indeed they reinforce
each other. Let us first summarize Freuds view. For Freud, forgetting the past by the patient

384

Paul de Man, Sign and Symbol in Hegels Aesthetics, Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4 (Summer
1982): 761-775.
385
Benjamin, The Image of Proust, Illuminations, p.202.
386
Amresh Sinha, The Intertwining of Remembering and Forgetting in Walter Benjamin,
Connecticut Review. Vol. XX, No. 2 (Fall 1998): 99-110.
387
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City:
Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1956).
194

implies that he is ill. Philip Rieff has correctly pointed out the Freudian premises of interpreting
the neurotic symptoms as a mask for memory, a substitutemade necessary by repression
for things the patient has forgotten.388 The epistemological character of Nietzsches active
forgetting demonstrates similarly the route of Freudian forgetting that results from repression.
Freud, like Nietzsche, carries an animus toward memory and considers the past in a
pejorative manner.389 Freud, in Psychopathology of Everyday Life, writes:
If one should be inclined to overrate the state of our present knowledge of mental life, all
that would be needed to force him to assume a modest attitude would be to remind him of
the function of memory. No psychological theory has yet been able to account for the
connection between the fundamental phenomena of remembering and forgetting; indeed,
even the complete analysis of that which one can actually observe has as yet scarcely
been grasped. Today forgetting has perhaps grown more puzzling than remembering,
especially since we have learned from the study of dreams and pathologic states that even
what for a long time we believed forgotten may suddenly return to consciousness.390
Thus even for Freud it is hard to imagine a total state of repression, of complete
forgetting.
One can almost hear Nietzsches voice superimposed over Freuds. Freud believed if only
repression could be total, no one would be ill.391 Writing on Freud and forgetting, Ricoeur
reminds us that forgetting remains one of the most unforgettable things in Freudian
psychoanalysis. The screen memory, that Ricoeur calls, the blocked memory in Freuds works,
both in Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through and Mourning and Melancholia, is
essentially a forgetful memory. The past is never totally repressed because the past once

388

Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1959),

40.
389

Ibid.
Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Mentor
Book, 1962), p. 66.
391
Rieff, p. 38.
195
390

experienced is indestructible, a thesis that both Freud and Bergson equally share, according to
Ricoeur, but not when it comes to the power of unconscious. Bergsons unconscious is defined
essentially by its powerlessness, whereas the Freudian unconscious, through its tie to instinctual
drive, is characterized by energy.392 Memory is history without a (second-hand) witness. It
exists without its presence in consciousness (Bergson), the domain of history. The Proustian
involuntary memory is, in that sense, also close to the Freudian theory of the unconscious, where
the shock is received without presentation or representation till the second blow makes it emerge
in the form of traumatized memory. But there is also a crucial distinction between Freuds theory
of the unconscious and the Proustian dimension of the involuntary memory. Prousts involuntary
memory is preceded by a sensation of happiness prior to the actual retrieval of that memory from
the deep recesses of the unconscious.
But there is no unconscious in Resnais; its presence, its most powerful manifestation
dreamsis absent from all of his films. This is what makes me so wary of applying the trauma
theory that specifies the unconscious as the major force of its articulation to Resnaiss oeuvre.
The reference to the dream in Hiroshima in the beginning of the film is a reference to not
knowing that one is dreaming, and therefore not a lack in the Lacanian sense.
Elle: A quoi tu rvais?
Lui: Je ne sais plusPourqoui?
Elle: Je regardais tes mains. Elles bougent quand tu dors.
Lui: Cest quand on rve, peut-tre, sans le savoir.393
She: What were you dreaming about?
He: I dont rememberwhy?
392
393

Ricoeur, p. 445.
Duras, pp. 44-45.
196

She: I was looking at your hands. They move when you are asleep.
He: Maybe its when you dream without knowing it?
When Riva asks what Okada was dreaming while his fingers moved in his sleep, his answer is
that he didnt know that he was dreaming. Caruth explains that the crucial point is not what one
is dreaming about but the fact that one doesnt know that one is dreaming, proving that one can
see without knowing what it is that one is seeing.394 And thus Caruths rhetorical argument
further attests to Okadas insistence on the unreliability of sight as the source of knowledge.
Sight exhausts itself, as Ropars-Wuilleumier points out, for it cannot recover from what it has
seen, and, thus, if translated into words and then into images it testifies to its own depletion,
further erosion, in the mass consumption, where it has been exchanged, transferred, to the
image.395 No self-affirmation but instead a universal vindication of endless circularity,
networking, and consumption, of language already transformed, translated, and expunged from
the memory strata as the oblivion severs its bond from its entwinement from the former. An
eternal memory-oblivion bond, kinship, is replaced by individual cathartic resolution of cheap
thrills bound and bought and sold in paperbacks and photographic images, circulated in film
theaters as realities.
ACT V Transmemoration
As a foreigner Riva can never fully fathom the idiom or the language of Japanese
cataclysm: the irredeemable as well as unreadable syntax of the nuclear catastrophe. The
impossibility of translation of her memory into the history of Hiroshima maintains the ethical

394
395

Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 36.

Ropars-Wuilleumier, p. 183.
197

distance but allows the irreducible difference to be articulated (as in Benjamins metaphor of the
transparent royal robe for the light to pass through) in its sovereign distinction in the form of a
friendship whose structure would eventually appear at the disappearing (the film neither begins
nor ends in the conventional order) of the film. The last encounter, as if anything ever lasts, in
the New Hiroshima hotel room is the instantiation of a friendship in the radical alterity of the
other as they re-call each other by their proper names: Hiroshima and Nevers. Within the
presuppositions of ethical responsibilities, Hiroshima mon amour not only considers the
sociological and political representations of otherness, which could be attributed to its joint status
as a Franco-Japanese co-production, the collaboration, as the invocation of friendship between
the two prior enemy nations, but also underlines the radical otherness of the Other, which cannot
be subsumed under the broad spectrum of a humanistic enlightenment discourse. The mutual
recognition comes in the form of an address (substitution) 396 of their proper names as
Hiroshima and Nevers in which the name functions as the representation of otherness in
memory, a theme that is, however, addressed in another chapter of the dissertation.
Lost in Translation
According to Donald Richie, there were many instances in the film that made the
Japanese audience respond with laughter at Resnais mistakes.397 The mistakes were mostly a
mistranslation of the Japanese cultural code that Resnais was not familiar with and should have
been corrected. It smacks of a European cultural snobbery, for taking the other for granted.
Resnais spent barely two weeks shooting the film in Japan. He shot most of it in Tokyo (where
396
397

Ropars-Wuilleumier, p. 182.
Richie, p. 34.
198

the bar scenes are set) instead of Hiroshima. Duras took no interest in the Japanese culture. She
specified that the main actor should be in the European mold, so as not to appear exotic, or
perhaps, in racial terminology, oriental. The choice of Okada was based upon his occidental,
European looks. He didnt look, for instance, as Japanese as Toshiro Mifune. That was the first
sign of erasing the trace of Japan from the film. The film consisted of many inaccuracies, but
perhaps the most glaring ones were about the mistranslation of cultural codes like the noren, the
hanging curtain, that was still in place after the bar was closed, which should have been taken
inside. The scene that provoked the most derisive laughter from the Japanese audience, Richie
tells us, is set in the Hiroshima Railway Station. The audience hears the announcement of
arrivals and departures of trains in the afternoon while the scene is set at night. Obviously,
Resnais-Duras had no knowledge of Japanese language and therefore didnt realize the mistake,
and perhaps their Japanese producers did not alert them due to politeness. But the overall effect
for the Japanese was rather comforting and reassuring, since the foreigners failed to master
their cultural idiom, a small solace, indeed, for a defeated nation. Obviously the Western
audience didnt realize the mistakes either, including the Western critics who wrote volumes on
the film. The scene at the train station takes place when a distraught Riva, after telling her story
to Okada at the Tea Room on the bank of the Ota, has wandered into the waiting room of the
station and sits down on a bench next to an old Japanese woman. Okada follows her and sits next
to the old woman. Before a word is spoken, Okada rudely leans over the older woman and hands
over a cigarette to Riva. The cultural difference is clearly staked out here. A Japanese woman, at
least in those days, would never smoke in a public place. Okadas rudeness is apparently, Richie

199

informs, a highly authentic gesture. The Japanese woman is naturally curious about the French
woman so she speaks to Okada in Japanese. This is the first time in the entire film we hear the
Japanese language spoken. Okada explains to her that the French woman is leaving for France
and therefore they are both sad at the parting (another improbable scene according to Richie, just
like the slapping of a foreign woman in the bar).
The entire scene at the Hiroshima Railway Station between Okada and the older Japanese
woman was not translated into English or French subtitles in the original version of the film.398
For the English-language audience the entire French dialogues have been subtitled. But the
introduction of Japanese language without subtitles at this late stage comes as a shock if not a
surprise. We suddenly realize that we are not in a French-speaking world, but in a foreign
country. In other words, the native language is not only exiled but becomes foreign in a sense
that Rudolph Pannwitz prescribed for translation, when he wrote that the true objective of
translation is to render our own language foreign, which Benjamin quotes in his essay on
translation.399 By making the Japanese language inaccessible to us, are we then to understand
that the history of Hiroshima too will remain inaccessible to us in any form of crystallized

398

The Criterion DVD supplies a full translation of the conversation.

See Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, Illuminations, pp. 80-81. The task of the
translator is to render the traditional concept of translation, in which the meaning of the foreign
words and sentences are made comprehensible within the readers linguistic milieu,
incomprehensible in such a way that the familiar sight of readers own language turns radically
different in its foreignness. The foreignness is not made ours [but] what is ours, our own
language, is made foreign. Amresh Sinha, The Use and Abuse of Subtitles, Subtitles: On the
Foreignness of Film, eds., Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT
Press, 2004), p. 189.
200
399

knowledge? If not, then the scene can be interpreted as another instance of Eurocentric bias that
we have already noticed before.
The incomprehensibility of the Japanese language for Caruth signifies the foreignness
of Japanese as a language of quitter, of departure.400 In fact, its rather telling that as the
conversation in Japanese is still happening between Okada and the old woman, Riva departs
from the scene unnoticed. Just like the audience, she does not really have any time to waste on a
conversation that really doesnt make any sense, and so it should rather be forgotten (i.e., needs
no subtitles). This reduction of the Japanese language to absolute insignificance has been largely
unnoticed by Western critics and is perhaps a testament to a prevalent attitude that finds the
foreign language as background noise unworthy of attention or translation. I have already
remarked on this phenomenon in my article on subtitles, how in Spielbergs Indiana Jones and
the Temple of Doom (1984) the Hindi dialogues are only used as a cacophony of background
noise without any subtitles.401
Another scene that is not translated in the film has less to do with language or speech
and more to do with sound, the sound of a coughing. As far as my reading goes, I have hardly
come across any mention of this scene, which, perhaps, in a most direct-indirect way, raises the
issue of radiation-related sickness and death. At this point in the film, Riva and Okada are back
in the hotel room, and they hear a man coughing outside in the corridor. She tells Okada rather
frighteningly how she hears him cough every night around four oclock. Nothing further
happens, just this mentioning of a recurring incident outside her door. Thus Hiroshimas history
400
401

Caruth, p. 44.
Amresh Sinha, The Use and Abuse of Subtitles, pp. 183-184.
201

of sickness continuously haunts Rivas path. Whatever political, ideological, or aesthetical

reason that governed Resnais-Durass decision to not to tell the story of Hiroshima, it certainly
was not due to the paucity of the subject matter in a city devastated by the first nuclear disaster.
There were many stories to tell in Hiroshima, if they really wanted to talk of the suffering of the
people, like the man coughing in the hotel corridor who apparently frightened the French heroine
out of her wits. She didnt care to see what the old man looked like and why he coughed every
night around the same time. She didnt care to find out (like most Europeans and Americans) that
he was perhaps one of the countless victims of radiation, stigmatized, and suffering from external
cause like the bombing and internal humiliation as a hibakusha. A storyteller tells the story of the
other whose experience he communicates to his audience. That is what is lost in the translation
of Hiroshima into Nevers, which will be recovered through the naming as an archaic form of
translation, a translation of translation.
Resnais in his heart of hearts was never a travelling salesman like his collaborator and
friend Marker, who trotted around the globe collecting stories from far-flung regions to weave a
network of stories that retained their foreignness. Resnais remained rooted to his soil, in the land
of Nevers that he once visited as a young man, or in the provinciality of Boulogne, and when he
did venture out he needed someone else to tell the storyJean Cayrol for Auschwitz, a prisoner
in the Concentration Camp, and for Hiroshima Duras, who took the story back to France, to his
native land. A storyteller, according to Benjamin, is the one who belongs to either tiller tribe or
the seafarer tradesman tribe. Resnais is neither. He was not a storyteller but an aesthete, an
auteur, who did not write a word or a dialogue for his films throughout his career.
202

Transference and Parallelism

There are various levels at which the film demonstrates the theme of transference. The
first instance of transference occurs involuntarily in the transposition of the Japanese man and
the dead German soldier in the beginning of the Hiroshima episode. The second level of
transference is of an erotic nature, both conscious and unconscious. Rivas affair with Okada is
transference of her early affair with the German soldier; both are representative of the enemies of
France. The third level of transference, in the middle section of the film, simulates the sance
of a psychoanalytic therapeutic session in the Japanese Tea Room. My purpose here is limited to
the interpretation of this scene, which takes up a great part of the film, in which Okada
figuratively assumes the role of an analyst, but not strictly as a literal Freudian psychoanalyst, by
repeatedly questioning the analysand, the French woman, about her past in order to understand
the cause of her nervous breakdown in Hiroshima. This is a scene of transference from a clinical
perspective. Riva starts to transfer the identity of her dead lover onto Okada. Similarly, Okada,
without questioning, willingly assumes this transferred identity and starts to refer to himself as
her dead lover by saying: Am I dead when you are in the cellar?
The fourth and perhaps the most enigmatic transference take place in the two parallel
stories of Hiroshima and Nevers, which has been best articulated in Ropar-Wuilleumiers article.
She points to the transference of what she calls the history of Hiroshima into the story of Nevers,
what I have earlier alluded to as grafting, a folding and refolding of Hiroshima and Nevers into
each other. She writes: To film Hiroshima, then, means to show in what way the event exceeds
the possibility of fixing it within filmic representations. The monstrous debris in the museum and
203

the mutilated survivors in the hospitals, the photos, newsreels, reconstructionsall the figurative
signs like all the verbal detailspoint to the impotence of sight and knowledge to organize the
readability of an event which can only be acknowledged through the mimicry of a fragmented
editing constructed in the model of the atomic explosion. The fragmented editing achieves the
transference or exchange of the event, according to her, for an inscription of the event (the
displacement of the afflicted bodies on to the eroticized bodies), which is enunciable, i.e.,
representable, that negotiates the possibility of another exchange or transference of the
unrepresentable of Hiroshima on to the narratable of Nevers.402
Riva unconsciously assimilates some of the objects/exhibits of the Hiroshima
museum that find a direct referential connection to her flashback memoir. The objects of the
museum in Rivas voiceover from the Hiroshima museumsuch as a deformed hand, a
destroyed eye, hair torn out, a distraught woman breaking out of a cavernous dwelling, a
twisted bicycle, legs of passers-by, river, anger, stone, 403 skins peeled off, blood, injured
dogs, river, dead fish, ruins, etc.form an integral part of her personal narrative through her
flashback. For instance, Riva is introduced riding a bicycle that she leaves crumpled in the
field as she rushes to meet with her love. She scratches her hands on the stone walls of her
cellar till it draws blood, which she drinks in the memory of her dead lover symbolizing the
Eucharistic ritual (Resnais was a Catholic). Her hair is shorn off; its fallen on the floor,
reminding us of the pile of hair that fell off from the victims of radiation and also of the pile
of hair in Night and Fog. The shearing of hair (the fate of female collaborators and the
402
403

Ropars-Wuilleumier, p. 179.
Ibid., p. 180.
204

Holocaust victims) has even a deeper resonance in French history, to Mary Antoinette,
whose hair was also shorn off, and like Riva she was paraded in the streets before her
execution during the French Revolution, but also to the victims of the Holocaust. Here we
should not forget that Okada is a scholar of the French Revolution, as he informs Riva at the
beginning of the film. Rivas shame before the townsfolk as she is paraded around the town
sitting on a donkey also echoes Christs fate before crucifixion. A cat comes in the cellar
reminding us of the limping dog in the Hiroshima documentary.
These objects in the flashbacks have been transferred directly from the displays of the
Hiroshima Peace Museum in her story as a repressed content. Her innocent inscription of the real
images of horror into her memory conceals a desire to cope with these objects that defy any
mode of understanding and knowledge. Their inscription or insertion into her memory provides a
passage to her unconscious desire to domesticize and personalize these individual items from the
petrified state into which they have been consigned by the narrative of history. Riva humanizes
these items with a force of personal narrative in order to redeem them from their historical
petrification in a place like the museum, which has an affinity with the German word (isnt this
about a dead German?) museal (museumlike), which has unpleasant overtones, as Adorno
reminds us, due to its phonetic association with mausoleum.404 Similarly Ropars-Weilleumier
contends that unless it is inscribed in bodies, History leads to museum; the trace is at once an
aid to readability and the sign of the unfamiliar; and if the reading still remains to be done, the

404

Adorno, Valry Proust Museum, Prisms, p. 175.

205

writing-reading reminds us, by its surplus and overflowing, of the loss of substance that the
acquisition of meaning costs.405
Among many parallels in Hiroshima mon amour, one resilient parallel is the doubling of
Durass La Douleur (a forgotten text that came out of obscurity/death like the character of
Robert L) onto the love story in Nevers and Hiroshima. Durass forgotten diaryor at least
thats what she claims in the Preface to the bookhas had many controversial interpretations.406
My attempt here is not to resurrect the episode of whether she is telling the truth about the status
and the origin of the text, but to critically analyze how the story from the book, with its
autobiographical connotations, has been translated into the love story of Riva. Like in Hiroshima
mon amour, the woman in La Douleur shares the trauma of her lovers absence or death; one is
imagined whereas the other is literal. In both the imaginary and literal variations of the death the
representations of the lovers have a similar impact on the woman. In both cases she cannot
separate her own body from the imagined/literal dead body of her lover. Just as Robert L lies
face down in a ditch, curled up like a fetus, so we have the German soldier lying face down on
the ground. The particular moment when the protagonist of La Douleur imagines her lover dead
in the concentration camp, she is pressed against her present lover D, as in Hiroshima mon
amour when Okada clasps Riva in his arms as she tells him about the death of her lover. There
are also variations in the similarity of the bodies of the dreaming lover and the dead lover. D, like
Okada, would bring the dead back. In La Douleur this happens by D going back to the
405

Ibid., p. 182,
For instance, Ropars-Wuilleumier in How Hiroshima begets Meaning: Alain Resnais
Hiroshima mon amour (1959) does a detailed analysis of this saga. See also Sarah French, pp.
2-4.
206
406

concentration camp and bringing Robert L back to the protagonist, who will refuse to accept him
back alive. In Hiroshima mon amour Okada raises the dead (the figure of the Lazarus and
Resnaiss collaboration with Cayrol is the case in point here too) out of obscurity, from the
graveyard of her memory to a virtual realm of her memory. And when Robert L comes back in
the end in flesh, she refuses to be him, just like Riva who screams and proclaims that she will
forget Okada when he comes back to her in the hotel room. Thus there is a great deal of
similarity in these two stories; they imitate each other fairly conclusively. One of the reasons
Resnais wanted Duras to write the script was due to his fascination with her first publication,
Moderato Cantabile (as I mentioned earlier).
For Riva the first nature of the self has been abandoned for the truth of the second nature.
She has left the first nature of reality to withdraw into the second nature, or the virtual nature
of memory. Caruths shortcoming was in characterizing Rivas trauma as literal and thus real
as the first-hand experience of the real trauma in a belated or deferred manner. She could have
borrowed the Deleuzian vocabulary and called it virtual. The literal cannot transfer into the real,
because it is more than real. It is what reality would propose as its own existence, a confirmation
of the real. But the transformation of virtual and actual (present and the past) is a commonplace
idiom in Deleuze. In fact his theory basically revolves around these actual-virtual connections
and transformations.
The last and most disturbing instance of transference takes place, according to RoparsWuilleumier in shot 323, where the dead German soldiers image is conflated with the

207

newspaper reports of the Hiroshima bombing.407 Finally the meaning of Hiroshima is

transferredhistoricized by the West, to Nevers, the corpse of the dead German soldier
signifying the end of the war (the defeat of Germany) and the liberation of France. From this
point on in the film, the story that began with the momentary eruption of an involuntary memory
starts to follow the painful agony of a remorseful forgetting of the other in the narrative. Riva
grieves the loss of her love, whose meaning can now be easily grasped by anyone. Her private
ruin is now turned into a public monument of victory. The story of memory has ended and the
tale of forgetting has begun. How can she transfer this forgetting back to unremembered
memory? Here on the banks of the Ota, in its calm water, the traces of death long submerged, the
memory of the Loire softly pours out its heart, making it a witness to the unsung song of a
youthful love that no one mourned.
From Casablanca to Hiroshima
The hero and the heroine meet in a bar, in Ricks Caf Americain (a weird name for a
casino and a bar). Like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Okada and Riva sit in the bar,
miles apart figuratively speaking, she in her world of private doom, he trying to enter her world
from outside, but the margins of their meeting brings to the fore the old pain. Yes, it was in
Casablanca, where the origin of the thermonuclear war was first conceived in the beautiful
friendship between (I dont stick my neck for anybody) Rick and the corrupt French Police Chief
Renault (round up the usual suspect). The two bars are echoes of each other. Womens lives
and virtue are constantly traded in these places as we witness Riva being accosted by a Japanese

407

Ropars-Wuilleumier, p. 181.
208

pickup artist. From Casablanca to Hiroshima, a whole trajectory of American involvement in war
can be traced here between these two cities (Real and Imaginary). Both are legends of their own.
The scene in the Caf Casablanca where Riva is sitting alone while being intently watched by
Okada from a distance, and is approached by a dandyish Japanese man who starts a conversation
with her in English, has been much discussed, especially by Caruth, who suggests that
introduction of English language is also a language of forgetting (just like the Japanese) of
Hiroshima for the American spectators.408 Here I reproduce the full text of the Japanese mans
exchange with Riva; she doesnt respond to his advances:
Are you alone?
Do you mind talking with me a little?
It is very late to be lonely?
May I sit down?
Are you just visiting Hiroshima?
Do you like Japan?
Do you live in Paris?409
This encounter obviously has the banality of all such encounters. There seems to be nothing
incongruous here, but hopelessly a situation that makes a woman, especially of a foreign origin, a
target for the resident males. But what is really incongruous in the one-way conversation of the
Japanese man with Riva is the last sentence: Do you live in Paris? Why did he speculate that?

408

Caruth, Literature and the Enactment of Memory, p. 49. Although the scene in the caf with
the Japanese stranger is a grotesque parody of the beginning of love affair between Riva and
Okada, but the significance of foreign accent for Riva must not be minimized. Armes, p. 74.
Armes is far closer to Rivas emotional venerability to the foreignness than Caruths reading of it
as a language of forgetting. If anything the foreign accent, and by extension the foreign language
is a language of remembering. He writes: Each time she hears words of love spoken to her in a
foreign accent and this perhaps, as much as anything else, causes the second love to revive the
first. Alain Resnais, p. 86.
409
Duras, pp. 121-122.
209

Wouldnt such a man most likely assume the woman to be an American, especially since she is
in a bar that makes obvious reference to the Hollywood film and not the place in Morocco? The
logical pick-up line would have been: Do you live in New York? The question would have
firmly implicated the everlasting presence of American culture and war (they go hand in hand) in
Japan and perhaps also explained the womans forlorn and distraught state as someone in
mourning for the action of her country. By assuming that she is from Paris, a Francophiliac bias
(well, the story apparently had to be fifty-fifty French and Japanese) of the film is presented
above the possibility of an American grief. This pickup scene is being intently watched by
Okada, who is sitting at a distance with a cigarette in his hand (reminiscent of Ricks perpetual
smoking in Casablanca). What is being repeated in this encounter is the hidden memory of
Okada and Riva, who perhaps started their affair in a similar manner.410 The encounter reveals a
memory of the past in the present, the confluence of actual and virtual, which has both tragic and
banal consequences. Like the banality of the love story of Nevers grafted on the immense
catastrophe of Hiroshima, the encounter in the Caf Casablanca lays over another layer (the
ashes of the nuclear fallout) of the memory of a romantic entanglement (a memory of the world)
that also covered over the real nature of American involvement in the Second World War. Unlike
the romantic love story immortalized in the idealistic sacrifice of Rick and Ilsa that prevails over
the disasters of nations at war, Hiroshima mon amour exposes its cruel banality and the
impossibility of reconciling love with war.

410

Freddy Sweet makes a similar observation about the two meeting the day before, p. 31.
210

And the Americans do get blamed, if not directly then indirectly via their cultural
imperialistic symbolism of Hollywood. Casablanca (1942), the emblematic film of American
romance and idealism, is implicated for its historical role in galvanizing the reluctant, isolationist
America to plunge headlong into the murky waters of the Second World War. Casablanca
(which means White House) issued the clarion call for America to forge ahead in Hollywoods
liberal agenda to attack the Fascist and Nazi forces ravaging the European continent, which,
ironically enough, was initially opposed by the United States Office of War Information (OWI),
because at the time the Roosevelt administration was in league with the Nazi appeaser Vichy
regime, until the Japanese attack on December 6, 1941, on Pearl Harbor changed the equation.
A Tale of Two Cities
It is a tale of two cities, one destroyed and rebuilt in the image of its destroyer, the other
a surviving monument of its countrys past, deeply tied in, at the opposite ends of the
world and human psychology, with the horrors of war.411
If there is a mimetic correspondence between Hiroshima and Nevers, it is not in their selfidentities as mutually reflected in the meaning of the term; a greater signification of non-identity
is at play. Rivas status as a victim and Hiroshimas status as a victim are not identical, in the
sense that both are victims of the same crime, but they do have a shared identity of being
victimized. The same forces that victimized the population of Hiroshima/Nagasaki are
responsible for the fate of Riva. Her trauma is caused not by the enemy but her own people, her
family and her nation. Hiroshima, too, is a victim of its own nations action, while also being a
victim of American atrocities, which doesnt negate Japans victimization of its own colonial

411

Royal S. Brown, Hiroshima mon amour, Cinaste, vol. 29, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 75-76.
211

subjects. The Japanese army massacred thousands as it retreated from Indochina during the
Second World War.
If we are thinking of memory in terms of mimesis of history from an Adornian
perspective, then we have to understand the phenomenon of assimilation from a slightly different
angle. If mimetic trace of memory is its absolute expression in a non-totalizable form that resists
assimilation into the other by assimilating the other into itself, then the history acquires the
residual form of memory as its own expressive entity, which it both assimilates and appropriates
in its own privileged language.412 The mimetic trace of memory that survives in the individual as
a sign of the collective that expresses its history through expression whose meaning remains selfidentical is violently wrenched off from its particular locality or locus into a general, universal
space. History is a language of communication; memory is a language of expression.
Communication is not identical with expression in the form of the relationship between the
subject and the object in the Cartesian/Kantian metaphysical sense. Adornos negative dialectics
is based upon a teasing of the difference of expression, as mimetic, an essential aspect of the
artwork, from the hegemonic quality of communication inherent in the discursive form of
history. For Adorno and also for Benjamin, mimesis signifies, or better, defies, language of
communication for the linguistic mode of being in which the meaning has neither a prereferential nor a denotative privilege. Ressnais-Duras, like Adorno and Benjamin, are deeply

412

For a reading of Mimesis in Adorno, see Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Also see Amresh Sinha, Adorno on
Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory, In Practice: Adorno, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, eds.
Briel, Holger and Andreas Kramer (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2001), pp. 145-159. Website:
http://www.wbenjamin.org/mimesis.html
212

averse to situating the film, especially the status and designation of Hiroshima, in the
nomenclature of a meaningful discourse. In fact, they refuse to historicize Hiroshima in the
context of a global peace movement or as a historical atrocity, where its specificity becomes a
matter of chatter and its true meaning is terminally subjected to the rationale of right and wrong,
subjective and objective issues of moral or political discourse.
As a transmemoration413 the film is about remembering one in the absence of the other:
Hiroshima and Nevers. The cities like the lovers walk side by side, together but separate in their
own personal grief, exchanging the streets, the signs, and the memories of one for the other.414 It
is impossible here to distinguish the separateness of one from the other, conflating and
confusing, identifying and then refusing to identify, breaking down in the presence of a great
humanitarian catastrophe for having lost also once ones own humanity in a distant time in a
faraway land, but connected by the same agency, within the grasp of the horror indistinguishable,
of indiscriminate loss of the self in a place where memorys call can no longer go unheeded.
What else can one do in a place where forgetting is anathema, a sign of a future death, but to
remember the death that has been forgotten. After concluding the personal history of Riva in
Nevers, the film finally makes its allegorical tour of the two cities as the virtual and the actual
representations of the past and the present, memory and history, becoming the mirror-image of

413

I have borrowed the word, Transmemoration, from Maclear, who defines it as a process of
situated historical inquiry and ethical translation. Unlike commemoration that means to relate
to memory together or recollect in unity, transmemoration, using the prefix trans, takes
memory beyond or across the normal hermeneutical boundaries associated with remembrance in
a limited sense. Maclear, p. 154, 155. I am primarily using it is a trans-it (a la LaCapra) between
history and memory, as a translation between remembering and forgetting.
414
See Emma Wilson Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Alainn Resnais, pp. 61-64.
213

each other to a point of indiscernibility.415 Riva and Okada take the last walk side by side as
they slowly merge, coalescing into the spatiality of their respective cities, their identities now
assume a cartographical confluence, and their bodies become the measuresthe city was made
to the size of love (Cette ville tat faite la taille de lamour)by which the topographical
dimensions of their cities can be properly mapped and eventually named. The breaking of the
dawn in Hiroshima, after the long nights painful journey from a forgotten memory to a
remembered history, is brought through the slow tilt of the camera up toward the glass roof of
the Caf, the sunlight streams through, reminding us of the early morning of August 6, 1945,
when the city was just waking up, while the two lovers sit silently, separately, as if waiting for
the catastrophe, the inevitable departure of love. They meet again, perhaps, for the last time,
which is always the first time for the event to be addressed by its proper name.
Transmemoration of the Toponym
Elle: Hi-ro-shi-ma.
Elle: Hi-ro-shi-ma. Cest ton nom.
Lui: Cest mon nom. Ton nom toi est Nevers. Ne-vers-en-France.
Hiroshima as an illegible sign of history transforms into a veritably readable narrative in
Rivas voluntary memory. One can also read this transformation as a translation through a
Benjaminian simile in which the original is left intact but ever so lightly touched in a tangential
415

The indiscernibility of real and the imaginary, or the present and the past, of the actual and
the virtualis the objective [not subjective] characteristics of certainimages which are by
nature double, writes Deleuze. The point of indiscernibility, however, does not suppress the
distinction between the actual and the virtual. In fact, there is no virtual which does not become
an actualor the latter becoming virtual through the same relation. This is the mirror-image in
the Bergsonian sense where the real and the virtual are reflected in reciprocity constituting what
Deleuze calls the two sides of the crystal-image. Cinema 2, p. 69. See Wilson Hiroshima, p.
63.
214

manner as an aeolian harp is touched by the wind.416 Here I would like to briefly introduce
some of the essential themes of Benjamins essay on translation followed by an analysis of his
language essay, which I believe will give us a deeper understanding of how to translate the
language of this complex film out of the historicized framework that is contingent upon its
oblique or tangential reference, in a true Benjaminian sense, to a narrative, both discursive
and digressive, toward an ultimate oblivion to defy historical obligations for monumentalized
memory. In The Task of the Translator, Benjamin writes, Just as a tangent touches a circle
lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to
which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and
only at the infinitely small point of sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the
laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.417 As a foreigner Riva can perhaps never truly
fully fathom (given her absolute lack of interest) the idiom or the language of Japanese suffering.
The impossibility of translation of her memory into the history of Hiroshima maintains the
ethical distance but allows the difference to articulate its autonomy/sovereignty in the bond of
eroticized friendship (of Eros and Thanatos) whose structure would eventually appear at the
conclusion of the film. The last encounter in her room in the New Hiroshima Hotel is the model
of friendship that ensues in the absolute alterity of the other, with the remarkable power of the
human word, as the reflection of the divine word, in order to translate the nameless in names:
Hi-ro-shi-ma. That is your name. Your name is Nevers, Nevers in France.

416
417

Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, Illuminations, p. 81.

Ibid., p. 80.
215

In the metaphor of language, Neverss story of madness acts like a royal robe of
translation that envelops the painful history of Hiroshima like a see-through garment with ample
folds.418 It doesnt conceal as much as envelops, folds it in its sovereign embrace, veils it with
her own forgotten tears, and nurses her own tattered soul in the warmth of its (Hiroshima) glow,
radiation, and bereavement. The language of translation, understood here as the divine and
mythical languageLanguage as suchallows the kinship of Nevers to speak its foreign
tongue, its orphaned vernacular, its subdued metaphor, its absence from the historical nations of
linguistic hegemony. As a language, the story of Nevers can only survive through its translation
into the echo of Hiroshima, where its distant murmur can be heard in the whisper of the wind
from the banks of the river Ota. Here in this echo we hear the double yesYes! Yes!that
Joyces Molly taught so memorably in Ulysses.419 The double yes also echoes in the
Nietzschean affirmation of the forgetting of the beast that even forgets that it has already
forgotten. Translation as an affirmation, as yes, the second yes arising out of forgetfulness
(in memory, as in echo) of the first yes, as coming back, as reversal that implies doubling, of
return, from an-other place.420 The echo comes in the direction of the original sound, and not
vice versa. But it is the place of the other sound, the sound of the other. It is one, that is, the first
418

In translation, Benjamin writes, the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air,"
though it cannot permanently dwell there, "yet..., at least it points the way to this region: the
predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages....While
content and language form a certain unity in the original, like fruit and its skin, the language of
the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds (Emphasis added). The
Task of the Translator, Illuminations, p. 75.
419
Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. John D. Caputo
(New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 188.
420
See Hent de Vries, Anti-Babel: The Mystical Postulate in Benjamin, de Certeau and
Derrida, MLN, vol. 107, no. 3 (April 1992): 452, 453.
216

that responds to the other, that is, the second sound in the form of its echo. The echo as it comes
back, always comes back with a delayed and distanced sounding voice. More remote than its
remoteness, this echo is an arch sound that we read here as translation of Gods language in
names.421
In Benjamin, translation marks the afterlife of language, sets the tone for the survival of
language in the kinship of all languages through an immanent violence. The violence of law is
immanent to the mode of translation, whereby meaning is violently moved or expelled.
Violently moved can also be translated, in a spatial/temporal sense, as expulsion from land,
Paradise and so on. The incidental state of ones own language has to be violently removed or
expelled from its state of occupation by a foreign language. Translations function of territorial
displacement attests to the metaphorical realm of languages sovereignty, so distinct in the
imagery of the royal robe with ample folds, which envelops but remains non-adequate,
violent and foreign with respect to its own content.422 Untranslated language is the sign of its
immanent death. In other words, by translating the language of Nevers, Riva has postulated an
afterlife, a future anterior for the memory of her story whose verse or text will be constantly

421

Benjamin considers translation to be already inscribed in mans naming language. And calling
name the language of language in which Gods creation is completed Benjamin sets the ground
for language as the translation of the Word in name. Name, as Benjamin puts it, is the innermost
nature of language itself. Naming is that by which nothing beyond is communicated, and in
which language itself communicates itself absolutely. In naming, the mental entity that
communicates itself is language. Where mental being in its communication is language itself in
its absolute wholeness, only there is the name, and only the name is there (emphasis added).
On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1978), p. 318.
422
Translated by Carol Jacobs, The Monstrosity of Translation, MLN 90 (1975): 755-766.
217

repeated, will be in constant replay, as all movies are inextricably bound to the eternal loop of
their material existence. And it will be remembered as an echo of the original for the listener who
will now forever remember the name Hiroshima as a hidden lament, a covenant, each instance
the name of Nevers is pronounced in Hiroshima mon amour. Riva has survived her trauma by
narrating or translating (the double yes, yes!) her story in the idiom of the other, in the place of
the other, in the name of the other.
To conclude, Hiroshima is not only a place of humanitys most unprecedented violence,
but also, most of all, a place of healing, where un-healed souls like Rivas come for therapeutic
sessions.423 As a city that heals troubled and tormented, traumatized, in Caruths sense, souls,
Hiroshima must open its wounds from a deeper valley of abyss to those whose internal bodies
too have ruptured resulting in deeper and wider wounds. Rivas nervous breakdown is a mimetic
symptomatic gesture in relation to the absolute traumatic episode of Hiroshima, a victim of
calculation more than reason. An unknown city, like the unknown protagonists of the film, is a
subject of intense moral and historical investigation, yet its pain has only become deeper and
more open due to the utter oblivion that has come to signify our attitude towards this global
catastrophe. Most people do not concern themselves with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not because
they are unpleasant memories, but because their actual threat has become less convincing and
they are better left to the monuments and the historians to take care of. The wounds have already
started to heal, the nuclear madness also started to ebb away, like Rivas temporary insanity, and
a gradual pall of forgetting like the environmental pollution has descended over the global

423

Ibid., p. 87.
218

conscience, which then felt more encumbered by nationalisms and growing economic inflation.
The Japanese, on the other hand, were using their own subversive psychoanalytic cure by turning
reality into nightmares in Godzilla-like creatures, in a clear reference to the relationship between
the unconscious repression and history, self and the Other.424 Psychoanalysis, as Noel Carroll
would profess, is the lingua franca of the horror film genre, which, along with science fiction,
poignantly expresses the sense of powerlessness and anxiety that correlates with times of
depression, recession, Cold War strife, galloping inflation, and national confusion.425 Most
science fiction radiation horror films take direct inspiration from the historical legacies of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In other words, there were greater homages to Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in global popular filmic imaginary than in the contemporary political or historical debates. These
cities are nothing but dark footnotes in the annals of modern history. We have moved far away
from Hiroshima and Nagasaki through Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Hiroshima mon amour is a project of remembering and forgetting as it intertwines
between the personal and national at the level of memory and history. If anything, it is a film
about realizing that the ultimate task of memory is to absolve history of its past. The story of
memory is situated and dis-placed in Nevers in France, an inconsequential provincial town on
the banks of the river Loire, far removed from the place that has become synonymous with
memory itself: the historical site of the first atomic bomb attack and unprecedented mass killing,

424

See Chon A. Noriega, Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare: When Them! is U.S.,
Hibakusha Cinema, pp. 54-74.
425
Noel Carroll, Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings,
Film Quarterly 34 (Spring 1981): 17. Cited in Chon A. Noriega, Godzilla and the Japanese
Nightmare, p. 54.
219

the city of Hiroshima. Hiroshima is, then, first a place of remembering over anything else. A
remembering that is ostensibly not directed as much to the past as to the future. Hiroshima
evokes nothing but the first experience of the nuclear holocaust whose memory is the very
demand and prerogative of never to forget. (Although the French provincial city of Nevers has
nothing to do with the English word Never, the uncanny resonance of the phonetic association
is remarkable in this context, because it is Nevers that will replace the pledge to never forget
Hiroshima.)426 Hiroshima stands as a sign, an arkh (both as commencement and command) 427
and telos of human memorys relentless appeal to the world to never forget what happened there.
The place is memory itself. Its not the temporality that is held at the highest esteem, but it is the
excoriation of the place, the spatiality, the site, which is the sole preserver and precursor of a
memory that must never be erased under any circumstances. As a place Hiroshima not only
signifies what has happened and what is going to happen lest we forget, but it is also the place
where memory is in constant struggle against forgetting, where the memory of the first atom
bomb has already been receding fast into oblivion.

426

Lynn A. Higgins also draws attention to the phonetic equation of French Nevers with never in
English. She writes, the Japanese man asks whether Nevers means anything in French. His
question brings the name into view as a word that might mean something, as in fact it almost
does in English. The English never casts a negation on what the French woman recounts and
suggests the possibility that she remembers a Nevers-neverland of her lost past. Myths of
Textual Autonomy: From Psychoanalysis to Historiography in Hiroshima mon amour, New
Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and Representation of History in Postwar France
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 45
427
Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 1.
220

The two Rivas, the present actress and the young girl in Nevers, are the same person but
two different personalities, playing two different roles, like Hitchcocks Madeleine and Judy. 428
One is an imposter, the other is real. One is memory the other is forgetting, and the combination
of the two constitutes the basis of desire that leads us back to Kojvian-Lacanian, Resnais-Duras,
Resnais-Marker territory. Hiroshima becomes in the encounter between memory and forgetting a
place that is remembered in the absence of its history. What Riva truly encounters in Hiroshima
is the place of Nevers in its absence, which is always already the state of becoming memory, and
thus the history of Hiroshima, which has been present in the monumentalized and fossilized
spectrum of museology, is the final attestation of memorys absence, its flight from the presence
of the present to the absence of the absent. In a sense, past cannot be recreated by historical
associationism, by some surreal fantasy as Scottie tried to create Madeleine out of Judy. But he
had also missed the real presence: the time of the death of the real Madeleine. By the time Riva
and Resnais arrived at Hiroshima, they had already missed the event, the encounter with the real,
thus the hubris to reconstruct the past through autodidactic means, by assembling the fragments
of dislocated bodies of a time through spatial iconography. It may produce the semblance of a
lost world, but it will remain a fiction masquerading as reality. Thus the well-known dilemma,
the proverbial paradox, that when the liar tells a lie, is he not, at the same time, telling the truth?
Resnais confronted this paradox of telling the story of Hiroshima through a means that is devoted
to its own undermining by its own technique of representation, and here, of course, it is the old

428

Kreidl provides an intriguing reading of Hitchcocks Vertigo and Resnaiss Hiroshima mon
amour as surreal texts of impersonation to see through the fabricated reality of its own structure,
pp. 61-64.
221

Platonic argument that has once again raised its ugly head, thus why not take recourse to avoid
the responsibility of telling the truth, which is fiction in any case. That is the reason why the
fiction of Nevers comes to dominate the banality of Hiroshima as a love story. Hiroshima mon
amour, translated as Hiroshima my love, is not a love story (that would be too banal for ResnaisDuras) but a story of love that must be forgotten, not because of Nevers but in spite of Nevers.
We have reached the ultimate understanding of memory in a deeply Nietzschean and primordial
sense, in a sense that I have elaborated on already in another piece elsewhere,429 as a fulfillment,
as an affirmation of forgetting.

Postscript
Pursuing the discourse of memory and history from the previous chapters in relation to
the notion of temporality, I would like to suggest that in both Hiroshima mon amour and Last
year in Marienbad (1963) the present has a privilege over the sequential order of time and the
spectacle is limited to its own presence, because at the end of both the films the narrative
collapses on its own axis without any possibility of extending further in space or time. Both films
begin and end in the lapse of time, in the vacuum of space, because here the space is nothing but
a place created in the cartography of a mental landscape in which objects are mental constructs.
Here the sense of time, its sequential or linear division, is suspended for a mental world in which

429

Forgetting to Remember: From Blanchot to Benjamin, Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique,

Issue 10, November 2005. http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue10/sinha.pdf
222

time and space are metaphors for the operation of mind creating, what Deleuze, calls, a cinema
which has only one single character, Thought.430
For Deleuze, Resnaiss films are not invested in the chronological order of temporal and
spatial configurations as such, but they are primarily a function of thought. What we get from
Resnais is the process of how thought can be conceptualized as a means of organizing the minds
circuitry of mapping or cartography: the continuum of time in which each sheet of memory
resides. He writes: When we say that Resnais characters are philosophers, we are certainly not
saying that these characters talk about philosophy, or that Resnais applies philosophical ideas
to a cinema, but that he invents a cinema of philosophy, a cinema of thought, which is totally
new in the history of cinema and totally alive in the history of philosophy, creating with his
unique collaborators, a rare marriage between philosophy and cinema. The great post-war
philosophers and writers demonstrated that thought has something to do with Auschwitz, with
Hiroshima, but this was also demonstrated by the great cinema authors from Welles and
Resnaisthis time in the most serious way.431
Here ideas are built through concentric circles of absences colliding with the space of
objective dimensions, like a Caf, a Railway Station, or a balcony, streets, etc., but these locales
are themselves cipher in relation to the mental map through which thought tends to move in its

430

Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 122. Resnais: le dbut nest pas seulement une reprresentation du
couple, cest une image potique. Et la cendre sur les corps, a ne se rfre aucune ralit
anecdotique, cest une pense. (the start is not only a representation of the couple, it is a poetic
image. And the ash on the body does not refer to any actual reality, it is a thought). Adolphe
Nysenholc, Premier Plan: Alain Resnais (October 1961): 18. Cited in Emma Wilson, Alain
Resnais, p. 47, n.4.
431
Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 209.
223

own peculiar dimension or direction. Thus in the Hiroshima Railway Station, Riva is hardly
aware of the noise and din and even the presence of an old lady sitting next to her. Her world is
her mental or subjective world that remains aloof and detached from the objective environment
into which the body has been suddenly placed. This absolute privileging of the mental map, the
cerebrum, the brain, is the locus, the immanent plane, on which the meandering but propitious
journey of thought occurs.
Instead of the story, that is, history, the characters within themselves embody both the
past and the present (the sheets of time). It is not the events that propel the action to various
stages through movement, which Deleuze has referred to as movement-image, in Cinema 1,432 of
the prewar classical Hollywood films. Resnaiss films, on the contrary, says Deleuze, are not so
much about the characters as they are about their feelings, the sentiment of being human, which
govern and facilitate the movement from one precipice to another. For instance, in Hiroshima
mon amour, both characters of Riva and Okada belong to the present, the space remained
constrained to, what Robbe-Grillet has described in reference to Marienbad, a perpetual
presence,433 but the feelings plunge into the past.434 The feelings can either belong to the
characters psychology or it could have its own psychology, by which I mean that feelings are
not necessarily in Resnais an essential component of a characters psyche; they have their own
autonomous existence, like shadows attached to the realities. For Deleuze, what is truly

432

Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986).
433
Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Grove, 1965), p. 153. Cited in Higgins, p. 85.
434
Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 124.
224

important is the manner in which the feelings circulate between different sheets of time thus
creating their own free consciousness or thought. Thus, if Riva and Okada are figurations of
Thought, representing a set of feelings or consciousness, whose free associations create
transformation of possible meanings through the interactions between the virtual sheets of time,
then, we have entered into the precincts of a mental theater, like Marienbad, into the workings of
cerebral mechanisms, the brain. Resnais, as Deleuze reminds us, was always interested in only
what happens in the brain. Deleuzes final point about the cerebral mechanisms that constitute
the monstrous, chaotic, functioning of the brain, specifies Resnaiss predilection for
understanding the mechanism as opposed to the mechanics, i.e., instead of understanding what
memory is and where it comes from, it is clearly articulated in the following sentence. If
feelings are ages [since they move freely from one sheet to another] of the world, thought is the
non-chronological time which corresponds to them.435 In other words, detached from the
psychology of the characters, the feelings become their own characters and they move freely
from sheet to sheet transforming the chronological division of space in quantitative,
homogenous, terms by which the thing can only differ in degree from other things and from
itself (augmentation, diminution); and on the one hand, the aspect of duration [qualitative
division], by which the thing differs in kind from all others and from itself (alteration)436
(emphasis in original).

435

Ibid., p. 125.
Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), p. 31.
225
436

In a philosophical sense, could we envisage that Resnais has invented a new concept, a
new philosophy of cinema, in documentary in Night and Fog and in feature in Hiroshima mon
amour, which is aimed at creating a new idea for realizing the cinema outside the Bazanian and
Kracauerian model of photorealism and neorealism? If philosophy, as Deleuze asserts, is the art
of creating a concept, a thought that has not existed before, then how is/are Resnaiss films
philosophical? In what way do we find the creation of a new concept that makes his films a work
that no longer is part of the existing conceptual order of the cinema established within the two
major theoretical and conceptual strains of montage and mise-en-scne? I have not been able to
show how Resnaiss films qualify as films that have created a new conceptual order in the
history of cinema, but I have tried to present Hiroshima mon amour as a film that has managed
to synthesize the montage and mise-en-scne rivalry in a friendly manner, which is to say, in
other words, following Deleuze and Guattari, philosophically.437 Philo-sophy in its origin is
deeply indebted to the concept of friendship. There is no philosophy without friendship. No
longer is philosophy the property of the Wiseman or the sage. They have been replaced by the
friends of wisdom, the ones who seek wisdom as opposed to the ones who possess it.
Resnaiss Toute la mmoire du monde comes very close to impersonating Deleuzes idea
of the memory world and the functioning of the brain. In the Bibliothque nationale, Deleuze
observes, the books, trolleys, shelving, stairs, lifts and corridors constitute the elements and
levels of a gigantic memory where men themselves are only mental functions or neuronic
messengers. As a result of this functionalism, cartography is essentially mental, cerebral, and
437

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 1-12.
226

Resnais has always said that what interested him was the brain, the brain as world, as memory, as
memory of the world.438 The library constitutes not only the institutional framework within
which the fact and desire of a reader to get access to a book in a fortress of memory, but a
whole system of maps and diagrams that constitute the elements of a gigantic system that
Deleuze refers to as the brain. Deleuzes inscription of Toute la mmoire du monde as the
functionalism of the brain is a reference to it as not only a part of the body (which is clearly
listed above), but as a feature of the mind, a body without organs. Deleuze also makes a passing
reference to Night and Fog as a film that, too, ostensibly represents the nature of the apparatus of
camps functioning methodology, but, more so, it discloses the mental functioning of the cold
and diabolical mind in its incomprehensiveness, impossible to understand. A comparative
reading of both Toute la mmoire du monde and Night and Fog can also be found in Dudley
Andrew and Noel Burch among others. For Dudley Andrew, in Bibliothque nationale [a]s in
Night and Fog two temporal orders are shoved in together, fact and desire.439 For Noel Burch,
Resnaiss Bibliothque nationale anticipates the atrocious memory of Night and Fog, where the
books, like the prisoners, are inventoried and locked away in their cell-blocks, guarded by
438

Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 121-122. Mary Warnock also differentiates the function of memory as
a mental activity as opposed to the function of the brain which is used as a storehouse (See
Augustines Confessions, Book X) or a functionalism of computer programming analogically
speaking. She writes: It would be generally agreed that memory is a mental phenomenon.
Nevertheless, anyone writing about memory is bound to write about the brain, which is part of
the body, as well as about the mind. And so to raise any questions about the nature of memory is
immediately to raise in some form the problem of the relation between mind and body. It is
worth asking why this should be so. It is perfectly possible to write about decision-making, or
imagination, or the nature of humour, all of them in some sense mental phenomena, without
discussing or even mentioning the brain. What is about memory that inevitably brings in the
physiological? Memory (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 1.
439
Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 46.
227

sinister jailers whose invisible footsteps echo in the corridor.440 In the only dramatic sequence,
in an otherwise descriptive documentary, a book is tracked and brought (searched and
retrieved, a process analogous to the Aristotelian science of recollection, anamnesis) to the
circulation desk to address the needs of a reader, prompting the paradoxical relationship between
the past and the present as it is realized in the moment of its circulation from one temporality to
another.441 A book is like an independent sheet of virtual past shelved in the non-chronological
continuum of time. As it is plucked from the shelf it signals the transformation (a realignment of
order/serial) from a virtual state to an actual experience of becoming in the hands of a reader.
Similarly, at the end of La Jete, the moment of the protagonists death is translated into a
memory of his childhood thus triggering the transformation of the past (memory) into the present
(death) in a perfect illustration of Deleuzes theory of the crystal-image. The past (the virtual),
through memory, has become the present (actual), of the passing of the present, a perfect image
of the past-present coalescence (past in the present and the present in the past), in the crystal of
time.442 The indiscernibility of real and the imaginary, or the present and the past, of the actual
and the virtualis the objective [not subjective] characteristics of certainimages which are by
nature double, writes Deleuze.443 The point of indiscernibility, however, does not suppress the
distinction between the actual and the virtual. In fact, there is no virtual which does not become
an actualor the latter becoming virtual through the same relation. This is the mirror-image in

440

Noel Burch, Four Recent French Documentaries, Film Quarterly 13, no. 1 (Fall 1959): 59.
See Naomi Greene, p. 42.
441
Dudley Anderw, p. 46.
442
Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 68.
443
Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 69.
228

the Bergsonian sense where the real and the virtual are reflected in reciprocity constituting what
Deleuze calls the two sides of the crystal-image.444
Even though Deleuze does not mention La Jete but his theory of the virtual memory as
the sheets of the past is much in evidence in the film. The memory-image in La Jete of the
woman is a supreme example of his theory that virtual time exists in the dure of memory.
Deleuze suggests that the virtual and actual are in continual exchange making the distinction
virtually impossible between the real from the imaginary, from knowing which is which, in the
crystal-image.445 The indiscernibility reaches its peak, for example, in the palace of mirrors in
The Lady from Shanghai, in the climactic scene where the two characters are literally
smashing each other into pieces. In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirrorimage as in the virtual objectwhich envelops or reflects the real.446 There is a reciprocal
passagestretched over the chiasmusbetween the past and the present: the mirror-image is the
virtual in relation to the actual character which the mirror reflects and vice--versa. In La Jete,
the crescendo of cinematic dissolves reaches the peak in the film when the real and the
imaginary, actual and virtual (opacity-limpidity), become basically indiscernible that many
miss the shot and do not perceive the fluttering of the eyelids of the woman as they gradually
open to the chirping of the birds. When the cinema wakes up the photograph, the latter
representing the temporality of it has been, as characterized by Barthes and Metz, the past,
brought into the present through motion imparting volume, that is, the impression of life
444
445

Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 69. See Emma Wilson, Hiroshima mon amour (1959), p. 63.
D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p.

94.
446

Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 68.

229

we have, then, travelled from the zone447 of history into the realm of memory.448 In La Jete,
the memory of the face of a woman is brought to life by the act of imagination and remembering.
The past becomes the present and the present vanishes in the past.
Markers later work with the new media can be properly understood as a remediation
of the global-cultural archive of repressed and forgotten histories. Markers redemptive gaze no
longer wants to appropriate the world into his images; rather he takes the images of the world in
tandem to secrete the secret power of their own parapractic histories. His films on Okinawa
(Level Five, 1997) or the French photographer, Denise Bellon (Remembrance of Things to Come,
2003), is to channel the archive into a remedial process and release what the archive hides from
the gaze of critical interpretation. To once again release those images from their seizure in the
archival vault under the introspection of the remedial processes that find their own associations
and combinations based networking of hypertextual, haptic connections as opposed to the
generic form which the cataloguing of archive imposes on the material it absorbs in its inner
sanctum.449

447

Zone is a homage to Tarkovskys The Stalker (1979) in San Soliel and it refers to Hayao
Yamanekos pixelated color images of the archival footage of Japanese protests of 60s,
burakumin: the lowest rank of caste system in Japanese society officially abolished in Meiji era,
and the Kamikaze attacks of the Japanese pilots on US warships stationed off the island of
Okinawa. See Catherine Lupton, , Into the Zone, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future
(London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2005), pp. 159-160.
448
Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 5-7.
449
Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, Introduction: Cultural memory and its Dynamics, Mediation,
Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 1-14.
230

CHAPTER 3
The History Lessons For and From Kluge: Memory, i.e., National Identity, Monument,
Archive, Women, and the Other
Modern memory is first of all archival. It relies entirely on the specificity of the trace,
the materiality of the vestige, the concreteness of the recording, the visibility of the
image. Pierre Nora
O ihr Guten! auch wir sind
Tatenarm und gedankenvoll! Hlderlin
(O dear German, we too are poor in
deeds and rich in fancies!)
While memory, especially when contrasted with history, has gained in value as a
subject of public interest and interpretation, history has become the very signifier of the
inauthentic, merely designating what is left when the site of memory has been vacated by
the living. Thomas Elsaesser
I Introduction
Lost in the Archives is the image that Walter Benjamin evokes in the concluding
passages of one of his autobiographical essays, Unpacking My Library.450 Like the legend of
the Chinese painter, mentioned by Benjamin in his Artwork essay,451 who disappears in his
painting, the real collector not only erects the dwellings of the archives with books as the
building stones, but also lives inside where he is going to disappear.452 The objects in the
archive do not come alive or get animated because there is a personal space erected for them,
450

Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting, Illuminations,

trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 59-67. The sentence appeared in my
essay, The Intertwining of Memory and History in Alexander Kluges Films, Lost in the
Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City Media Inc., 2002), p. 383.
451
Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Illuminations, p. 239.
452
Benjamin, Unpacking My Library, p. 67.
231

rather it is the collector who comes alive inside the archive, it is he who disappears in the inside
of the dwelling. This is how I should like to introduce the work of Alexander Kluge, a
remarkably erudite filmmaker, whose work in the divergent areas of literature, film, politics,
culture, and pedagogy can be considered as veritable archives themselves. His films, in Peter
Lutzs opinion, are structured almost like an anthology: a grouping of shorter, more
autonomous segments of documentary and fictional material.453
Kluge is considered in Germany to be both a major filmmaker and a major social theorist
in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. His films are centered upon the question of memory and
history.454 As one analyzes Kluges films, it becomes increasingly apparent that for him the
memory of any given situation is multiform, that its many forms are situated, in place and time,
from the perspective of the present.455 To put this in another way, memory has a history, or
more precisely histories.456 This is not to suggest in any manner that the relationship between
history and memory is, or should be, a balanced or stable one. In Kluges work, it is the tension

453

Peter, C. Lutz, Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1998), p. 77.
454
One of the finest discussions of memory and history in the New German Cinema is to be
found in Kaes, Anton, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989). See also, Timothy Corrigan, New German
Film: The Displaced Image (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1983); Rainer
Lewandowski, Alexander Kluge (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980); , John Sandford, The New German
Cinema (London: Oswald Wolff, 1980); Hans Gnther Pflaum and Hans Helmut Prinzler,
Cinema in the Federal Republic of Germany: The New German Film. Origins and Present
Situation. A Handbook (Bonn: Inter Nationes, 1983).
455
Kaes, Alexander Kluge: In Search of Germany, p. 108.
456
What we call memory today is therefore not memory but already history. The so-called
rekindling of memory is actually its final flicker as it is consumed by historys flame. The need
for memory is a need for history. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past,
vol. 1, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p, 8.
232

and outright conflict between history and memory that is both necessary and productive. Thus
my emphasis with regard to Kluges films is to locate a break in the ancient bond of identity, a
break in the equilibrium of memory and history.457
Through this chapter, my discussion of Kluge deals with the intertwining of memory with
history, and its subsequent regression to the problematic of identity, which forms the basis of
Kluges critical formulation of what is lacking in German history. And this lack must be
thought of in terms of what it is to have a positive identity of Germany after 1945, a historical
reality that is unacceptable to Kluges critical project for both memory (also mourning) and
redemption of a German history that could not be identical to the years of Nazi atrocities.458
Therefore, it is my attempt to investigate the question of memory, which is of utmost importance
for Kluges discourse of Germanys disastrous history, with a view to this other lack that he
forgets, that is, the lack of the other in his films and critical projects.
Kluge, one of the finest and most sophisticated of all filmmakers in Germany, the architect
and the strategist of the new German cinema, has remaineddespite his ongoing struggle with the
German government over subsidizing independent film and television programs for building
infrastructure towards the construction of a public spherethe least receptive to the question of the
non-German in his films. 459 For a filmmaker of Kluges stature, with his political, aesthetical and

457

Ibid.
Kluge defines his concept of Germany as the lack of Germany. It is precisely the absence
of the imagined other Germany that determines [his] understanding of the existing Germany.
Kaes, p. 134.
459
Kluges television program perhaps makes a small contribution to an oppositional public
sphere, but its engagement with contemporary and historical social issues is distanced, abstract,
and peripheral. Lutz, p. 198.
233
458

legal expertise, a friend of Adorno, how can heand that is my crucial questionnot address
himself to the other, the non-German? Such lapses cannot be attributed surely to lack of hindsight.
Such omissions, unconscionable and deliberatein terms of the obligation to hear the other, not
from one film but from all his films, the responsibility to face the other, the others face if he/she
can have one in Germanypoints to a systematic exclusion of the other from his politics of cinema.
This is a deeply disturbing aspect of his filmic praxis, which, instead of raising the question of the
other, seems to be more preoccupied with the question of other Germany. Kluges oeuvre is not
only empty of the reference to the other, but, it has a few more blind spots that are as disturbing
when it comes to the role of women outside the matriarchal mode of production. Although Kluge
bemoans the lack of supportive materials for constructing a positive identity of Germany as a
nation, his films and writings, too, exhibit, in my view, a lack of positive identity in his portrayal
of the so-called utopian female characters, who, as Caryl Flinn has also noticed, often come out
as failure(s)460 despite making the extra effort.461 I will present an inventory of these
characters, aptly designated as Trmmerfrauen,462 from several of his films, who experience a
great degree of humiliation and pain, and are often invented as analytical categories than as
individuals. Most of the critics, German as well as Americans, have, rather than providing a

460

Caryl Flinn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matte of Style (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), p. 116.
461
Thomas Elsaesser, Melancholy and Mimicry: Alexander Kluges Enigmas. Published in
French as Melancholie et mimetisme: les enigmes d'Alexander Kluge, Trafic, no. 31 (Autumn
1999): 70-94. I am providing the English translation of the essay by the author himself in the pdf
version.
462
Trmmerfrauen were the women who sifted through the rubble of war for useful building
materials, often allegorically represented by Kluge in his recurring character of Gabi Teichert.
Flinn, p. 109.
234

critique of Kluges philosophy, instead adopted his critique in their own language and
philosophy. This mistake or oversight will be undone in this chapter.
How does one explore the possibility of reading Kluges ongoing interventionist politics
within contemporary Germany as a politics for finding new raw materials for re-writing the
otherwise disastrous history of Germany during the Nazi period? For Kluge, cinema forms the
connection (Zusammenhang) between memory and history, because his films can be viewed as a
type of history writing which offers multiple testimonies as opposed to a single story, or the
univocal authority of history itself. In culinary terms, Kluges films have also been regarded as
confectionery filmsa veritable assortment of condiments. In some sense, between the
cinematic text and the textual cinema there seems to be a correspondence that can only be
obtained through the montagic principle of Zusammenhnge, a term that forms the backbone of
Kluges dialectical mediation in his theoretical as well as filmic works. There are also many
building blocks from Die Patriotin (The Patriot, 1979) whose cinematic correspondence can
be found in his other literary works like Schlachtbeschreibung (The Battle) 463 and Neue
Geschichte,464 and, of course, Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Obstinacy),465 where the
analyses of fairy tales is the core part of the history lesson which I have explored in the latter part
of the essay.

463

Kluge, Schlachtbeschreibung (Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg: Fischer, 1968). The Battle,
trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).
464
Kluge, Neue Geschichten : Hefte 1-18 : Unheimlichkeit der Zeit (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978).
465
Kluge, Alexander and Oskar Negt, Geschichte und Eigensinn (Frankfurt am Main:
Zweitausendeins, 1981). The book has been translated as History and Obstinacy, trans. Richard
Langston et al (New York: Zone Books, 2014).
235

There is something comical, just like Gabi Teichert, one of his ubiquitous characters, the
history teacher-cum-amateur archaeologist, in Kluges personality. He has been digging in the
hardened soil of German history for years, in its two thousand year old history, as he likes to call
it, to look for an alternative and emancipated or counterfactual model of history that would allow
him to reclaim it from the disasters of the not-so-distant past. His task is often mistaken for
mourning of German history; on the contrary, in my opinion, it is to reclaim it from a certain
interpretation that condemns it to a particular straitjacket and narrows its focus to the revolting
years from 1933 to 1945. Thus to redeem the present, the history that is hard to reconcile with
(Es ist namlich Schwer, deutsche Geschichte in eine patriotische Fassung zu bringen), he must
dig deeper into the soil (boden), into the bowel, the powerhouse, of his countrys mythological
substrate, in order to escape from the present state of the historical impasse. The actions of his
fathers generation weighs like a nightmare on his conscience, but he is not blaming or
condoning them.466 He is looking for an alternative in terms of either/or, or, neither/nor.
By invoking Benjamin as a philosopher of memory and Adorno as the trenchant critic of
historicality, Kluge follows the critical project of negativity by refusing to identify467 the cause
of German history, which he often also designates as catastrophe.
The relationship of memory with Germanys catastrophic history in the last century, a
theme that is deeply inflected in the discourse of identity, is presented in two of his films,
Brutalitt in Stein (Brutality in Stone, 1961) and Die Patriotin. Both films are genuine attempts
466

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed.
Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc.,1972), p. 437.
467
Here I am referring to Kluges theoretical affinity with Adornos critique of identity thinking
in the Negative Dialectics.
236

to mourn the history of Germany, but the latter seems to fall in the revisionist category.468
Whether his conception of memory invariably assists a discourse of history which becomes a real
and tangible entity that can be recovered as well as distorted by inscribing a certain validity to
the existence of the past or whether he succeeds in rupturing the fatal consequences of a
traumatic history by counterposing or redefining memorys relation to its own history remains a
question. To put it another way, the catastrophic German history, the history of National
Socialism, is not only an image of the monstrosity of an unimaginable proportion, nor it is
simply a logical culmination of the failure of the left in the thirties to gain the consciousness of
the people, that can be put to some analytic subterfuge, as Adorno put it.469 Instead, it is a
psychological symptom of a nation and its people, and, unfortunately, Kluge is amongst those
who have been constantly striving to find a way out of the guilt complex by suggesting (a) that
there is nothing to be guilty about it or (b) by equating Auschwitz with Dresden or Hamburg.470
Kluge, in Die Patriotin, proclaims that we should never forget the sixty thousand people killed in
Hamburg by the Allied air strike. At least, that seems to be the overall context (Zusammenhang)
of Die Patriotin that acknowledges the past by denying the present in the form of the collective

468

A revisionist conception of German history about the Nazi crimes can be found in writings of
Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, and Joachim Fest that became very controversial during the
period known as Historikerstreit in the late 80s.
469
Adorno, The Meaning of Working through the Past, trans. Henry W. Pickford, Critical
Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 89103. See also Brian OConnor, Adorno on Destruction of Memory, Memories: Histories,
Theories, Debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwartz (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2010), p. 137.
470
Adorno, What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Means, Bitburg in Moral Perspective,
ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 114-129..
237

mourning for a nation that increasingly sees itself as a victim of historical catastrophe.471 The
third section will examine the status of the archive in relation to discourse of folk and fairy tales,
as a cumulative experience of historical injustice, in Kluges film (Die Patriotin) and in his
critical writings, in association with his co-author Oskar Negt, especially the newly translated
veritable encyclopedic collection of archival materials in History and Obstinacy (Geschichte und
Eigensinn).
Last and not the least, I must also take up the question of nationalism as opposed to what is
termed as ethico-cultural impoverishment of a national majority. This is a very serious issue with
incredible political consequences. To suggest that more than 2000 attacks against the foreigners in
the seventies (in FRG) and the recent resurgence of anti-Islamic neo-Nazi movements all across
Germany, in the name of Foreigners out, is a product of German nationalism, to my mind, does
not hit the mark. The pogrom of Auslnder raus is perpetrated against the other, (for it exceeds
the boundary of Auslnder) whose presence threatens the integrity of the neo-Nazis and their
sympathizers. How can one speak of German history, especially German history (pre-unification is
a period of Germany that is of interest here) without saying a word about the Gastarbeiter? What
sort of modern discourse are we witnessing in Kluges methodology of history which has not
defined this moment, after 1961, even as a point of reference? Is history possible when so much
471

In a conversation with Bernhard Sinkel Kluge posed this question:

Why is it that American dramaturgy always aks about guilt and atonement while we tend
increasingly to put those value aside as uninteresting and ask about something completely
different; where do I come from, what can I know, what can I become?
Sinkel: I think that is because Americans can only know the dramaturgy of good and evil. Their
heroes are either good or evil, good guy or bad guy, and that is why they are necessarily in a
moral straitjacket when the showdown comes.
Kluge: That is difficult to do in Germany. Cited in Kaes, p. 345, n. 67.
238

blindness or actual apathy is perceived in one of Germanys major intellectuals? 472 Kluges history
of Germany not only excludes the history and therefore the experience of the Turkish and other
people from its midst, but it also neglects the possibility of reintegration of the history of the
foreigners, the Gastarbeiter. (The essay primarily deals with Kluges films that range from 1963 to
1985. At present there are 16 million foreigners in Germany making it the third largest immigrant
nation in the world, but their representation in Kluges television program is negligible.) Everything
has a history; the tree, the puddle, the ruined castle, the lamp, everything; except the Gastarbeiter.
She/he may be there, in Germany, to stay forever now with his/her family, but he/she will be neither
a part of the official German history, of naturalization, based on droit du sang, and not droit du sol,
nor a part of the protesting history either.473
Anton Kaes in From Hitler to Heimat has rather aptly named the title of chapter on
Alexander Kluge as In Search of Germany. He raises the question of the other Germany in
relation to Kluges films and writings (with Osker Negt, especially Geschichte und Eigensinn) as an
example of Zusammenhang.474 Zusammenghang is, incidentally, for Kluge, one of the highest
principles of filmmaking which manifests itself as the context, as the connection, or even better, in
relation to the spectator, as the interlocutor, between the image and the film. The question of the

472

This apathy is not only directed towards the other, but it is also reflected in the post-war
generation to bear witness to that what could have been the redemptive aspects of German
history in the past. To seize the moment as it flashes up, Benjamin wrote, which
unfortunately hardly ever occurred in most of the New German Cinemas encounter with its own
immediate history.
473
The German Citizenship Law changed in 1999 and became effective on January 1, 2000,
which allows greater flexibility in acquiring citizenship to immigrants and children not born of
German parents in Germany.
474
Kaes, pp. 107-135.
239

connection (Zusammenhang) between the present Germany, the presence of Germany and the
utopian Germany, the absent Germany, the lack of Germany, in search of Germany, the other
Germany, between the real and the imaginary Germany, is to be found within Germany itself
through its own identity. In the film, Die Patriotin, Gabi Teicherts search for history is similar to
her search for Germany that bears a strong identity principle. The quest for identity is also
remarkably un-Foucauldian: The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the
roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipationto reveal the heterogeneous system
which, masked by the self, inhibit the formation of any form of identity475 To me, the very
anxiety, unmistakably Freudian in nature, for the quest of an other Germany, also, perhaps
unwittingly, because it puts (it)self before the other, ignores the question of the other in Germany.
To put it simply Kluges films do not construct a discourse around the trace of the other. How come
Kluge fail to see the Zusammenhang between violence and identity politics, for it is a discourse of
the politics of identity, which is identifiable in history with the periods of worst forms of
xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, religious and political fanaticism? How come he does not
discuss violence in relation to identity? Kluge, the modernist, appears more like a traditionalist in
his search for a German national identity, which, for him, is still to be found within the mediation of
nature and history, between a bush in Knigsburg and a puddle in Frankfurt.
But before I critique Kluges films, there are three major questions that we need to look
into which are historically related to Kluge as the father of the New German Cinema. How did

475

Michael Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interview,

trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p.
162.
240

the New German Cinema come into existence? Why did these films make such an impression on
the international cinema? And what caused the New German Cinemas demise? These questions
are specifically raised in Julia Knights book, New German Cinema: Images of a Generation,476
which will be my focus here (what follows here is in a large part my critique of her book which
appeared in Film-Philosophy).477 After providing the historical context of the New German
Cinema, then I would take up the question of memory and history in two of his films: Die
Patriotin and Brutalitt in Stein (his first short film made with Peter Shamoni).
II The New German Cinema
The historical circumstances that led to the emergence of the New German Cinema had
its roots in the Allied handling of the West German film industry immediately after World War
II. The systematic dismantling of the German film industry by the American culture industry for
both political and economic reasons had a devastating impact on German film culture in general.
After the creation of two separate German states in 1949, the identity of a resolute German
cinema disappeared. The GDR quickly organized its film industry along the party line; in the
Western zone, the production companies were busy dubbing and marketing French, British, and
especially American films, or Nazi entertainment films deemed innocuous by the censors. Old
Hollywood movies, many of which had been banned in the Third Reich, were now being dubbed
into German. The American films quickly became standard fare of many movie houses. By

476

Julia Knight, New German Cinema: Images of a Generation (London: Wallflower Press,
2004).
477
Amresh Sinha, Same Old New German Cinema: Julia Knight's New German Cinema:
Images of a Generation, Film-Philosophy, vol. 9 no. 15 (March 2005). http://www.filmphilosophy.com/vol9-2005/n15sinha
241

1950, of the 85 motion picture distribution firms operating in the Federal Republic of Germany,
most had ties with American companies.478
The history of German cinema from 1945 to early 1960s has its own share of ignominy.
The films of the 1950s can be best described as 'escapist', because they refused to deal with the
realities of the events of the Nazi era. Many did not even go to the movies because of its
tainted history. And those who went preferred mindless entertainment and German films that
avoided at all cost a confrontation with contemporary issues. In the absence of what Alexander
Kluge has called the positive history of Germany and the lack of genuine mourning
(Trauerarbeit, in the Freudian sense, I will come this in a moment),479 the nation as a whole,
gripped with the melancholia of loss, withdrew and found solace in the sentimentality of
Heimatfilm, a genre of idyllic tranquility in the German countryside, a favorite amongst the
Nazis, which still somehow retained its innocuous status, or took refuge in the escapist genres of
romantic comedies, operettas, Edgar Wallace thrillers, and Karl May Westerns. Despite a brief
respite in 1955, when the Heimatfilm attracted record audiences, the German cinema went
through a progressively downward spiral.

478

Sinha, The Intertwining of Fiction and Documentary in Alexander Kluge, Ph.D. Thesis.
York University (1995), p. 343.
479
Klaus R. Scherpe links Kluges Die Patriotin as the German project of memory to
Alexander Mitscherlics Die Unfhigkeit zu tauren (The Inability to Mourn, 1967). He calls his
films on Germanys history as Totengedanken, memorials of the dead. Alexander Kluge:
Germany An Experience of Words and Images, European Memories of the Second World
War, ed. Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett and Claire Gorrara ((New York: Berghahn Books,
1999), p. 178.
242

Against this background of American hegemony, the inception of the New German
Cinema took place at the Oberhausen Festival in 1962.480 In a celebrated manifesto, twenty-six
filmmakers, writers, and artists, headed by Kluge, protested against the Government economic
and cultural policies, which paid little attention to the problems encountered by the West German
filmmakers. What followed after 1962 has become something of a commonplace in the
chronicles of German film. The subsequent legislation for state support of film solely from the
perspective of Autoren Kino was pushed by Kluge and Norbert Kckelmann and led to the
establishment of Kuratorium junger deutscher Film (Board of Curators of the Young German
Film). The concept of Autoren Kino was explained in the Oberhausen Manifesto by Kluge as the
freedom from the conventions of the industry and from commercial interference from the
establishment.481 The Oberhausen manifesto proclaimed: The old cinema is dead. We believe
in the new.482 The fundamental principle behind this manifesto was that filmmakers should

480

The Oberhausen Manifesto, the spontaneously drafted document signed at a short-film film
by a group of 26 ambitious youth on February 28, 1962, marked the semi-official birth of the
loose collection referred to subsequently as Young German Film. Rentschler, Eric, West
German Film in the Course of Time (Bedford Hills, New York: Redgrave, 1984), p. 35. For a
careful assessment of Kluge on Television, see, Peter C. Lutz, Alexander Kluge: The Last
Modernist, pp.179-200; and also Jan Bruck, Kluges dilemmas, Filmnews (April 1992): 9-10.
481
Sinha, The Intertwining of Memory and History in Alexander Kluges Films, p. 333.
482
The declaration of Oberhausen manifesto:
In Germany as in other countries the short film has become training ground and experimental
arena for the feature film.
We declare our objective to be the creation of the new German feature film.
This new film needs new freedoms: freedom from the conventions customary to the industry;
freedom from inter-vention by commercial partners; freedom from domination by special interest
groups.
We have concrete ideas regarding the intellectual, formal, and economic realization of the new
German cinema. We are collectively prepared to take economic risks.
The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new.
243

have autonomy in giving shape to their film ideas without having to take legal or serious
financial risks. Filmmakers were to retain control over the direction and the entire production
process, including the unrestricted commercial exploitation of their films.483 The signatories of
the Oberhausen Manifesto launched an aggressive lobbying campaign of the West German
government, which resulted in its most significant achievement: the formation in 1965 of the
Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (Board of Young German Film), an institution funded by the
Federal Ministry of the Interior.
The Kuratorium was founded with an aim to stimulate a renewal of the German film484
and bring prestige back to the once proud tradition of Lang and Murnau. The new German film
was to be free of the usual conventions of the industry, free of influence from commercial
partners, and free of the control of interested parties. Kluges Yesterday Girl (Abschied von
gestern, 1966) funded by the Kuratorium, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, thus
becoming the first film to win an international award after the inception of West Germany as a
nation. It became the lightning rod for the numerous successful films produced by the
Kuratorium in the subsequent years. 1966 was truly the year of breakthroughthe annus
mirabilis of the New German Cinema, as John Sandford called it.485 The New German Cinema
became a common staple on the international film circuit, winning numerous awards.
In 1972, The New York Museum of Modern Art presented twelve features and seventeen short
films from West Germany, heralding a new era of the New German Cinema. Andrew Sarris, in

483

Sinha. The Intertwining of Fiction and Documentary in Alexander Kluge, p. 345.

Knight, p. 19.
485
John Sandford, The New German Cinema (New York: De Capo Press, 1994), p. 13.
244
484

the Village Voice, 27 October, 1975, announced: "The Germans are coming! The Germans are
coming!" Vincent Canby called it The German Renaissance. The American interest in
German cinema was initially dubbed by the German critics as a meaningless love affair of
predictably brief duration. They were not wrong. But in the late seventies and the eighties the
love affair appeared to continue. More classes and courses on German cinema were being
offered in the American universities than ever.
What the German film critics disdainfully regarded as not more than a dozen
individualists working away on their own in a disorganized manner was considered by the
American critics to be the liveliest in Europe. In the American estimation, the New German
Cinema is a miraculous recovery after the post-war shambles, the return of the prodigal son, of
the cinema of the twenties of Lang and Murnau. Gerald Clark in Time wrote: With little
encouragement, less money and no older hands to guide them, a few extraordinary young
directors have given birth to a phoenixthe brilliant German cinema of Fritz Lang and Ernst
Lubitsch that Hitler had consigned to the ashes 45 years ago.486 Encouraging as these reviews
might sound, but they hardly conceal the American critics lack of awareness of the historical
development of the entire movement that began in the sixties. Here it is important to sketch a
brief historical analysis of the growing pains of the individual directors, who shared a marginal
commonality with each other, a commonality that provides a starting historical point behind the
cultural context of their works. It is insufficient to ascribe the liveliness and growth of German
cinema to a few individual directors and to assess the entire movement in the light of the
486

Gerald Clark, Seeking Planets that Do Not Exist: The New German Cinema is the Liveliest
in Europe, Time (March 20, 1978): 2.
245

achievements of Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders, some of the relatively better known German
directors in the United States. The eventual danger of such un-historical criticism is that it
covers up the very economic and political history of the growing pains those individual directors
had to suffer in their fight for autonomy in an organized capitalist society. But instead of
recognizing these facts American critics amused themselves by glorifying the individual
filmmakers, each making films with most distinctive and individual flavors.487 Sandford
defined it as a collective term for the work of a number of very different directors, nearly all of
whom have grown up in the post-war years. It is not a movement, or a school, nor it is a
selfconsciously underground or alternative' cinema.488
The funding of the Kuratorium by the Federal government did not go unopposed,
however. The commercial film industry charged it with unfair competition. Although the
Kuratorium continued to function, lobbyists from the film industry succeeded in bringing about a
revision of government policy that was more favorable to the commercial film industry. In 1968,
a new law was enacted, the Film Promotion Act (FFG), which provided a levy on every
cinema ticket sold in the FRG. This money was then transferred to film production. The
commercial industry, making the same old formula films, reaped a financial bonanza. A great
majority of films made in the early 1970s were sex films or Heimatfilms. In contrast to the
Kuratoriums intent to fund the first features of non-established filmmakers, the new law
strongly favored high-grossing commercial work. It became structurally impossible for young
German filmmakers to obtain subsidies from the government.
487
488

Sandford, p, 6.
Ibid.
246

These young filmmakers turned to television stations like WDR to produce their films,
which spawned an altogether new genre of Arbieterfilme (Worker films), focusing on the lives
and the contemporary experiences of the working class. The popularity of the genre even
attracted names like Fassbinder, who started a long collaboration with WDR. But the nature of
the ad hoc contractual relationship made the situation rather arbitrary and tenuous. The Film
and Television Agreement (1974) between the government and television networks (ARD and
ZDF) was promulgated to safeguard the Autoren film production. Under the new law, the
networks set aside 34 million marks for film production for a period of four years, from 1974-78.
The films produced in the 1970s with the help of this Agreement marked a full maturationthat
is, the transition of Young German Cinema, as it was known in its early period, to the New
German Cinema. This is the period that gave the world some of the best-known films by
Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders, including Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele
auf, 1973), which received the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974,
and Schlndorff's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel, 1979), which won the 1979 Academy
Award for Best Foreign Film.
The economic, social, and political circumstances in the Sixties and Seventies in West
Germany cultivated the conditions for Autor cinema. The American critics emphasized the role
of these directors, whose films displayed deeper affinities to Hollywood conventional cinema
than the Autoren filmmakers like Kluge, Syberberg, or Straub and Huillet, whose films were
regarded too abstract and experimental to become popular in America. Film critics like Andrew
Sarris of The Village Voice and Gerald Clarke of Time, at the height of New German Cinemas
247

popularity in the mid-1970s, ignored the experience of the filmmakers' struggles with the
institutional framework of production and thus failed to actively trace out the concept of the
auteur within the New German Cinema, leading to a confusion of the definition of the term. The
concept of Autor for the Kuratorium and for Kluge meant an individual defense against pressure
from economic and social power structures.489 Equally important was the investment of the
concept of Autor in the field of film academics and training. An important feature of the training
at the Ulm film school (founded by Kluge and Edgar Reitz) was that students should not become
specialists stuck in the culinary thinking of the film industry, but Autoren, who would differ
from specialists in having a greater responsibility and in conceiving film as a general medium
of expression of intelligence and human experience.490
Both the French politique des auteur of the Cahiers du Cinema and the German Autor
theory are equally concerned with the domination of economic discourse in commercial film
production, and they particularly cultivate the idea of the film being an extension of the
directors creative personality, bestowing primacy to the author over the text. However, there is
an important distinction: the French auteur theory is applied retrospectively to the director's
entire oeuvre, while the German Autor theory confers that status on the filmmaker both
conceptually and institutionally before he or she has even made a first film. To that one must
add another important distinction. Whereas the Cahiers approach was concerned with the
distinctiveness and instant recognizability of individual works, the Autoren stressed the primacy

489

Cited by Sheila Johnston, The Author as Public Institution: The 'New' Cinema in the Federal
Republic of Germany, Screen Education, nos. 32/33 (Autumn-Winter 1979/80): p. 73.
490
Ibid., pp. 72-73.
248

of thematic originality, the film as the vector of ideas. As Kluge had said, the idea of Autor was a
programmatic principle, which was to be achieved not just by arguing for a particular relation of
director to film, but by setting up new, legal, contractual, and institutional relations and special
forms of training. It is the contention of most of the new German filmmakers that Hollywood
films try to persuade the audience to give up their own experience and follow the more organized
experience of the film. In Kluges words, if the film is active, the spectator becomes passive.491
For Kluge the real cinema shapes in the viewers head. It is the viewers imagination that
animates the screen with his own experience. In other words, Autor cinema mediates between the
formal structure of the experience of its producer (in terms of the historical reality of the
production process), and the imagination of the spectator, whose reception of it depends on the
horizon of his expectation and experience. It no longer aims at distorting or colonizing the
experience of the spectator, which the Hollywood imperialistic films have done so far. The
problem is largely addressed in Wim Wenders's Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976),
which specifically deals with the colonizing of the German unconscious by American films.
The New German Cinema came under severe attack for undermining the role of women directors
within the movement, especially by Frauen and Film, a feminist journal established by the
filmmaker Helke Sander. The feminist filmmakers also tried to wrest the concept of
Autorenkinothe subsidizing of film as cultural property and recognizing the institutional power
of director as auteurfrom Kluge and his colleagues and instead tried to place it in the wider
context of a national cultural movement to establish FRG as the sole legitimate heir of the
491

Jan Dawson, Alexander Kluge & the Occasional Work of a Female Slave (New York:
Zoetrope, Inc., 1982), 34.
249

authentic German culture in opposition to the culture of GDR. The political and cultural
necessity that prompted the West German government to use the New German Cinema as its
cultural ambassador to promote and export German culture, through its embassies and cultural
organizations like the Goethe Institute, was not purely motivated by economic interests. It was
mostly to establish its national identity abroad. In her book, Knight pursues this analysis and
downplays the concept of Autorenkino formulated in the Oberhausen Manifesto and later
explained by Kluge in a number of articles he wrote on this subject. Her objection extends over
to the directors for commercially exploiting the term for their own publicity. In addition, Knight
is critical of New German film directors promotion of the cinema as an institution of selfrepresentation and self-expression. The principle of Autorenkino, for Knight, goes beyond the
process of subsidizing of film as culture and recognizing the filmmaker as an artista process
that came out of the Kuratorium and Kluges lobbying work.
The New German Cinema developed its own system of distribution and exhibition for its
survival. The government subsidies from various institutions went to distribution and exhibition
networks as well. It became quite apparent that funding of production itself wasn't sufficient to
ensure its existence. In order to distribute their own films, a collective of thirteen filmmakers,
including Fassbinder and Wenders, formed a distribution company in 1971, Filmverlag der
Autoren (Film Publishing House of the Auteurs), modeled on American-style distribution
agencies. The early 1970s proved to be a financial disaster for German cinema at home, despite
its international success. Popularity abroad simply did not translate into commercial success at
home. The unpopularity of the New German Cinema was attributed to its refusal to take the
250

audience's need for entertainment seriously, to its noncommercial bent, and to its penchant for
ambiguous narrative structurewhat David Bordwell calls art cinema. It didn't take the
spectator into the equation and produced films that the audience found intellectually too
challenging, too abstract, and boring. A number of opinion polls taken in the early seventies
revealed that, as Elsaesser notes, the audiences who had seen films by Young German
filmmakers were unable to name common characteristics or identify what the label stood for. But
not only was there no brand recognition, many spectators felt irritated or annoyed by the
films flippancy and lack of seriousness. The elliptical story-telling made them feel
intellectually inferior,492
The anti-establishment nature of many of these films didnt curry much favor with
American distribution companies, who preferred the standard fare of Hollywood-type films.
Thus the search for a German audience became inevitable. You cant have a national cinema
without a national audience. To address this crisis, to quell the hostility of German critics who
were gleefully writing its obituaries almost since its inception, the New German Cinema shifted
its emphasis from Autoren cinema to a cinema of audience, taking a decisive turn toward more
narrative-oriented cinema. This decision was crystallized in the Hamburg Manifesto in 1979,
signed by sixty directors, declaring its solidarity with the spectator, conceding the authority from
the Autor to the spectator.
The very existence of New German Cinema was based on a radical displacement of the
old hegemonic order of images that severely undermined the participation of the viewer in
492

Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1989), p. 26.
251

his/her capacity to become a meaningful interlocutor in the cultural discourse of nation, its
politics and representation. For once the image on the screen was not supposed to control us,
make us stupefied and mute, but this new experience that the modern directors of the German
films were supposed to usher in was a uniquely distracted image of a new era of political
struggle.
The politics of race, gender, class, and identity became the major themes in the New
German Cinema at this stage of its development (although Kluge will remain an exception). The
contemporary relevance of the New German Cinema lies in its counter-representation of the
social and political issues that were largely ignored by the films of the 1950s.493 For instance,
racial prejudice and intolerance, a growing concern with American cultural imperialism,
confrontation with the Nazi past, the spread of violence and terrorism in the 1970s, and the
influence of the student and womens movements became the fundamental tenets on which the
critique of West German society was formulated in the public sphere through these films. But
was the criticism a result of self-guilt, a torment of the repressed past, or was it a revisionist
response to re-present history in order to take hold of ones own story from the clutches of an
institution like Hollywood and tell it from a multiple rather than a homogeneous perspective?
Many stories as opposed to one story became the maxim of remembering, of memory in the New
German Cinema. Perhaps this is best illustrated by one of Kluges characters, Gabi Teichert, who
comments in Die Patriotinin what could be a statement of Kluges own projectWhat else is
the history of a country but the vastest narrative surface of all? Not one story but many stories

493

Knight, p. 48.
252

(Was ist die Geschichte eines lands anderes, als die weiteste Erzhlfche berhaupt? Nicht eine
Geschichte, sondern viele Geschichte).
How can one speak of German history, especially contemporary German history (preunification Germany) without saying a word about the Gastarbeiter? The theme of latent racism
in West German society appeared in numerous films of the New German Cinema as a strong
reminder of its continuing Nazi legacy. Two filmsFear Eats the Soul by Fassbinder and
Shirins Wedding (Shirins Hochzeit, 1975) by Helma Sanders-Brahmsboth these films
explicitly engaged with the plight of the Gastarbeiter in West Germany after reconstruction.
The term Gastarbeiter was applied to immigrant workers, mostly from Turkey, who came to
assist in West German reconstruction during the 1950s and afterward settled down but were
never recognized by the German society as its own. Both Fassbinder and Sanders-Brahms had
quite successfully treated this subject matter in earlier films in Katzelmacher (1969) and The
Industrial Reserve Army (Die industrielle Reservearmee, 1971) respectively. Fassbinders Fear
Eats the Soul is, however, not only one of his best films, but also his most internationally well
known. Sanders-Brahmss Shirins Wedding, on the other hand, is a relatively unknown film
about a Turkish womans tragic saga in West Germany. Both films are supposed to critique the
racist mentality of the West German populace; they are less concerned with the actual experience
of the Gastarbeiter and more with the countrys own guilt.494 Knight gives broad outlines of the
plot developments of the filmswith some recycled comments on the strategies of mise-en-

494

Knight, pp. 47-53. Also see Deniz Gtrk, Beyond Paternalism: Turkish German Traffic in
Cinema, The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, Deniz Gtrk (London:
bfi Publishing, 2002), p. 250.
253

scne, along with the customary reference to cinematic homage to Douglas Sirkbut in terms of
providing a serious analysis, the writing does not venture beyond the implications of crosscultural conflict and its detrimental effect on the country's image as a new political
democracy.495
The theme of remembering and mourning Germanys recent past, the intertwining of the
public and the private became a preoccupation in the films of some of the New German Cinema
directors after the events of 1977 which rattled the whole country. The historical background of
the period, ranging from the student protest movements in 1960s to a growing opposition to
Vietnam War and American foreign policy; the disaffection with the Leftist SPD for joining the
conservative Christian Democratic Party (CDU) in the Great Coalition, with Kurt Georg
Kiesinger, a former Nazi, as its Chancellor; the rising incidents of terrorism sponsored by
Baader-Meinhofs Red Army Faction (RAF); the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane to Mogadishu,
Somalia, and the subsequent storming of the plane by an antiterrorist squad that killed all the
terrorists along with a score of the hijacked passengers, followed by the suicides/murders of
Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Carl Raspe, all members of RAF in the maximum security
prison in Stammheim the next day; and the kidnapping and slaying of the ex-SS member HansMartin Schleyer, chairman of Mercedes Benz, in retaliation by the terrorists in the autumn of
1977.
The portrayal of increasing terrorist violence and the repressive measures of the West
German government to counter terrorist attacksin such films as The Lost Honour of Katharina

495

Knight, p. 53.
254

Blum (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, 1975) by Margarethe von Trotta and Volker
Schlndorff, and Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst, 1978), a collective film, directed
by Kluge, Fassbinder, Schlndorff, and others. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, based upon
Heinrich Blls quasi-autobiographical novel of the same title, is a film about a woman whose
life is ruined by the police and the media because of her accidental meeting with a terrorist
suspect. Although Bll wrote the novel in response to the way the West German popular media
hounded him after he wrote a sympathetic article on the trial of Baader-Meinhof, the film
touched a raw nerve with the public and became an instant success. Germany in Autumn, on the
other hand, dealt with the issue of terrorism in a variety of different forms. It consists of many
episodes, each reflecting a particular stance, and together constituting a collective work of
mourning. Its interweaving of real and documentary footage with fictional material gives it a
highly elliptical and experimental character, which obviously wasnt accessible to the general
public when it was released. As a result, it failed at the box office. Nonetheless, it remained an
important contribution to the discourse of memory and mourning in the New German Cinema.
The New German Cinema has been defined by necessity and obligation to Remembering the
Past, which is sometimes confused with the project of Vergangenheitsbewltigung (coming to
terms with the past) or Trauerarbeit (mourning work). After a prolonged and uncomfortable
silence, the new generation of postwar filmmakers felt that they needed to ask questions about
their parents past, and they also needed to distance themselves from that past in order to tell
their own stories without being subjected to a contaminated history. But to do so, they had to go
back to that which they had not yet confronted. Two factors contributed to this crucial turn
255

toward memory and history in West German society: first, the events of 1977, already alluded to
above, and second, the immense popularity of an eight-hour American television series,
Holocaust, that was shown on West German television in 1979. The telecast of Holocaust, a
fictional film starring Meryl Streep and James Wood, was watched by more than 50 percent of
the adult population in West Germany, and caused a cathartic outburst of emotional response
amongst the population. For once the taboo was lifted and thousands came forward with their
recollections of the Nazi crimes and collaborations in public and private. Holocaust also caused
much consternation among the German intelligentsia, which viewed the series as a trivialization
and cheap commodification of the Holocaust. Many articles were written about how Germany
should be represented in history, but the most memorable response to this Hollywood production
came out in Reitzs sixteen-hour, two-part television series Heimat.
Both Reitzs Heimat and Helma Sanders-Brahmss Germany, Pale Mother (Deutschland,
bleiche Mutter, 1979-80) are semi-autobiographical and set in the Nazi era, but the crucial
absence of the Holocaust in these films is extremely disturbing, to say the least. In SandersBrahmss film, the historical reality of the Nazi period is suppressed in favor of the experience of
the everyday reality of the German people, whose lives were largely untouched by the political
events of that period. In Reitzs Heimat, a prolonged work of mourning, there is not even a single
image of Jewish suffering, and no mourning for Auschwitz. This crucial absence, incredible as
it is, has been rightly chastised for avoid[ing] any explanation for who should bear the
responsibility for the Nazi atrocities.496 Both films have been admired for their authenticity in

496

Knight, p. 72.
256

depicting the other side of the story that has been largely eclipsed by the centrality of the
Holocaust in determining the German national identity. (I will be examining this issue more
forthrightly in the latter part of this essay in relation to Kluges Die Patriotin). The attempts to
rewrite history in the New German Cinema reveal an increasing reliance on the testimonials of
the participants from the perspective of the Third Reich, and despite their ironic and critical
stance, these works can still be seen as an effort to assimilate the unique status of the Holocaust
into a larger catastrophe that somehow undermines the necessity of remembering (Eingedenken),
the specific Jewish form of remembering history.497 The apologetic tendency in Heimat and
Germany, Pale Mother comes extremely close to echoing the revisionist sentiments of the new
historians that Habermas critiqued in the famous Historians debate (Historikerstreit).498 Both
films have been thoughtfully and provocatively analyzed by Anton Kaes in From Hitler to
Heimat, and a closer look into Eric Santners Stranded Objects499 provides an even more
enlightening approach to the treatment of the (lack of) Holocaust in Reitzs Heimat.
In the seventies, the postwar generation started to feel more and more uncomfortable with
the presence of America in Germany. On the one hand, its own past was too repugnant to turn to,
but the presence of the American culture industry was a sore reminder of Germany's lack of
national identity. Thus a desire to obliterate and expunge a historical legacy through assimilation
to another culture became a way of everyday life for the new generation. The immersion in
497

Kluges latest book on Frita Bauer is an attempt to address this need. Berlin.Wer ein Wort
des Trostes spricht, ist ein Verrter. 48 Geschichten fr Fritz Bauer (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013).
498
Jrgen Habermas, A Kind of Settlements of Damages (Apologetic Tendencies), New
German Critique, no. 44 (Spring-Summer, 1988): 25-39.
499
Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 57-102.
257

American culture produced a love/hate relationship among the West German youth. Against this
background of American hegemony, the New German Filmmakers looked for an alternative
network of production, distribution, and exhibition possibilities to create their own identity,
which was more palatable to the German people. But the relationship between German
filmmakers and Hollywood films was more ambivalent than one simply of antagonism, as is
quite evident in the films of Fassbinder and Wenders. Wenderss The American Friend (Der
amerikanische Freund, 1977), based on Patricia Highsmiths novel Ripleys Game, demonstrates
this feeling of love/hate, this ambivalence, of Germans toward Americans. The character of
Jonathan in the film is both fascinated and repelled by the American Ripley, who symbolically
stands for the presence of the United States in West Germany. A fascinating review of the film
can be found in Timothy Corrigans excellent book, New German Film: The Displaced Image.500
Knight further explores the question of ambivalence in Herzog's Stroszek (1976), a dire
indictment of the American dream and an illustration of the victimization of German immigrants
in a soulless consumer society. One wonders what caused her to select Stroszek to stress the
notion of ambivalence, when there is obviously none.
Knight ends the chapter with feminist film criticism in West Germany, which was closely
aligned with the 1970s literary movement known as the New Subjectivity, which proclaimed
that Personal is Political. Knights previous book, Women and the New German Cinema,
written more than a decade ago, was an attempt to unmask the myth of the New German Cinema
as a movement of extraordinarily talented (male) filmmakers. She called it the divided history of
500

Timothy Corrigan, New German Film: The Displaced Image (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1983).
258

the New German Cinema, an allusion to Rentschlers earlier formulation, the contested ground
between the male mainstream and extremely active feminist film culture.501 That book drew
attention to the glaring absence of the works of women filmmakers in the academic discourse of
the New German Cinema. The invisibility of the women filmmakers is no longer the concern
of this book, because here the feminist filmmakers and their films are already accorded the same
legitimation and weight as their male counterparts. No longer are Juta Brckner, Ulrike Ottinger,
Helke Sander, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Monika Treut, and Dorris Drriewho directed Men
(Mnner, 1986), one of the most successful films in West German historymerely treated as
marginalized, peripheral directors; their contributions are set alongside the celebrated male star
directors we all know. But I must also add that Knight herself accords scant attention to some of
the other marginalized directors, such as Werner Schroeter, Werner Nekes, Rosa von Praunheim,
Herbert Achternbusch, and the late Harun Farocki, although to her credit she does mention
Turkish immigrant director Tevfik Baser. There is also not a word on what is now known as
Post-Wall Cinema, the inheritors of the New German Cinema according to some leading scholars
in the field.
Today the New German Cinema no longer exists. It is too early to speculate on the causes
of its demise (for many think it does exist, at least in spirit), but a few factors can always be
mentioned: the loss of Fassbinder in 1982; Herzogs marginal presence in world cinema after his
last important film, Where The Green Ants Dream (1983/4), made in Australia with international
financing; and Wenderss unquenchable Wanderlust. All these factorsincluding Schlndorffs

501

Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (London: Verso, 1992), p. 42.
259

increasing visibility in the Hollywood scene, the shunning of Syberberg by the international film
community for mythifying Fascism, and last but not least, Kluges own departure from film to
television as an alternative public spherehave had a devastating impact. Although a few
individuals like Wolfgang Petersen, Roland Emmerich, and Tom Tykwer, have become
Hollywood directors, the condition of Post-Wall Cinema has not made an impact so far in the
global world.
Knights concluding chapter is devoted to examining the material causes that might have
contributed to the possible demise of the New German Cinema. The specific historical
circumstances of the 1960s, which brought it into existence and gave it a distinct character, no
longer applied to the historical and material conditions of the 1980s. The conservative Christian
Democratic Party came into power in 1982 and the ultra- conservative Interior Minister Fredrick
Zimmerman withdrew state funding on the grounds that New German Cinema was no longer a
financially viable option for the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) and started to subsidize
entertainment-oriented Hollywood-type projects. Television also played a crucial role in its
demise. Ironically, the television that resuscitated the New German Cinema from its financial
ruination and became its patron saint also created the material conditions that eventually
destroyed its financial and artistic autonomy. With the increase in terrorist activities in the
seventies, the political climate in West Germany radically changed and political and economic
censorship was widely exercised by the right wing CDU/CSU alliance. The Candidate (Der
Kandidat, 1980), another collaborative film by Kluge, Schlndorff, and others, this time about a
right-wing politician, Franz Josef Straussand which received Adornos blessingswas
260

blacklisted by the ruling party. The state subsidy policy changed toward commercially oriented
cinema. But worst of all, Knight tells us (I am sure not without a great deal of pleasure) the
concept of the Autor, so central to the identity of the New German Cinema, diminished in
importance.502
I will conclude this section with a few remarks on Kluges transition from film to
television in the mid-eighties in the last century, before I embark on the discussion of the
redemption of memory and history in some of Kluges films. Kluges lobbying for subsidies
might not have been purely opportunistic or programmatic, but he certainly was one of the main
beneficiaries in the long run. He was also the one who bailed out after laying the foundation of
the New German Cinema by defecting to television, a medium that he once theorized, in the
seventies, as one of the main adversaries of the German cinema along with the union of the
American distribution companies (as noted above). A medium that he apparently abhorred
now constituted his tactical ground for launching independent counter-public programming
under his full artistic and administrative control, which, to be fair, was always the basic objective
of the Autoren for the Oberhausners, as Adorno called them rather affectionately. Adorno,
whose suspicion of cinema as an art form is no secret, found himself in total agreement with the
potential of alternatives that he glimpsed in the first few productions of the young German
filmmakers. In consonance with his own critique and with that of his peers, Adorno offered a
criticism of the young German films in the following way: In this comparatively awkward and
very unprofessional cinema, uncertain of its effects, is inscribed the hope that the so-called mass

502

Knight, New German Cinema, p. 104.

261

media might eventually become something qualitatively different. While in autonomous art
anything lagging behind the already established technical standards does not rate, vis--vis the
culture industry--whose standard excludes everything but predigested and already integrated, just
as the cosmetic trade eliminates facial wrinklesworks which have not completely mastered
their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a
liberating quality.503
The whimsical angle of Kluges films coincides with the Benjaminian collectors role:
The marches [Benjamin] undertook in the pursuit of books. 504 In some sense, the archivists
tendency in Kluge has remained intact in his preoccupation with the acquisition of television
cable satellite time for the archival distributions of his own and other directors films and works.
The archivist or the librarian is not the one who is supposed to have read and thoroughly
examined all the books and other archival materials in his/her collections, but it is more or less a
weltanschauung for collection and acquisition that cannot be reduced to any utilitarian purposes,
such as buying textbooks by students or buying precious objects for ones significant other, or
purchasing a book for travel reading. Benjamin defines the activity of an archivist with a
suffusion of militaristic tropes: militant, capturing a small city, the smallest antique shop
can be a fortress, tactical instinct of collectors, and so on. To this list of archival conquests,
Kluges recent role as a television programmer for German satellite television can be
apprehended as both instructive as well as puzzling. One of the ways in which Kluges recent

503

Theodor W. Adorno, Transparencies on Film, New German Critique, no. 24-25

(Fall/Winter 1981-82): 199.
504
Benjamin, The Storyteller, p. 63.
262

preoccupation with renewing his archival materials on television screen can be redeemed is by
acknowledging, as Benjamin suggested, that a collectors deepest desire in life is to the renew
the old world 505
Jan Bruck, in his in-camera interview with Kluge, points to the paradoxical nature of
Kluges undertaking of constructing an alternative public sphere on television.506
Kluge and Negt have, of course, as Hansen notes already, critiqued the institution of public
television from a theoretical perspective in Public Sphere and Experience.507 Their objection
to public television is neatly summarized by Hansen in her Foreword to the book: The
chapters in Public Sphere and Experience, on the problematic status of public television [which
Negt and Kluge refer to as public-service television throughout] may suggest an answer. Given
its bureaucratic structure and generalized will to program, public televisionis much less
capable of establishing even the semblance of communicative reciprocity that the privately
owned, market-based media to some extent depend upon. As a kind of subversive mimesis, the
critique of television has to take the form of counterproductions, programs that at once learn
from and compete with the enemy at the most advanced technical and economic level.508 The
impetus for Kluge to join the enemy in order to destroy it by learning from it how to compete
and on the highest level of technical and economic stages was already set in as early as 1985

505

Ibid., p. 61.
Jan Bruck, Kluges dilemmas, Filmnews, (April 1992): 9.
507
Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of Bourgeois Public
Sphere, trans. Peter Lebyani, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 1993), pp. 96-129.
508
Hansen, Public Sphere and Experience, p. xxv.
263
506

when he joined forces with some of the most conservative forces in West Germanys mass
media, SAT 1 and the right-wing media mogul Axel Springer.509
Thus Kluges political and economic compromise to battle the institution of public and
state sponsored television by joining forces with his arch enemy, the New Media, that he once
denounced as Industrialization of consciousness appears less theoretical and more self-serving,
in retrospect, for survival in the new media ecology.510 By 1987, according to Lutz, Kluge was
able to secure even larger share of his television operation in SPD dominated provinces. He had
started his own broadcast company, DCTP (Development Company for Television Programs),
which had commercial deals for broadcasting his television programs on cable networks, RTLPlus and SAT 1. He struck a rather lucrative deal with two major private channels ensuring the
broadcast of his cultural programs produced by his company DCTP. In short, Kluge, even today,
maintains the biggest share of controlling interest in DCTP with partners that include 144
theaters, operas, symphonies, book publishers, and film directors, Spiegel publishing, and
Dentsu, one of worlds largest advertising agencies.511 Kluges television career has brought
him both fame and wrath (for many television executives he is the ratings killer).512 His
television programs are constructed in similar vein as his films, as Tara Forrest describes them,

509

See Peter Lutz, for a most comprehensive analysis of Kluges career on Television, Alexander
Kluge, pp.179-200.
510
Kluge, Why Should Film and Television Cooperate, October, no. 46 (Fall 1988):.97.
511
Kluges net worth of share on television is as follows: Kluge (50%), Dentsu (37.5%), and
Spiegel Publishing (12.5%). Lutz, p. 240-241, n. 14.
512
Helmut Thoma, head of RTL, refers to Kluge as a parasite whose programs suggest that he
bought out the black-an-white stock of Peoples Republic of China: Stone-age Television.
Cited in Peter Lutz, p. 196.
264

out of highly diverse collection of raw materials (including photographs, drawings, diagrams,
clips from films and documentary footage).513
Kluge has been essentially peddling or recycling materials from his vast archive of silent
cinema along with footage from his feature and short films with a notable difference. The earlier
archaic manipulation of old footage and other raw materials, or scrap514 (Schrott) as it is now
called, in his films through primitive devices like fast motion, rephotgraphing images off the
editing table, angling the camera, tinting, masking, etc., are now being achieved in his television
program through computer graphics.515 Besides the old gimmicks of manipulating images
through new and modern computer technologies, Kluge has not succeeded in revolutionizing the
medium of television or created some new utopian dimension for its future use in the
emancipatory politics of cultural redemption. His programs largely constitute of interviews with
overwhelmingly white male cultural authority figures like Professor Peter Sloterdijk, Hans
Magnus Enzensberger or the late Heiner Mller. After 9/11 Kluge invited Islamic scholars Tariq
Ali and Mohammed Arkoun and conducted interviews on terrorism but hasnt followed the issue

513

Tara Forrest, Raw Materials for the Imagination: Kluges Work for Television in Alexander
Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, ed. Tara Forrest (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2012), p. 305. For a fuller account of Kluges television programs also see in the same
volume, Christian Schulte, Television and Obstinacy, pp. 318-330. The anthology contains
numerous scripts of the interviews of Kluges television programs.
514
See Christopher Pavseks interesting analysis of Scrap in Kluges The Assault of the
Present in the Actuality of Cinema: Alexander Kluge, The Utopia Film: Cinema and its Future
in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 204-208.
515
Miriam Hansen, Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes on Kluge and Early Cinema, in Raw
Materials for the Imagination, p. 389.
265

since then.516 Famous actors, musicians, Opera singers, etc., also regularly appear on his
television shows. He also often invites his friends like the actor Alfred Edel and Gnter Gaus to
guest host his late night programs, but has never invited any woman, as far as I know, to host his
shows. The medium that he once disparaged has not only made him a household name but also
extremely wealthy, something that he seldom speaks of. So, there lies the irony befitting of a
Kluge episode. A man who hated television and loved the cinema became the king of late night
television as he abandoned his love (love, as Kluge defines it, is a conservative emotion in Die
Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos (Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed, 1967) in order to
infiltrate the enemy territory. The late Miriam Hansen, Kluges biggest advocate, had also
wondered: How could a film-maker who had been fighting the so-called New Media for years
lend his name work to the enemy, even worse to a channel (partly owned by a media giant
Bertelsmann) that airs considerably more entertainment programmes (80%) than the other
satellite and cable channelsas well as depoliticized, soft news programs?517
Although one must also acknowledge the tenacity for perseverance in Kluge. He had
been steadfast to his own utopian project, in the spirit of one of his indomitable characters, Leni
Peickert, who, in Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed, seeks cooperation with television
industry for keeping her utopian ideals alive. Kluge, too, has clung to his utopian dreams by
amassing a load of wealth while trying to reach, in his futile but utopian quest (the word utopia
was reprogrammed by Negt through anagrammatic change of the letters from NO WHERE to

516

Tim Grnwald, Reframing Islam in Television: Alexander Kluges Interviews on Islam and
Terrorism since 9/11, in Raw Materials for the Imagination, pp. 331-351.
517
Hansen, Reinventing the Nickelodeon, p. 390.
266

NOW HERE)518 to create a real public sphere (ffentlichkeit) for the mass audience. Kluge had
already in1984 provided the reasons for his move from film to television precisely in terms of
saving the former from extinction. In an interview with Wolfgang Michal, Kluge reportedly told
him that If I had a wish, like one gets in fairy tales, I would wish the whole New Media to
disappear. Since I cant make them disappear, then instead we must use these New Media to
protect the film medium. Since we can only do this through aggressive action, we must take the
New Media seriously. We want to develop an island or a show-window of high quality, exciting
programs. Thereby we can simultaneously obtain the financial means to be able to invest
again.519 Lutz, who cites Kluge, does not follow the obvious question as to whether Kluges
departure to television for the ostensible reason to saving film by investing in it has materialized
or not since Kluges fairytale wish had come true. Kluge as an extremely successful business
man has so far failed to live up to his promise of saving film by exploiting financial resources
obtained from the New Media channels or helping the young struggling filmmakers by
showcasing their films on his television programs.520 Since Kluge used the analogy of fairy tales
to describe his predicament by making the Faustian bargain with the New Media, which he had

518

Negt, Arbeit und Menschliche Wrde (Gttingen: Steidl, 2001), p. 432. Cited and translated
by Devin Fore, Introduction in History and Obstinacy, p. 52.
519
Cited in Lutz, p. 181.
520
It seems strange that Kluge has not, for the most part, attempted to use these programs to
showcase new and radical works from unestablished film- and video-makers. Most young
filmmakers or video artists would be delighted to have their films shown to a larger television
audience and would view any payment at all as a windfall, since they had already paid their
production costs.Kluge is less interested in experimental work or young artists. Perhaps such
programming does not seem as appropriate to a targeted audience that is older and more affluent,
or perhaps he is simply reluctant to relinquish control at this critical stage of the venture. Lutz,
p. 240, n.16.
267

qualified with Negt in History and Obstinacy as the ecological danger to the structure of
consciousness,521 then why is the big bad wolf (the New Media), with Kluges permission,
taking care of the children at home, i.e., the film?522
I am unable to pursue in greater depth an analysis of the nature of his television
broadcasts, but instead would simply suggest that Kluges utopian dream of creating a counterpublic sphere through the mediation of commercial television (in direct opposition to
government sponsored public television) has culminated in what appears to be a classical
television slot, i.e., a classic (a term that Kluge has himself applied to his format) bourgeois
public sphere, aimed at the elitist consumption of high modernist culture, which none of the
proletariat wing of the German society that includes a vast array of multicultural/ethnic
immigrant communities (Turks, Eastern/Southern Europeans, Vietnamese, Arabs, Pakistanis,
etc.) have found of any interest or value, because of its inherent exclusionary culture and politics.
Of course, Kluge can argue that the real utopian impulse of his works resides in the uselessness
of its value for a commercial culture to take advantage of it in monetary or political terms. Yet
Kluge has boasted that more than 280 million people have watched the 250 episodes of his 10
vor 11 program, but the actual figure is, perhaps, somewhere a million per show. In fact Kluges
programs ratings have been sliding from the very beginning of the inception of his television

521

Negt and Kluge, History and Obstinacy, p. 470, n. 189.

Kluges has by now wholeheartedly embraced the New Media and most of his television
work is now only available on the Internet (cited above), sponsored by a joint program between
Cornell University, Universitt Breman and Princeton University.
268
522

career.523 His programs are basically created as a high-brow cultural window, snug between
soft-core pornography and other commercialized junks, which would fit nicely on the PBS, as a
weekly slot, on American television, except that Kluge has the privilege to run his late night
programs without the risk of advertising breaks on cable television because of the sweetened deal
he struck using his lobbying and lawyerly tactics with the cable programming executives. In
short, Kluges programs on television are artistic and eclectic in nature, a valiant effort to bring
in the old media back into the new media. His programs lack progressive global political agenda
and are devoted to bringing back the prehistoric culture (i.e., the so-called patriotic culture of a
unified German history of Negts and his imagination without taking into consideration the
contemporary contradictions of a racialized democracy since the unification) in the new media.
Kluges opposition to the New Media is expressed in The Assault of the Present on the Rest of
Time (1985), released in America as The Blind Director, quite unambiguously: Its a mistake to
think that the New Media are about entertainment. They are a new industry. But that was in
1985, in the last two decades Kluges has embraced their full potential without any real sense of
irony and his body of work is now fully sustained and shared by both television and the New
Media. Kluges cinematic career stalled since his television ventures, but in 2008 he produced a
nine and half hour film, based upon Eisensteins ambitious but unrealized project to translate
Marxs Das Kapital into a film, Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike: Marx Eisenstein
Das Kapital (News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx Eisenstein Capital), which is virtually
523

According to one source, RTL viewership drops from 3 million to 0.6 million, and SAT 1
numbers fell 3 million to 0.2 million. Even this figure, the private channels claim, is probably too
high, because a lot of people forget to turn off their televisions or fall asleep while they are still
on. Lutz, pp. 241-242, n.26.
269

an archive of his television broadcasts with contributions from other filmmakers including Tom
Tykwer.524
Kluge is almost a mythical figure in German cultural scene. But what has contributed
to Kluges enduring mystique is precisely his obscurity (even on his television program, it is only
his voice from the offscreen space that is visible to the audience): not being in the limelight
helped him to control and manipulate his image considerably. Kluge is still prodigiously
productive. He published three major works in 2013. Recently, he has published a book of
stories, Wer ein Wort des Trostes spricht, ist ein Verrter. 48 Geschichten fr Fritz Bauer
(Anyone who speaks a word of solace, is a traitor. 48 Stories of Fritz Bauer) on the
destruction of the European Jewry in the Final Solution.525 Fritz Bauer was the district attorney
in Frankfurt in the 1950s and 60s who carried out the first Auschwitz Trial and was instrumental
in the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.526
III Memory and History in Public Sphere
In considerations of Kluges films, lets us take the relations between history and memory,
in particular the question of German history, as a starting point to discuss the concept of
experience (Erfahrung) that is central to the discourse of collective memory for both Benjamin
and Kluge. Kluges definition of Erfahrung is rather broad and far reaching which he has worked
out in its full complexity in his co-authored book, Public Sphere and Experience, with Oskar

524

The entire film is available on Alexander Kluge: Cultural History in Dialogue.

https://kluge.library.cornell.edu/films/ideological-antiquity
525
Kluge, Wer ein Wort des Trostes spricht, ist ein Verrter: 48 Geschichten fr Fritz Bauer.
526
He makes a guest appearance in Kluges first feature Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl,
1966).
270

Negt, the sociologist. Erfahrung contains the German root of fahren, which means journey or
travel, to ride, etc., and is therefore in the philosophical works of Frankfurt School (Adorno,
Benjamin, Kracauer, and Horkheimer) has been accorded a much wider connotation and
privilege than its neutral counterpart Erlebnis (limited to event, adventure lived experience in a
singular occurrence). One can hear the echo of the journey of the storyteller who brings his
experience of travelling from the far flung places to expand the social horizon of experience of
his/her readers. It is connected to their idea of the public sphere (ffenlichkeit) which can only
be properly articulated in oppositional framework to Erlebnis.
By Erfahrung, Negt and Kluge expand and increase the very idea of public sphere to a
realm of public articulation of experience that is continuously expanding and changing the
social horizon of experience. In short, the term is linked to the idea of learning process as
opposed to the accumulated experience of the past that Erlebnis generally signifies. According to
Hansen, the significance of Erfahrung refers to the capacities of having and reflecting upon
experience, of seeing connections [Zusammenhnge, for Kluge/Negt], of juggling reality and
fantasy, of remembering the past and imagining a different future, on the other hand, it entails
the historical disintegration and transformation of these very capacities with the onslaught of
industrialization, urbanization, and a modern culture of consumption.527 For Kluge and Negt,
therefore, Erfahrung is essentially a part of the complex of the public sphere which is related to
the perspective of experience in the existing contemporaneous world that is based on the

527

Hansen, Foreword, Public Sphere, p. xix.

271

principle of openness (ffentlichkeit) and inclusiveness of multiplicity, heterogeneity, conflict,

contradiction, difference, etc.
Kluge often uses the resources of montage in a way which takes into account both the
need for some kind of documentation of the events (...) and the need to reveal the fundamental
inadequacy of documentation.528 What emerge from his text are two dialectically related
aspects: History and Abstraction. The common factor between the two aspects is the antagonism
toward the experience of the individual subject. We deal with our surroundings in an
unsensuous way, exactly as we do with the real relations in history. And we deal with lyric
poetry in a sensuous way with our direct sense for what is near. The two fall apart. The big
decisions in history are not made in the realm of what we experience close at hand. The real big
disasters take place in the distance which we cannot experience, for which we dont have the
appropriate telescope (or microscope) in our senses. The two dont come together. In this sense
man is not a social, not a political being. And experience shows that when he rebels he generally
even smashes the few sensuous tools which link him to the social whole.529 Kluge, here, is
looking for a way out from the ambiguity and radicalism of realism. Since the limited
individual experience does not provide the way out, it is necessary to look for those ways out in
connection with the collectivity by organizing collective social experience.
In Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Obstinacy), which he co-authored with Oskar
Negt, they emphasize that the public sphere can be understood as organizing human

528

Alexander Kluge, The Political as Intensity of Everyday Feelings, trans. Andrew Bowie,
Cultural Critique (Nov. 1986): 114.
529
Kluge, The Political as Intensity of Everyday Feelings, p. 122.
272

experience, as a historically developing form of the mediation between the cultural

organization of human qualities and senses on the one hand and developing capitalist production
on the other.530 And in that sense, they situate themselves completely in opposition to
Habermas, whose The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere531 was widely popular
during the protest movement in Germany. Their basic criticism of Habermas stems from the
analysis that Habermass idea of the bourgeois public sphere does not include the proletarian
public sphere, as the latter is inherently opposed to the former in many respects, rather than he
treats it merely as a repressed variant of a plebeian public sphere.532 For Habermas, the public
sphere of the bourgeoisie is disintegrated into the rival politics of the power groups and therefore
has become an object of manipulation. He relates this condition directly to the state of late
capitalism as a refeudalization of the public sphere.533 The point Kluge and Negt are proposing
is evidently different, according to Knodler-Bunte, when they place the function of the public
sphere, which is altered in the interest of profit maximization, in the context of a Marxist analysis
of society. For them the main concern has been to develop a middle level theory which
confronts the qualitative transformation of capitalist social relationships from both the standpoint

530

Eberhard Knodler-Bunte, The Proletarian Public Sphere and Political Organization: An

Analysis of Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge's The Public Sphere and Experience, New
German Critique (Winter 1975): 53.
531
Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
532
See Dana Polan for a critique of Kluge and Negts Public Sphere as bleaker than Habermass
in The Publics Fear; or, Media as Monster in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 39.
533
Cited by Eberhard Knodler-Bunte, p. 54.
273

of new forms of production as well as from the standpoint of changes in everyday experience in
society.534
Both Benjamin and Kluge oppose the linear model of historiography that presents history
in its contemporary form as the relation to the past. Both prefer the model of history that is based
on the collective experience of the masses that has been mimetically handed over to generations
through traditional means. Both prefer the storyteller above the chronicler. Another crucial
element that brings Kluges work very close to the model based on Benjamins early writings on
Surrealism is where the latter found the Surrealists explorations of the most dream-like object
in the world of things: the city of Paris, Bretons and Aragons writings, etc. The intertwined
obsolescent and archival objects found and recognized by the Dadaists/Surrealists have a
distinct place in Kluges images: the iron constructions, factory buildings, early photos, objects
that have become extinct, early dresses, old film-footage, old restaurants, interiors of shops, objet
trouv, etc. This tendency brings forth the revolutionary nihilism present in both Benjamin and
Kluge.
Benjamin points out in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire that the structural change in
peoples experience, both empirically and biologically, was caused by the rise of big-scale
industrialism, which he defined as shock in the experience of modernity by the masses.
Despite philosophys attempt to internalize the external, visible, infrastructural changes taking
place in the appearance of an industrial society by strictly historical and epistemological

534

Knodler-Bunte, p. 51.
274

methods, and by emphasizing essence over appearance, despite all such cognitive
circumspection, the real or true experience was no longer available to insight.
Benjamin introduces the figure of the Storyteller to elaborate his theses on the decline of
experience in the modern world. The figure of storyteller is important to him, because it forms
the link to memory. Benjamin equates memory with historiography, whereas the nature of true
storytelling reveals an aspect of self-forgetting on the part of the listener. Like Benjamins
chronicler or the storyteller, whose memory is of many, Kluges experience of history is also
manifested through pluralism and a sense of loss, a loss he describes as a national loss, a
failure, Fehlleistung, to perform the work of mourning, as Thomas Elsaesser has described it one
of his essays.535 For Benjamin experience has fallen in value, and so has the art of storytelling,
which had fallen victim to the historical forces of industrialization. Likewise, in Kluges films,
we find the foregrounding of the social function of the storyteller. History appears there as a
collection of folk and fairy tales that itself can be viewed as reframing the original genre. That is
to say that with time, history itself must become a fairy tale, becoming once again what it was
in the beginning.536 My effort later is to gauge the impact of such conflation between history and

535

Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema and History: The Case of Alexander Kluge, The
New German Cinema Book, pp. 182-191. See also Elasessers brilliant analysis of parapraxis in
the iconic image of Het Mesje (also appeared in Resnaiss Night and Fog) in Migration and
Motif: The (Parapractic) Memories of an Image in Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian
Terror and Cultural Resistance, ed. Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (London: I. B. Tauris,
2014), pp. 47-58.
536
Novalis, Werke und Briefe, ed. Alfred Kelletat (Munich: Winkler, 1962), p. 506. Cited in
Zipes, The Instrumentalization of Fantasy, Breaking the Magic Spell, p. 105.
275

fairy tales and provide questions as to whether the transformation of power from one to the other
may not be implicated in the possibility of spawning fascism.537
IV. The Aura of Kluges Film: Brutalitt in Stein (Brutality in Stone, 1961)
Kluges first film with Peter Schamoni, Brutalitt in Stein is, in Theodore Fiedlers
account, a short innovative documentary on the Nazi period whose simultaneous evocation and
deconstruction of the aura of the Nazi architecture transforms Benjamins basic concept into
filmic practice.538 Kluges reception of Benjamins ideas is most evident in The Utopia Film, his
theoretical discourse on film, which has remained consistent over the years.539 The first
encounter of memory and archive in Kluge takes place in Brutalitt in Stein through a caption:
The deserted structures of the Nationalist Socialist Party reactivate as stone witnesses the
memory of that epoch, which ended in the most horrible catastrophe of German history.
Brutality in Stone can be also read fully in agreement with Jameson as a product of antagonistic
realism.540 Eric Rentschler, on the other hand, reads the film as a site of deconstruction of the
National Socialist past to which people now seemed to have become immune or inured.541 A
past that rather be forgotten, as Adorno stated in his 1959 lecture, What Does Coming to Terms
[Aufarbeitung] with the Past Means, than remembered, especially the past dealing with the Nazi

537

OKane, p. 4.
Theodore Fiedler, Mediating History and Consciousness," New German Filmmakers, ed.
Klaus Phillips (New York: Fredrick Unger Publishing Co, 1984), pp. 198-199.
539
Kluge, ed. Bestandsaufnahme: Utopie Film (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1983).
540
Fredric Jameson, On Negt and Kluge, October, No. 46 (Fall 1988): 151. Antagonistic
realism is term used by Jameson to explore the site of an explosion, which is exactly what
Kluge and Schamoni proceed to do in Brutality in Stone.
541
Eric Rentschler, Remembering Not to Forget: A Retrospective Reading of Kluges Brutality
inn Stone, New German Critique, no, 49 (Winter 1999): 23-41.
276
538

period and the Holocaust and, furthermore, that takes no collective responsibility for the World
war II.542 It also marks the first encounter of memory and archive in Kluge in this short film:
The deserted structures of the Nationalist Socialist Party reactivate as stone witnesses the
memory of that epoch, which ended in the most horrible catastrophe of German history (Die
Verlassenen Bauten der nationalsozialistischen Partei lassen als steineme Zeugen die
Erinnerung an jene Epoche lebendig werden, die in die furchtbarste Katastrophe deutschen
Geschichte mndete).
The film begins with the following caption:
Alle Bauwerke, die uns die Geschichte hinterlassen hat, zeugen vom Geiste ihrer
Erbauer und ihrer Zeit auch dann noch, wenn sie lngst nich meher inhren
ursprnglichen zwecken dienen.
All the monuments bequeathed to us by history gives witness to the spirit of their times
even when they no longer serve their original purpose.
We are introduced to the catastrophic site of the German history, the monumental ruins of the
Nuremberg architecture, in a long wide-angle shot. The camera pans left and zoom in to a close
up of a shattered piece of wall. Another caption appears: Die Ewigkeit von Gestern (The
eternity of yesterday).543 The images of the ruins are followed by the sound of drums. Over the
loud din of the drums, over the long shot of the monuments, Kluges voiceover informs us that it
is the site of Nuremberg rallies. The third shot is composed of another long shot of the ruins of
walls and stairs and the music has now distinctly turned into a ritualized pageant marching

542

Adorno, What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Means, pp. 114-129.
Kluges preoccupation with the phenomenon of yesterday reaches its apotheosis in his later
feature film, Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966), where he claims that the we are
separated from yesterday not by an abyss but by a change of situation (Uns trennt von gestern
kein Abgrund, Sondern die vernderte lage).
277
543

sound. As the drums continue to beat, a frenzied collective drone of the crowd is distinctly
superimposed on the soundtrack while the images still linger upon the ravaged sites of the
abandoned monuments. Over the cheering crowd appears the sound of Hitlers voice, only the
simplest mind believes that the essence of a revolution lies in destruction alone, as we are
witnessed to the various montage sequences of the monument in its present decay.
The speech continues: We saw it as expansion in gigantic terms. After Hitlers screaming
speech that ends with the words, ganzliche ausbau, gigantic construction, we are witnessed
to a flurry of a montage sequence: A series of swish pan (reminiscent of Orson Welless Citizen
Kane, the scene at the breakfast table between Kane and Emily) reveal structures of the
monument from the right and then followed by the left. They are then joined by a shot from the
center: the theme of left, right, and center is visually established as a rhythmic pattern of
Montage as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.544 The visual rhythmic pattern of presenting the
monument in its present decay provides a counterpoint to the contrapuntal sound of Hitlers
speech and the thunderous applause of his followers at the rally.
We are further introduced to a heterogeneous collection of shots of the monuments: long
shots of walls, grounds, corridors, and columns (6 shots) over the non-diegetic music. Kluges
voice again informs the spectator: Thunderous applause erupted after the Fhrers speech. The
rally closed with a symphony of Brahms.545 The commentary continues as the camera keeps
tracking on the stairs in a close up that reveals distinctly the ruins of the once majestic steps:
544

In his text of Die Patriotin, Kluge wrote that Montage is in the film history, the world form
of connections. (Montage ist in der filmgeschichte der formenwelt des Zusammenhnges).
545
The symphony of Brahms appeared for a very moment in the first montage sequence of the
grounds of the Nuremberg rally.
278

And Alfred Rosenberg spoke the closing words. Three programmatic dissolves of the tracking
shots of the steps--dissolves from left to right to right to left is joined by another dissolve in
which the steps appear in the center of the frameconstitutes the central thematic of the film.
The voice appears again, again the primacy of memory given to the presence of the absentthe
dead themselves. We hear Hitlers voice, Sieg Heil; the crowd responding: Sieg Heil;
thunderous applause. The camera slowly tilts up to reveal a large door on top of the steps. It
slowly starts to zoom-in to the large closed door, and then a brilliant dissolve from a low angle
shot of the long corridor whose dark ceilings matched the dark closed doors. With the dissolve
the camera tracks in through the corridor, and for the first time through the commentary an
excerpt from the memoirs of the Commandment of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hss is introduced:
The first transports, all due for extermination, arrived in spring, 1942. At first they went
quietly into the chambers where they were to be disinfected. Then some became suspicious and
spoke of exterminating. The immediate result was panic. The others quickly herded into
chambers and doors were bolted. The image here is of the camera tracking through the corridor
and arriving at a closed door as the words and the doors were bolted. The image appears to be
a reversal of the closed door that we initially saw from the outside: Sieg Heil; and now we get an
inside perspective in the form of a memoir through a voice, on behalf of Rudolf Hssproviding
us with an inner track. I will be coming to the voice or commentary in Kluges films in a
moment.
In the meanwhile, the chilling and the numbing bureaucratic and quotidian details of the
concentration camp activities from Hsss diary are introduced to the audience in its entire

279

matter-of-factness. The obvious conflation, or conflagration, an irruption of the private and

the public: the public guilt and the private redemption seem to instigate this particular gesture
from Kluge and Schamoni. It is not simply a diary to introduce a conflicting and dissonant
discourse of the other, the one which cannot be represented by the official discourse, the national
mourning of ones identity which is seen in correspondence to the ruins of a nations identity, in
the monumental ruins of the Nuremberg history.
The sordid and repugnant details of Hsss diary which opens the sequences of montage
that Kluge and Schamoni construct, and construction is their metaphor for building sites, in
order to take us through a harrowing journey down the arcades and halls of memory that have
been locked behind the bolted doors. Lets us follow in a state of mourning the roving and
deliberate camera, which, in keeping with Benjamins assertion of its analytical power,546
serves as an analytical tool investigating the properties and the functioning of the optical
unconsciousness of the Nazi spectacle.
The camera continues to track through the columns of arches culminating in front of
another locked door. The process is repeated in several different tracking shots and each time
the camera stops at a locked door. Commentary continues: cremating had to be done at night,
so as not to delay the transport. The time-table, decided by the Ministry of Transport, had to be
observed at all costs to avoid confusion. On the image track, dissolves from a rectilinear hall
with a classical architecture of a door with an arch at the end of the hallthe track continues
towards the closed door. Dissolve to another column of walls with steel fence over the sides and

546

Fiedler, p. 198.
280

connected with a row of horizontal wallsand at the end, once again, it is revealed, the closed
doors. We hear the commentator reading a fragmented sentence from the diary, whose
beginning we have missedon the railway lines concerned. Here there is a remarkable visual
correspondence to the railway lines, the audio track, because the fences on both sides of the
wall appear very much like the railway lines. As the camera steadily tracks over the corridors,
it suddenly, quite abruptly, takes a vertical plunge and through an abrupt and quick tilt down
while also managing to zoom in at the same time, it reveals a dark space beneath the walland
the montage sequence terminates at the point.
The fourth sequence takes place outdoors. This section is devoted to the planning stages
of the gigantic architectural dreams of the Nazi power and glory, what Benjamin called the
aestheticization of politics, which he wanted to combat by politicizing the aesthetic in
cooperation with the Brechtian utopian ideology.547 Commentary: A goddess of victory which
also three times larger. The visual is shown from a high angle shot of the empty and hollow
pedestal on which the goddess was supposed to be placed. A few more shots of the ruins
emphasizing the openings left for doors and arches, because we are exposed to the sunlight now.
Cut to a low angle shot, with a zoom in, of the arches on top of the building, and followed by a
few more repetitions of similar shots usually in adherence to the triadic form of the dialectical
axioms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, I have mentioned earlier. A long shot of Hitlers
portrait, standing behind him a portrait of the goddess in black holding an eagle on the palm of
her right hand. Two metal statues of a male and a female in the Greek mould flank the portrait.

547

Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Illuminations, p. 242.
281

On the sound track we hear Hitlers screeching voice, lies in destruction alone. Another
quick cut to a tilt down of Hitlers photograph in which he appears to be sketching. The voice
resumes, we saw it as an expansion in gigantic terms. We are offered a quick succession of
four shots, in close ups, of Hitlers sketches for building, and we hear a few strains of Brahms
music. The entire sequence ends with another series of tracking shots of a magnificent arched
hallway culminating in the apotheosis of the closed door.
Plans for the future, Zukunft builder, announces the voiceover as we confront ourselves
with a photograph of Hitler with Albert Speer and an unidentified man looking at the gigantic
drawings of the architectural plans. A series of photographs of the planned city is superimposed
upon the architectural plan and the voiceovers ironic statement further dialecticizes the context,
the Zussamenhang: The transformation of German cities. Here lies the plans of the city from
below which will be destroyed by the logic of the above, by bombardment, which should have
been taken into context, into account retrospectively at the time when the foundations of the
plans for construction were being laid out. The contrapuntal sound of air raids and bombing
pierces the surface of the architectural plan of the city. Over the plans of the future architecture,
Kluges voiceover tells us: Hitlers table talk of June 8th, 1942. A transcript is followed by an
image of Hitler signing the order for the plan. People must be brought to think in a Germanic
way. The renaming of Berlin, the Reichs capital as Germania could give new life to this effort.
Such imaginings of the architectural grandeur is represented through a consortium of visuals
with the motif of Swastika present at the crest of the building top. And in a gesture of ultimate
irreconciliation between the past and the present, we find the most delusional longings of Hitlers

282

master plan delivered on the model of Germania: The name of Germania could create a feeling
of solidarity between the Germanic race and the capital city of Berlin. That such renaming
causes no problem can be seen. What is astonishing in this process of renaming a historical city
into an idealized fantasy is the fact that it is not only a political act but also more than that it is an
artistic or aesthetic achievement galvanized by the visual imagination of the spectacular. As we
know, most of the architectural undertakings for the construction of the mythical Germania were
later on quickly abandoned by the Nazis.
And now, almost at the end of the picture, we have visuals of Nazi soldiers in Nuremberg
rally; women in white Greek toga dresses walking with their hands caressing the gigantic model
of the building carried by the soldiers; with soldiers and people wearing big swastika badges
around their necks. The sound of Allied bombers is once again juxtaposed with the image of the
impeccable model of Germania. The narrator resumes the commentary: Fhrers order: August
20th, 1943: I need a million homes for victims of bombings as soon as possible. (Visual panning
on the model as the sound of bombing continues). Living area 3.5 x 4m. Building material does
not matter. I have even considered clay huts. (Visual pan from right to left on the classical
model of Germania). At worst holes in the ground. The houses, if possible, are to be erected
individually, in allotments near towns and villages. In the suburbs hidden beneath trees, close to
air raid shelters, etc. The montage of images again ends with a vertical tilt down on the column
of the main faade of the model showing three doors with two model soldiers. Another cut to the
photograph of the building with two gigantic square doors guarded by a lone soldier. A few
strains of music follows at regular intervals as the shots change from one to anotherbut now
283

showing the actual parts of the ruin. Three to four long shots interspersed with a sharp and
sudden zoom in to the door, and then gradually paced shots of the building with empty hollow
windows in a row. The voiceover now suddenly transforms into a female voice:
From the BDM songbook (league of German Girls) distributed by the State Youth Leadership.
Freedom Fighters song. Now trusty sword, strike to earth the ferocious lions who are
menacing us. May the blood of this brood splash onto our threshold, over rubble and corpses,
you bondsmen, join in. Fatherland will protect you. The enemys blood will flow.
This particular section ends with an image of the wall held for a small duration.
The last montage of the film is the most disturbing, because at this point Kluge/Schomini
violently opposes the historical ruins of the site of the Nuremberg rally with a memory of
Kluges own childhood trauma. We see the ruins, in a long shot, of a classical archway; the
camera then suddenly tilts up accompanied by a violent, and highly dissonant, musical note, as if
to show the strategy from above in conjunction with the helplessness of the strategy from
below, where lies the ruins of all our utopian wishes, for they were not sufficiently given
enough training or history lesson in future survival. The steady and analytical compositions of
methodological montage build up is shattered by the traumatic experience of a childhood
memory that completely destroys the possibility of coming to terms with ones own history
without a mediation in the public sphere. The camera, in its most intense point of view shot,
begins to recall a personal trauma at the site of a major public catastrophe. The mimetic
correspondence between the image of a childhood memory and the traumatic and disturbing
association of its origin is grafted on a collective and national trauma whose site is once again
284

damaged by the forces of recollection. The agitation of a traumatized childhood is brilliantly

captured by Kluge and Schamonis rather subjective camera in the chaotic and helter-skelter
succession of shots of the ruins, the quick zoom ins and outs, as the sound of the bombing
continues, we see the ruins of a destroyed past in the angst of a childhood memory.548
The entire scenario is constructed, Fiedler comments, on the principle of contrastive
montage, a strategy that maximizes the shock effect on perception that Benjamin saw as intrinsic
to all film.549 The contrast with the introduction of the contrapuntal sound creates an ambiguous
tension with the visual field and forces the spectator to use associative forms of memory to
explore the historical consciousness of the past in its present context. Fiedler recognizes the
importance and the significance of the complex and multiple facets of the film whose structure is
deliberately organized in a disjunctive manner, in order to avoid a complete internalization or
mastery of either the archival materials represented in the film, such as fixed frames of historical
photographs, newsreel clips, spoken texts, and titles, or a logical rational that neatly explains in
clear and coherent terms the immense destruction ideology helped bring about.550 Both Fiedler
and Miriam Hansen along with others have noted on different occasions how Kluges films

548

Kluge has written many times over about the Allied bombings on Halberstadt, his hometown
in the Eastern Germany that he claims almost killed him when he was only thirteen years old.
Ever since the childhood trauma has remained a permanent fixture in his oeuvre. For an analysis
of trauma in Kluges films see Flinn, pp. 126-136.
549
Fiedler, p. 198.
550
Ibid., p. 199.
285

attempt to negate a widespread tendency among West Germans in the 1950s to forget 551 or
repress the discourse of memory of the Nazi period without having come to terms with it.552
Furthermore, the film [Brutalitt in Stein] is clearly intended to subvert such an attitude, to
engage its viewers in a multifaceted, critically mediated reconstruction of their collectively
experienced past;553 and thus it paves the way for the necessity to introduce new
epistemological categories and relationships to the analytical content of filmic representation.
This also proves the abiding interest Kluge has in contemporary reality in its relation to the
continuum of German history as the subject matter of his films. Brutality in Stone as a document
of collective and private memory which resulted in both collective and private catastrophe of its
filmmaker (Kluge) has its ancestry in the oldest form the archival activity. The archive weighs
on memory as a stone and slowly acquires the foundational structure, because of its sheer weight
which results in forcing the memory to the level of the edifice. We are back to the founding
document of archive of the New German Cinema, the Oberhausen Manifesto, that solemnly
declared:
Every edifice left to us by history emanates the spirit of its creator, its age, even when it
no longer stands in the service of its original function. Thee forsaken edifices of the
National Socialist Party, as testament in stone [of its brutality, if we may add], allows
memories to come alive of that epoch which led to the most terrible catastrophe in
German history.

551

Ibid.
Ibid. What Miriam Hansen has called in another context can be applied to Brutality in Stone
that the film is an attempt to salvage historical rubble from the drift of amnesia. The Stubborn
Discourse: History and Story Telling, Die Schrift an der Wand: Alexander Kluge: Rohstoffe and
Materialien, ed. Christian Schulte (Hg.) (Osnabrck: Universittsverlag Rasch, 2000), p. 128.
553
Fiedler, p. 199.
286
552

In a Heideggerain speak, the archive is the clearing of the space in which the base of memory
gathers, and this is how I see the significance of Brutality in Stone for which the stoneserved
as a support for an overload of memory.554 These stone archives, these monumental ruins,
added to the function of archives proper the character of an insistent and prolonged sense of
mourning to which we turn now in Kluges Die Patriotin.
V. German History and Identity: Die Patriotin: An Archive of Materialist Wishes
The question of identity is foremost a problem of constructing ones own identity in
relation to what, in Kluges terms, remains a problematic in the absence of a positive (German)
history.555 The best example could be seen in his treatment of Gabi Teichert, played by
Hannelore Hoger, a history teacher from Hessen in Die Patriotin (The Patriot, 1979), who goes
on illegal digging expeditions in the middle of the night in search of the foundations of German
history. We ought to remember that the progressive development of archaeology, as Le Goff
reminds us, in the eighteenth century was purported to not only renew the ancient history, but
was also deployed for the conquest of the vast territory of prehistory and protohistory.556 Thus
the recurring figure of Gab Teichert, from Deutschland im Herbst to Die Patriotin, as an amateur
archaeologist, or a historical materialist, digging with a spade in blue wintry landscape557 in

554

Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, p. 59.

John Davidson has recently examined the obsession of German intellectual with the question
of national identity as a result of the New Subjectivism which challenged the political and
cultural history of Germany while maintaining a tradition of creating a German identity as
marginalized and colonized subjectivity. John E. Davidson, Deterritorializing the New German
Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 54.
556
Le Goff, p. 181.
557
Its actually not blue-lit as Miriam Hansen has described it. Kluge points out in one of his
interviews that the cameraman forgot to the put the proper filter which resulted in the blue tone.
287
555

the outskirts of Frankfurt, should not be approached as either comical or melancholic in her
utopian quest for the excavation of German history, since she lacks virtually any control or
ownership to her fictional identity in the diegetic material of the film. Yet, as an archaeologist,
she, however, functions as an agent (and no less than a secret agent as the subsequent images of
her in consort with the detective finally hones the point home) of historical renewal of
Germanys contemporary history, which is characterized by Kluge as nothing less than
catastrophic and disastrous in its present form. One must also acknowledge the fact that the
advent of archaeology has always been deeply connected with the issues of art and technology
and thus plays an important role in broadening the purview of historical culture. From this, one
could easily surmise that the role of the archaeologists or the antiquarians, as they are known
otherwise, is to construct the archaeological document, the objet dart, as tools or vestiges of
art in a scientific and disinterested manner.
Kluges inspiration for his fictional character of the amateur archaeologist could be
ultimately traced to the great German archaeologist Johann Joachim Winkelmann, whose
Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The History of Ancient Art, 1746)558 along with Comte de
Cayluss Recueil dantiquits gyptiennes, trusques, greques, romaines et gauloise (17521767)559 were the first seminal texts to provide legitimacy to the documentation of the
archaeological evidences. We ought to pursue more thoroughly into the choice of this
Bion Steinborn, Cinema Pure, Cinema Impure, Filmfaust 7, no. 26 (February March 1982):
48. See Lutz, p. 229, n. 15.
558
Johann Joachim Winkelmann, The History of Ancient Art, 4 v. trans. G. Henry Lodge
(Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1872-1973).
559
Anne Claude Philippe Caylus, Recueil dantiquits gyptiennes, trusques, greques, romaines
et gauloise (1752-1767) (rue S. Jean de Beauvais: Desaint & Saillant, 1767).
288

occupational history schoolteacher and her subsequent transformation into an amateur

archaeologist. Normally, critics in general have interpreted this particular transformation of Gabi
Teichert as one of those quirky Klugesque moves beyond rational basis. Yet, if one looks
closely into the role of archaeology in establishing the framework of historical interpretation of
culture, politics, and economics of a nation, it wouldnt be difficult to realize that the project of
archaeology, as one of the most renovated discipline of historical science, has been to shift the
emphasis from the object and the monument to the overall site, whether urban or rural. Kluges
excavation site or landscape straddles the line between the urban and the rural. Archaeology thus
succeeds in creating a material culture, which is first and foremost a culture of the masses and
the majority. This endeavor of Gabi Teichert to renew the German history through
archaeological mediation is troubling from the perspective of the normative and constitutive
doctrine of the archaeological science, that is, the scientific project of historiography, because it
fits precisely into the project of redeeming all the dead of Germany. Despite Kluges
purported assumption that he is providing us with the figure of Gabi Teichert an alternative mode
of historical representation, his choice of selecting archaeology, nevertheless, as a means to
convey that order of impression, undermines his own intuitive counter-historical discourse.
The image of an artist digging deep into the narrative surface of a nation to recover the
vestiges of national identity is borrowed from Walter Benjamin: Language shows clearly that
memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past
experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to
approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid
289

to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as
he turns over soil (emphasis added).560 The discourse of the identity of German history is thus
introduced at the very beginning of the film because of the catastrophic move by the state
legislatures towards eliminating the subject of history from Hessens curricula for schools. The
alarming situation demanded a personal intervention that placed Kluge in a unique situation as a
filmmaker. He made his fictional character Gabi Teichert attend the Social Democratic Party
(SPD) Congress in Hamburg in the fall of 1977, while he documented her in a newsreel type of
footage as she conducted individual and group meetings with the members, some very well
known in the West German politics, asking them how to improve the material of teaching of
German history in school. I am a history teacher. I have come here because I would like to work
with you to change history. What do you think of that?561 The staging of fictional with
documentarythe graininess of the print and inadequate lighting, two well-known tropes of
documentary, are held fast in the long sequence, which lasts for almost twelve minutesis a
clear illustration of Kluges strategy of antagonistic film making. In critiquing the
overdetermination of documentary as a genre of realism and deploring the repression of
imagination in both reality and art, Kluge states: I think the testimony of fiction is better than
the testimony of non-fiction. Fiction is mimetic, imitative, because its hiding behind non-fiction;
and I think these are two sides of the same thing. Which is why I always try to mix these two

560

Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle, Reflections, 25-26. Ausgraben und Erinnern, Denkbilder

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 110.
561
Ich bin Geschichtslehrerin. Ich bin hierhergekommen, weil ich die Geschichte mit Ihnen
zusammen verndern mchte. Was halten sie davon? Kluge, Die Patriotin, p. 75.
290

thingsnot simply for the sake of mixing them, but rather to create in any film the maximum
possible tensions between fiction and non-fiction.562
Earlier, in a shot of Teichert putting make-up on in front of a mirror, Kluges distinct
voice informs us in intimate terms about the dilemmas she faces as a historian and as an amateur
archaeologist. He tells us that Gabi Teichert was sure that the raw materials for history on the
advanced level were difficult. Its hard to present German history in a patriotic version.
Teichert is described by Kluge as a patriot. She, he tells in his condescending voice, takes
an interest in all of Germanys dead. Because no one is simply dead, when he dies.563 Kluge
here evokes his memorial address to Heiner Mller at his funeral in 1996: It is an error, that the
Dead are Dead.564 He quotes Mller at his funeral for wishing for an impossible funeral, for
an impossible mourning, but also for laughing with a Dadaist glee at the complete chaos, the
absurdity, as in Felix Guattaris funeral at the Pre-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, as in a Buster
Keaton movie: All successful funerals must fail.565
Speaking of dead, we are reminded of a Corporal Wieland, who fell north of Stalingrad
on January 28, 1943, and his rambling knee heard over a painting of trees and three owls
perched on them.566 The painting instantly brings to mind Hegels owl of Minerva that flies at

562

Dawson, p. 54.
Gabi Teichert, Geschichtelehrin in Hessen, eine Patriotin, d.h sie nimmt Anteil an allen
Toten des Reiches. Kluge, Die Patriotin Texte/Bilder 1-6, p. 50. I have used the subtitles
(translation in my opinion) of the film Die Patriotin throughout my main text.
564
Kluge, Alexander, It is an error, that the Dead are Dead, New German Critique, no. 73
(Winter 1998): 5-11.
565
Ibid., p. 6.
566
The image of the knee is taken from Christian Morgensterns poem, Das Knee:
Ein Knie geht einsam um die welt.
291
563

dusk. We find ourselves fervently berated by the protesting knee. Speaking antagonistically, it
admonishes us, though in a gentle voice: You just cant write us off: the wishes, legs, joints,
ribs, skins, and if only I remain the knee, than I have to talk. I must talk, talk, talk, even if my life
is unusual, as part of an entire man, who is a part of a people, that is part of history, of animals,
nature, gardens, trees, etc., etc. Get used to it: I am the one who is speaking here. I have a right
to; I demand nothing. Neither that you believe me, nor that what I say make sense. But I must
speak. If someone has a right, he doesnt demand it. He fights for it.567
It was in Geschichte und Eigensinn that Kluge and Negt first developed the idea of the
relationship of the body with the notion of identity. The body is seen as concretely as that
through which all human experience is filtered, processed, and pursued; it is at once personal and
social. Never privy to a fixed, permanent identity, it can sometimes be the battleground for the

Es ist ein Knie, sohn nicht.

Es ist kein Baum, es ist kein Zelt,
Es ist ein Knie, sonst nicht.
Im Krieg Ward einmal ein Mann,
Erschossen um and um.
Sein Knie allein blieb unverletzt,
Als wrs ein Heiligtum.
Kluge, Die Patriotin, 52. Kluge attributes the conceptualization of this allegorical representation
of the knee to his long time collaborating editor, Beate Melinka-Jellinghuas. See Stuart Liebman,
On New German Cinema, Art Enlightenment, and the Public Sphere: An Interview With
Alexander Kluge, October, No. 46 (Fall 1988): 52.
567
So kann man uns nicht abschreiben, die Wnsche, die Biene, die vielen Glieder, Rippen, die
Haut, die friert, und eben: wenn nichts anderes brig ist als das: Ich, das Knie, dann mu ich
reden reden reden. Wenn ich nicht schon im blichen Sinn lebe, als Stck eines ganzen Mannes,
dieser als Stck eines Volkes, dieses als Stck der Geschichte, der Tiee, der Natur, Der Grten,
der Bume, usw., ust. Man soll sich daran Gewhnen, das ich hier rede. Ich habe ein Anrecht
dazu, noc daes einem sinn hat, was ich sage. Nur reden mu ich. Wenn jemand ein Recht hat,
dann fordert er es nicht, sondern er kmpft darum. Kluge, Die Patriotin, p. 55.
292

conflicting social antagonisms.568 The reductive assessment of the fragmented body, the knee
of Corporal Wieland, with the subject conceptualized as an assertion of subjective identity, or
a fixed form of ego identity, is untenable to Kluge and Negts concept of how subjectivity is
constituted, which is primarily enunciated in their works as Arbeitskrfte (labor-power) in its
widest possible sense.569 The fragmented identity of the knee is mediated through the body
politic of wishes, legs, joints, ribs, skin, and thus the body is introduced to the discourse of
nature and history, or more specifically, in Adornos sense, to the discourse of natural history,
that is, to nonidentity. It also removes the question of identity from the ontological premise of
the nature of history or vice-versa.
The knee performs, via its soliloquy, a self-acknowledgement of speaking neither from a
fixed determination of being, that is, from the center of the subject (neither that you believe
me) nor from a position of meaning, of coherence and articulation (nor that what I say make
sense). In ontological phenomenology, on the contrary, the philosophical object is constituted
by the essence of the subject, of its being. But in this case, the talking knee not only resurrects
the question of origin as reproduction of what has already passed away, but also refuses to
identify itself in the historical process of the abstract death that deprives its after-life the
possibility of escape from history. As a German knee I am naturally interested, above all, in
German History: kings, peasants, flowers, trees, farms, meadows, plants. I must clear up at
once a fundamental error: that we dead are just dead. Were full of protest and energy. We
568

Adelson, Leslia, A. Contemporary Critical Consciousness: Peter Sloterdijk, Oskar

Negt/Alexander Kluge, and the New Subjectivity, German Studies Review, vol. X. n. 1.
(February 1987): 61.
569
Ibid., p. 60, 61.
293

march through history and examine it. How can we escape history? History which will kill us
all570(emphasis mine). Thus for Kluge this is the basic question that the knee must thoroughly
investigate in order to get through the German history (Diese Frage ist fr das knie in an der
Patriotin das Motiv, die deutsches Geschichte zu durchheilen und zu durschforschen).
The destructive power of history has a special place in Kluges own personal history, in
the memory of his childhood, and it is a sort of a leitmotif in almost all his literary and cinematic
works. This particular memory remains consistently traumatized as a conceptual
zusammenhang. Therefore, the imprinting of the personal autobiography in the personal archive
achieves translating this particular traumatic experience into a privileged mode of a
public/historical discourse. Thus, a critical move must be undertaken here for analyzing the
possibility of critiquing Kluges work as a tension of a dialectical sort between his work in the
public sphere and in his autobiographical project that seems to rewrite the history of his family as
the experience of the collective history. Or, in other words, whether his project is
autobiographical or historiographical? Can the autobiographical speak for itself in a text or film,
whose entire production lies in the sphere of effacing the signature of personal historiography,
i.e., auto-thanto-graphy, that effaces the self as the otherand the discourse of history? Is it
possible for the author to exist in the mode of autobiography? The mode of autobiography, in its
various contexts, is the destruction of the subject as the being of knowledge or perception.
Autobiography is a genre that is constitutive of the conditions of possibility for authors to

570

Kluge: Wie Kann Ich der Geschichte, die uns all umbringen wird, entkommen? Ulrike
Bosse, Alexander Kluge: Formen Literarisher Darstellung von Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main:
Verlag Peter Lang, 1989), 1.
294

become writings and their identity is no longer determined by them being the writers; instead the
writing establishes the priority of the reader, the other. As in de Man, autobiography is forever
marked under the sign of undecidability impossible to conclude whose life is being
writtenor read.571 The scene that follows shows the archive footage of German POWs in the
battle of Stalingrad (hence the connection, zusammenhang, between the personal and the
historical trauma). A subject matter that he deals in great detail in his fictional reportage called
Schlachtbeschreibung (The Battle). And earlier in the film, we were also introduced to a cluster
of images of German landscapes, meadows with flowers and trees, and a painting by Casper
David Friedrich, Oak in a Thaw, over a melodic piano concerto.572 The commentary begins
about Corporal Wielands knee as we see the ruins of a bombed building in a beautiful natural
landscape, an image of a violent juxtaposition of natural beauty and the destructive and ugly
remnants of war.
As a German knee, or better, as a patriotic German knee, its subject of interest coincides
with that of Gabi Teicherts: they both have a common project in German history. Through the
embodied and disembodied figures of Teichert and Wielands knee, respectively, Kluge resists
the totalization of the concepts of nature and history as autonomous, individual categories of the
different branches of philosophy and science. He rejects the attempt to define history as the

571

Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and
Proust (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 99. Autobiography as De-facement,
MLN, Vol. 94, No. 5, (December 1979): 919-930.
572
Fiedler, p. 223.
295

nature of history and nature as history of nature.573 Instead of subsuming nature within history or
vice versa, the concept of natural history must be rethought in a dialectical way which would
overcome the dichotomy of the natural and the historical from the perspective of both natural
and mathematical sciences.574 Kluge seems to follow Adorno, for whom the usual antithesis of
nature and history must be overcome in the mediation of their difference. Therefore in order to
arrive at some sort of a conclusive verification of the idea of natural history, no conclusivethat
is, (no) rigiddefinition of history or nature should be accounted for. There is yet a meeting
ground between history and nature where they can still mediate without being dissolved by the
reduction of one into the other. After all, if mediation were taken away from Kluge, i.e.,
Zussamenhang, his entire critical apparatus would fall apart.
Here I would like to reintroduce Fiedler for his perceptive analysis of Kluges Die
Patriotin. He writes, The Patriot, Gabi Teicherts seemingly random excavations may be
absurdly comic on their face, but they are also a fitting analogue of Kluges approach to his
subject. For in unearthing German history for his viewers, Klugealso working in the dark, as
it wereappears to draw at random on a disparate array of sources: paintings, landscapes, and
cityscapes, comic books, musical works, photographs, illustrations, interviews, dramatized
scenes, literary texts, proverbs. If, as a consequence, the films viewers sometimes experience
confusion, they have paradoxically gained some understanding of what is at issue. As Kluge
comments on a shot of Gabi Teichert near the films end: Most of the time Gabi Teichert is

573

See Christopher Pavsek on the antithetical relationship between history and nature in which
the latter has been forgotten. The Utopia Film, 201-202.
574
See Adorno, Idea of Natural History, Telos, no. 60 (Summer 1984): 111-124.
296

more confused than not. Thats a matter of the overall context.575 Helke Sanders comment is
also pertinent here: If one thinks that he [Kluge] is setting out to confuse his audience, this is
partly true; however, his path to clarity leads through confusion. 576
Confusion is a state, a tactical state, a state of distraction that both Benjamin and
Kracauer privileged over the sedate bourgeois model of spectatorship577 that not only represents
the characters in Kluges films and writings, but also often accompanies the audiences who, too,
are found bewildered and discombobulated after the screenings of his films. Stern reported that
Kluge and many of the others admitted that he and his colleagues had often produced Autor
films for the museum and had neglected the cinema at the corner of the street.578 Even John
OKane, whose essay, History, Performance, Counter-Cinema: A Study of Die Patriotin,579
is a bit hasty in its insistence upon analyzing Kluges filmic oeuvre from, and often within, a
postmodernist perspective, appears to accept the predicament of this rather inimical and
antithetical relationship between the mass audience and Kluges films.580 According to OKane,

575

Fiedler, p. 222.
Helke Sanders, You Cant Always Get What You Want: The Films of Alexander Kluge
New German Critique, No. 49 (Winter 1990): 61.
577
See the following essays by Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimer Essays, trans.
Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 75-86;
and Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, pp. 239-241.
578
Johnston, p. 78.
579
OKane, History, Performance, Counter-Cinema, pp. 2-17. OKane however is not alone in
suggesting Kluge as postmodernist, because many of the postmodernist tenets could be applied
to Kluge due to the application of heterogeneous materials, blurring of the genres, interweaving
of documentary and fiction , high and low art, etc. But what makes his work stand out as nonpostmodernist is the absence of the endorsement of the liberating popular culture, particularly
by the Other: women, gays, blacks, and the Third-World people. Lutz, p. 139.
580
Asked by Stuart Liebman whether he rejects the postmodernist label, Kluge replied
categorically, We are not postmodernists. I believe in the avant-garde. But that is not where the
297
576

Kluge is one of the lesser-known personalities of the New German vanguard, the audience for
his films being significantly smaller and more academic than for others.581 OKane blames
this restrictive operation of Kluges public sphere directly on the limitations of classic
cinema and its lack of historical mediation, to its incapacity for sustaining discursive modalities,
such as deep historical analysis, issues pertaining to historical materialism, etc., and thus
remaining virtually moribund in the classically ossified discourse of the immediacy of the
illusory presence of the image. Whereas OKane propounds a theory of disjunction between
theory and practice in Kluges works that leads the mass audience programmatically to
disorientationa state that nonetheless appeals greatly to Kluges utopian sensibility (and
some of his most memorable utopian characters such as Gabi Teichert in Duetschland im Herbst
(Germany in Autumn, 1977-78) and Die Patriotin and Leni Peickert in Die Artisten in der
Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos, both played by Hannelore Hoger, are wonderful illustrations of that very
kind), where the connection for the life context (Zusammenhangs Lebendigkeit) requires
reframing and reformulation according to a much deeper and also an authentic criterion for the
experience (Erfahrung) in the public sphereyet, he seems to occlude the fact that in spite of
Kluges political and pedagogical claim for the possibility of constructing the basis of the
counter-cinema in the head of the audience, Kluge has never acknowledged positively any other

distinction lies. There are two different approaches: dominating the materials and respecting the
materials. The first would take materials to realize intentions. The opposed attitudes would be to
accept the autonomy of these materials, which are living. It doesnt matter whether its done by
film, by music, or by painting. October, p. 57.
581
OKane, p. 16, n. 30.
298

form of cinema but the classical cinema of Murnau, Lang, and Griffith along with the Soviet
constructivists in his own cinematic works.
The question needs to be looked into whether this is simply a matter of reinvigorating the
old traditional form of narrativization by bringing it into contact with the new discursive forms
of the new subjectivity (Neue Subjektivitt).582 The ubiquitous phantasmagoria of archival
materials from the history of silent cinema in Kluges filmsfor instance, the scenes from D. W.
Griffiths Intolerance (1916) and Fritz Langs Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (1924) in Die
Macht der Gefhle (The Power of Emotion, 1983)does not just present these cinematic
materials in their historical context; their originality or purity is ever so tampered with or
contaminated by the mechanism of representation that borrows its techniques, such as the
frequent use of iris in and out, fast and slow motion, lap-dissolves, intertitles, etc., from the
resources of those silent films themselves. The estrangement or distanciation thus produced from
this sort of intertextual approachand here I would hasten to add that Kluges aesthetic designs
are more or less operations held within the grand syntagm of Brechts theatrical principlesis
further augmented in the representation of the scenes from these early films when they are seen
though a pair of opera glasses, thus bringing in violent juxtaposition at once the unfulfilled
wishes and desires of one form with the other.583

582

See Leslie A. Adelson, Contemporary Critical Consciousness, pp. 57-68.

Kluges films follow quite closely, what Bordwell calls, the literarization of Brechtain
dramaturgy of theater--the use of episodic structure [Die Macht der Gefhle has 26 episodes all
together], voice-over commentary, and inserted captionas a tactic for bringing out diegetic
aspect which Aristotelian conceptions of theater had effaced. David Bordwell, Narration in the
Fiction Film (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 17.
299
583

Watching the film through the mediation of opera glasses opens the historical possibility
of rupturing the narrative continuity of the classical diegesis of the pure form, and aligns Kluge
with both modernist584 and postmodernist discourse of hybridity.585 Furthermore, Kluges
historical constellation of the old and new forms of cinematic discourse prevails upon at least
one of the unfulfilled wishes of that period: to be able to talk. Later in Die Patriotin, Corporal
Wielands knee, a bizarre character indeed, will like to do nothing else but talk, talk, talk
(Reden, Reden, Reden). In the light of the historicity of the knee and its visual incongruity on the
image track, as the archival footage is clearly from the era of World War I, a time when cinema
could not speak, the desire of the image to speak for itself has nothing incomprehensible about it.
Kluges antithetical cinema finally restores the lack of voice (sound was generally present in the
form of live music at most of the screenings in the early period) by supplementing and
substituting his own ironic and witty commentary, which produces its own immanent and
contrastive associations with the image, allowing the spectators to look for connection and
meaning by activating their own imaginations and fantasies.
Speaking of stimulating the imagination of the viewer reminds us of the true nature of
Kluge as a film historian or archivist, whose job is not only to sort out things, but, also to
preserve, that which is authentic in the image. In his interview with Liebman, Kluge actually
acknowledges the place of his own authorship in the residence of his films. He proclaims that in
584

According to Kluge, Adorno was extremely angry with Jean-Marie Straub for his puritan
attitude in The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach and using Gustav Leonhardt, a purist
organ player, Adornos main enemy in Frankfurt. Liebman, p. 57.
585
Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990),
148-150. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, Race (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 128.
300

his films the entire information resides in the cut. I did not make the images. The world made
the images, or prehistory, or the dear Lord, or the performers who have a right to their own faces.
But I freely acknowledge that I have cut them together. One doesnt see the cut, but my signature
resides in it. Thats my means of expression.586 Liebmans follow up question doesnt
contradict Kluges claim that Kuleshovs famous experimental film (which Kluge misidentifies
as Pudovkins, a curious mistake for a film archivist),587 when spliced with different locales to
create the illusion of a unified place (one actor in Washington the other in Moscow) as a
mistake, which became unified as a techniqueof a narrative principle.588 That is to say
that the joining of the disparate shots in unity becomes a principle for continuity editing which
signifies as a mistake for Kluge. He suggests that the Hollywood narrative films, for instance,
like Gone with the Wind (1939), have been unified by the narrative logic of continuity, in which
the separate images do not have an authentic value by themselves (but wasnt that the lesson of
Eisenstein that individual image is a cipher?). Instead of connection between the images that
create the impression of a false unity, Kluge proposes the disunity, the lack of connection as
his brand of filmmaking. It is here that he provides the nucleus of his authorial principle to which
I was alluding. For Kluge the image has a sacred quality, a use value, an authentic existence,
that owes itself to the Kantian enlightenment, which it would be inhuman to tamper with. The
authenticity of the image, when it stands alone amongst the plethora or the garden of images as a

586

Liebman, Interview with Alexander Kluge, p. 54

In the same interview Kluge the archivist/historian gets another fact wrong when he
mistakenly suggests that Repas de bb was Lumire brothers first film. It was Workers leaving
the Factory made in March 17, 1985.
588
Liebman, p. 56.
301
587

sole entity, as a blue flower in the land of technology,589 is invested with a historicity and (use)
value which inheres in its very nature as an entity. If an image is simply created for it to serve the
larger purpose of being amalgamated in the plot then its virtue as an independent object of a
subjects fantasy is cruelly expropriated. An interesting example of the independence or
autonomy of the image occurs in The Patriot. There is a long shot of a bush, nothing in the
foreground or the background, it stands alone without another shot to give it a context: in short,
an anti-Eisensteinian montage but a pro Pudovkin (brick by brick) image. Kluges voiceover
informs us: The bush stands outside Kaliningrad in Soviet Union, 45 kilometers from the Polish
border. After a pregnant pause, the voiceover continues; Earlier this area was called
Knigsberg. That doesnt concern the bush.
Here the image of the bush reactivates the spectators imagination which would have
been dormant if the bush had become a part of a larger narrative and its status has lost its
autonomous state. Suppose the bush was trampled or eaten by a circus elephant. Its existence
would have not provoked anything in the spectators mind except a fodder for the hungry
pachyderm. But its association with the two names Knigsberg and Kaliningrad provokes a
multitude of feelings that goes as far as back 1255 when Knigsberg was founded by the
Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades. A city famous for its Albertine university with a
great intellectual center, home of people like Immanuel Kant, E.T.A Hoffman, David Hilbert,
Hannah Arendt, to name a few, who made their residence there. The shot of bush not only
signifies a historical catastrophe but also mourns for its great intellectual tradition. The historical
589

The blau blume is translated as orchid by Harry Zohn. Benjamin, The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, p. 233.
302

thread is known to all who know this history. What Kluge has achieved by his voiceover with
the bush is not only a short history lesson (unterricht) of Germanys defeat and humiliation but
also a sense of mourning that is absent in nature. Kluge talks about it: Take a tree for example. I
can shoot trees; it might be boring to watch trees in the wind for ninety minutes, or a tree over a
course of the seasons, and yet it still would be a self-contained piece of information. But then
again, I could also say: The bush near Knigsberg is unaware of the fact that Knigsberg is no
longer part of Germany and is now called Kaliningrad. This is an authentic statement that is selfcontained. It needs no further explanation since from the perspective of the bush it is of no
consequence in which country it is located. However, if the tree were growing next to a nuclear
plant or in a courtyard, then it would no longer be a self-contained object which I could present
in a single take. I would have to communicate this context by means of cut, since no image could
convey this information. In the case of the bush near Kaliningrad (Die Patriotin), I felt it was
necessary for the film as a whole to shoot this scene. This is to say that the bush existed before
the entire film; the bush and its relationship to Kaliningrad.590 The Shot of the bush contains a
historic trauma that is named by the past and the present: Knigsberg and Kaliningrad. In this
particular shot he invokes the historical trauma by making the bush as a symptom. Although the
bush existed before the trauma but now it has become the representation or symptom of that
trauma. The image is sufficient to lend the meaning and suffering of the trauma, therefore, there
is no reason to use another image to juxtapose in order to ensure the contradictory nature of the
meaning that would emerge if the bush were growing next to a nuclear plant that would have

590

Kluge, On Film and the Public Sphere, p. 219.

303

demanded the cut between those images for the rightful meaning to emerge from the association.
In this single image a fact has been registered that no longer requires any symbolic mediation of
language, because the meaning and the image are the same. It communicates itself as being-initself. This is what Kluge means by an authentic image that belongs to itself and cannot be
reduced to manipulation by instrumental logic or reason. By providing not a historical account of
the bush and its relative indifference to where it is in terms of location a certain displacement of
meaning of the place has already occurred. The bush is where it is and always be except that the
place is no longer what it used to be. I presume what Kluge referred to in his earlier film that we
are separated from yesterday not by an abyss but changed circumstances is quite applicable in
this case to the bush. What separate the bush from itself are the circumstances and not the
temporality of now and then. In other words, its own existence has not changed by any means
but the existence about it has changed.
Now I would turn back to the utopian quest of Kluge for the rewriting of German
history in a patriotic version, which not only rehearses the overall context of his political and
philosophical interventions in the history of German cinema, but also generates a thematic or
logocentric pathos, which translates as the mourning for German history and its lack of
positive identity that surmounts all his theoretical and pragmatic concerns. One of the myths of
history that Kluge finds the most challenging and counter-productive resides in the present
discourse of German history in the light of its identity with the Third Reich. A theme that can be
nonetheless observed in Kluges Deutschland im Herbst and Die Patriotin devoted to the
redemptive project of German history, a project necessitated by the writings and presence of
304

Germanys two most outstanding philosophers of the modern era: Benjamin and Adorno.
Kluges redemptive glance akin to Benjamins is turned back to the catastrophes and the
ruins of (monumental) history echoed in History is what hurts, Jamesons famous woeful
cry.591 It begins with, what Miriam Hansen calls, a blend of Benjamins backward-flying angel
and a Keatonesque clown,592 the figure of Gabi Teichert, the indomitable history teacher from
the province of Hessen, first in Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978) and
subsequently in Die Patriotin, both in response to the political circumstances of 1977 in
Germany with the slaying of the ex-Nazi and the Chairman of Mercedes Benz, Hans Richter
Schleyer; the suicide of the RAF members, Baader, Meinhof, Gudrun Esslin in Stammheim
prison; the attack on Mogadishu airport.593 Her search for unearthing positive materials for
history lessons finds itself confronted with an acrimonious relationship with the recent German
past, as it becomes an allegorical saga for the redemptive project of mourning for all of the dead
in Germany. Gabi Teicherts utopian project is to implement a more positive, a more patriotic
version of German history in the school curricula. As a history teacher from the West German
state of Hessen, Kluges voiceover informs, she empathizes with all the dead of the Reich. On
the surface, it sounds like a proper redemptive project but it has a revisionist bias to it. The
crucial absence of the Holocaust in the leftist politics of Kluges works, and also in Edgar Reitzs
Heimat, is extremely disturbing, to say the least.
591

Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 102.
592
Hansen, The Stubborn Discourse, p. 126.
593
For a comparative reading of Deutschland im Herbst and Die Patriotin, see Hansens
Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluges contributions
to Germany in Autumn, New German Critique, No. 24-25 (Fall-Winter 1981-2): 36-56.
305

Although Kluge and Negts project of German history is closer to Marx than the
production of cultural identity, which is more dear to poststructuralist and postmodernist
thinking, but I am also puzzled by at least Kluges constant evocation of the fatality of all the
Reichs dead, which includes both the murderers and their victims on the same level of
discourse. This relativism has been taken to task by some very distinguished scholars in the
field including Eric Rentschler who objects to Kluges utopian wishes for mourning all of the
Reichs dead especially in light of the crucial absence of the Holocaust from the film. According
to him, the strategy to mourn and recollect all of the Reichs dead by using Hans Eislers
composition for Night and Fog is rather troubling, because it collapses Jewish concentration
camp victims and German war dead into one, implying their common status. This is all the more
disturbing in a film that makes no further mention of the Holocaust, that withholds even a single
image of Jewish suffering in a prolonged work of mourning, suggesting that we can talk of
World War II without mourning Auschwitz.594
Caryl Flinn has also finds the requiem for the mourning of the Nazi soldiers as
redemption for a nations history rather distasteful. She writes: What does it mean to give the
right to speak to the knee of a Wehrmacht official, to have it speak it on behalf of a nations
dead. After the film was made, knees like Wielands were honored at Bitburg by conservative
real-life patriots Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl , but these frightening realities only show the
urgency of the questions. When a wound testifies, it is usually to its own repression and
victimization; it is usually not victimizing, as the military knee would surely have been. Why
594

Rentschler, Remembering Not to Forget: A Retrospective Reading of Kluges Brutality in

Stone, New German Critique, No. 49 (Winter 1990): 39.
306

didnt Kluge use a knee of a Pole killed during Germanys invasion. Or the knee of a camp
prisoner whose leg had been amputated without anesthesia?595 What Kluge lacks, as many
scholars have observed, is empathy and affect, the latter an essential category in Freudian
psychoanalysis for the labor of mourning. Speaking with concern over Kluges a-pathetic
analytical rigor,Santner writes: For all their evocations of tragedy, violence, and horror,
Kluges stories and films are in a very disturbing way lacking in affect. What remains is a
deadpan irony spoken from a place strangely dissociated from human life and emotion.596
After the release of The Patriot when people objected to Kluges effort to mourn the dead
Nazis he did not stop there. In Die Macht der Gefhle (The Power of Emotion), the theme of the
mourning for the fatherland is continued through a recitation of a Hlderlin poem by a German
army officer in Wehrmacht uniform. The actor is not identified and the poem as follows:
I do not wish to die in vain.
Yet gladly I will sacrifice myself for the fatherland.
Bleed my hearts blood for the fatherland.
The heralds bring tidings of victory
The battle is won!
Rejoice, ooh fatherland and do not count the dead.
Not one too many is fallen for you.
After the recitation of the poem, an intertitle appears: Hlderlin. Schn (Beautiful). The poem
by Hlderlin, beautiful as it is, is a grotesque parody, an unrelenting, stubborn, refusal to
acknowledge the guilt of murdering millions in the name of the glory of the fatherland. The
poem is obviously offered as mourning to all the Germanys dead, those who died for the
fatherland, and the theme of mourning for Corporal Wielands knee and the dead German
595
596

Flinn, p. 133.
Santner, p. 155.
307

soldiers in Stalingrad. Kluges patriotic spirit never once winces or budges from its great
devotion to its own dead. It would have been interesting if he had a passage from Primo Levi or a
poem by Celan. Even in Brutality in Stone, Kluge kept quoting the Auschwitz commandant
Rudloph Hss, a close friend of Hitler, but the victims of the Reich never got to say their side of
the story. Kluge is consistent in denying any sort of self-representation, through a song, or poem
or essay or a testimony, to the Jews, or other victims of the Holocaust.
The lack of mourning, the explicit absence of the Shoah in Kluges film, has led Thomas
Elsaesser to wonder: Is Kluge, then, a revanchist, a conservative nationalist masquerading as a
concerned liberal and even left-winger.?597 Elsaessers question is more rhetorical than
accusatory. It is the right question, as Elsaesser explains, that Kluge has shown concerns for
mourning that is reserved to his own (West-) German dead, especially the soldiers who died on
the Eastern front in the battle of Stalingrad. But as Elsaesser points out that for Kluge and Negt,
the Germans that they may have been thinking about are indistinguishable from being Hitlers
willing executioners as well as being the victims of Allied forces. These are the same Germans
who in the post-war era regarded themselves as victims, but were actually Nazis or fervent
supporters of Hitler. But for Kluge and Negt, they are the victims of a superior technological
force, the power that dictates from above, symbolized by America, that destroyed their
beautiful Germany down below.598 So for these authors, according to Elsaesser, Trauerarbeit

597

Elsaesser, New German Cinema and History: The Case of Alexander Kluge, p. 189.
Kluge has consistently maintained the dialectical antagonism between, what he calls, the
perspective of above and the perspective from below. I will examine this formulation in The
Patriot later in this chpter. For a highly philosophical take on this issue see Gilbert W. Meyns,
Der Himmel ber Hellas und Halberstadt: A Study of the Image of the Sky in Greek Philosophy
308
598

concentrates on those publicly forgotten dead, and those who perished inor survivedthe
aerial bombing raids, the refugee treks heading west, fleeing or expelled, ahead of the victorious
Soviet troops. Given the impasse between unacceptable anti-Semitism and self-censoring silence,
Kluge seems to say, a way must be found of also mourning this history, but it will have to take a
very special form if it is ever to become a dialogue, opening up a space of communication.
Under these circumstances, parapraxis becomes the only form of authenticity, the only kind of
speech act of troubled soul.599
Elsaesser joins Kluge in the project of redeeming the New German Cinema from its own
guilt complex for failing to represent the Holocaust. He argues that nowhere is the absence of
the consequences of the Holocaust more present than in the New German Cinema of the
1970s.600 For him Kluges work in its entiretycan be seen as an exemplary case of mourning
work (emphasis added).601 This exemplary work consists in figuring out how not to represent
the Holocaust in post-war Germany, for it has to do with completing the incomplete work of
mourning that began with the inception of the New German Cinema. All mourning works are
works of failure, as Derrida would say, for it entails as Freud suggests a certain mimetic
interiorization of the other in ones own body, incorporation and devouring of the other as an
idealized figure that one must never forsake in the memory. But in order to mourn or remember
we must make the other a part of us, but by that very act we disavow the radical alterity of the

and recent German Literature (Plato and Alexander Kluge), Ph.D. Dissertation. New York
University, January 2006.
599
Elsaesser, New German Cinema and History, p. 189.
600
Ibid., p. 184.
601
Ibid., p. 186.
309

otherness with which the work of mourning is concerned. Thus all mourning in its mimetic form
is an aporia, an impossibility of mourning, because true mourning if it must succeed must also
fail at that very moment.
It is, as Elsaesser would perhaps agree, the failure of mourning (and ironically and
allegorically its success) that leaves the sovereignty (i.e., death) of the other intact, without
cannibalizing or devouring his or her exteriority, his or her name, by which we remember and
mourn them, alone, outside, over there, in his [or her] death, outside us602 in a memory that
Hegel called Gedchtnis that I explore in the next chapter on Mira Nairs The Namesake.
Any representation of the Holocaust can only lead to promoting some basically crude
understanding of that event which is essentially incomprehensible in its uniqueness and
magnitude. Elsaesser proposes a novel and intriguing strategy to redeeming Kluges attempt to
mourn for all the Reichs dead from the perspective of a satirist who uses the Freudians theory
of mourning through an assessment of Nachtrglichkeit (deferred action) to its hilt. He suggests
that the absence of mourning for the Jews in Kluges films is paradoxically a form of
remembering, an anamnesis, through parapraxis, mimicry and repetition.603 According to him, in
Kluges workthe Holocaust is presentin the mode of Fehlleistung (performed failure), 604
also known as parapraxis in the Freudian sense.605 Elasaesser defines parapraxis as a multi-stage

602

Derrida, Memoires, p. 35.

Ibid., p. 189.
604
Ibid., p. 186.
605
The reference to parapraxis occurs in the Standard Edition of The Psychopathology of the
Everyday, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W Norton & Company, 1965), pp. 304-305 and
in On Metapsychology, vol. XIV of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed.
and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), p. 173.
310
603

processsituated somewhere between the acting out of melancholia and working through of
mourning.606 Fehlleistung, on the other hand can be defined by Fehl as failure or missing, and
leistung as performance, thus it can possess dual meanings: performance of failure and failure of
performance. He argues that the absence of the Holocaust is the presence-in-absence as in the
failure to represent the Holocaust is bound to the performance of that failure in the nature of
parapraxis, which is to say that the Holocaust has been displaced in its absence on to the other
presence of images from history that in some sense act out, bring forth the presence-inabsence.607 Such an acting out could be compared to Christos installation of wrapping of the
Reichstag with white sheets in order to make the monument invisible that only succeeded in
making it even more visible.608 Similarly the New German Cinemas overt attempt to
deliberately omit any (positive) reference to the Holocaust makes the absence even more
poignantly felt.
For Elsaesser, the presence-in absence of the Holocaust in its concealed, misprision,
and deferred status could be located in Kluges The Patriot in the scenes that deal with the battle
of Stalingrad. He writes, One would only have to substitute for the knee of soldier Wieland a
solitary shoe, a pair of glasses, a comb or a gold tooth, to get a sense of what this passage would
be like if it was this part-object, so familiar from the archive footage of the camps, that had
suddenly decided they no longer wanted to be silent. It would be both monstrous and unbearable.
But, then, if one takes a closer look at the pictures that Kluges uses in the sequence from The
606

Elsaesser, New German Cinema and History, p. 184.

Ibid., p. 188.
608
Andreas Huyssen, Monumental Seduction, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present,
ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1990), p. 196.
311
607

Patriot, one is struck by an uncanny recognition: are these not the right images but in the
wrong place. Do these prisoners of war who are looking at us, not belong to the images we
have become used to seeing from the camps or from the rounding up of ghetto inhabitants, rather
than the trek of hungry Germans, marched here into Soviet camps after the defeat at
Stalingrad?609 So Corporal Wielands knee is a displaced, a (para)practice pars-per-toto
synecdocheal substitution of the victims of the Holocaust with the German POWs because of the
uncanny similarities they evoke from another movie? Thus, these archival footages of the
Stalingrad in The Patriot can be interpreted as masquerading or performing (leistung) for the
missing (Fehl) archival footage of the Holocaust, making that absence all the more present? The
absence of the Holocaust, Elsaesser argues, is not a negative aspect of the essential nature of
Kluges work or the cumulative project of the New German Cinema, but instead in hindsight the
absence can be seen as a positive turn, because, after all, the proliferation of the Holocaust
films in the 1990s, spearheaded by Schindlers List (1993), has practically led to nothing but the
devaluation and cheapening of the event itself. Its an underhanded argument supporting the
thesis of the Holocaust as unrepresentational.
But is that the reason why the New German Cinema collectively decided not to represent
the Holocaust? Elsaesser defends this strategy by suggesting that Kluges redemption of all the
dead of Germany, who have not been allowed to be mourned, as Syberberg has blamed the Jews
for it, could only be mourned if they are truly denied the opportunity of mourning, a sort of

609

Elsaesser, New German Cinema and History, p. 188.

312

mourning [that] is in the default.610 He writes: One can mourn those who cannot be mourned
by resisting the mourning as a strategy for redemption. Through Freudian parapraxis
(Fehlleistung), through a failure to mourn, the mourning of the failure of the gigantic
construction can be accomplished. Thus Kluge as a mourner of German history is a redeemer of
its failure to achieve the complete demolition of its entire potentialities of the past by the assault
on its historic memory by the failed and deformed ambition of the destructive present. The
present has failed the past, because the past has never lived to its own present, it was never
present in its own past. What happened is something that Kluge and Negt attribute to all the dead
of Germany from the past generations who, we are told, are full of protest against the failure of
the present to realize and redeem the utopian project of the production of labor of the human
capacity that they had been working on for the last two thousand years. If they could speak they
would tell us: we did not want everything to turn out that way (so haben wir das alles nicht
gewollt).611 The mourning work takes on special and oblique forms in Kluges work,

610

Hlderlin, Mnemosyne, translation modified by Michael Hamburger, cited in Jacques

Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, Revised Edition, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler,
Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press,1989), p. 6.
611
For roughly two thousand years, humans have toiled away at a product on a site that would
later be called Germany. This product is German history. We do not mean here the succession of
battles, rules, states, and regulations. If we could interview the dead generations who produced
this historical period as to whether the results of their labor were appropriated by reality different
from the motives that produced them, and if every deceased person were to have the overview of
what each and every other deceased person did, we believe an unequivocal answer would yield
itself; it is impossible to identify oneself with the results. The answer is: We did not want
everything to turn out that way. Kluge and Negt, History and Obstinacy, p. 235.
313

according to Elsaesser, because the dead he needed to mourn are not the victims of the
Holocaust: they are the Germans themselves and their history.612
Those who actually died by their millions, and who were left alone in the absurdity and
meaninglessness towards which their lives were moving, it would seem, have lent their fate to
Kluges Germans, wearing the futility and incomprehension of their Jewish compatriots' death
like a disguise, a mask, a form of mimicry.613 Therefore, the perpetrators of the Holocaust
themselves in the end became disguised like the Jews, whose absurd and meaningless lives
mimicked the victims of their crimes. Elsaesser further clarifies his position by stating that
Kluge in his ability to simulate the monstrous put himself in its place. But if we bear in mind
the strategy of disavowing the disavowal, in order to reveal the possibility of redemption, then
Kluges mimetic impulse becomes a step on the path to empathy, mimicking the other in order
to protect the other from himself.614 By bringing forth the biographies of the petit bourgeois:
factory workers, farm-hands, smallholders, traders, accountants - bureaucrats, in short, the
class that flourished during the war and since then, Kluge is mockingly bringing a mourning for
those who were the victims of this parasitic class. This in sum is Elsaessers argument based on
the paradox of mourning: mourning in absentia. Thus, the space of mourning has to be kept
empty, or rather filled with absence. This means that mourning cannot be subsumed or filled
in a particular historical time. In its openness mourning remains open to both the past and future,
what Elsaesser calls, to a timeless time. In this concept of mourning the presence of the

612

Elsaesser Melancholy and Mimicry: Alexander Kluges Enigmas. Trafic, p. 89.

Ibid.
614
Ibid.
314
613

mourning is dissimulated into a form of mourning that takes the form of all the other past
mournings that did not take place, remained absent from the collective history due to the lack of
positivity associated with those memories, and they must also be redeemed if the mourning work
is to be effective. In order to mourn the dead of 1945 and tragic fate of the Germans from the
Eastern front, the nation must organize its labor of mourning to include them with others. By
systematically abusing the petty bourgeoisie, by abusing and showing the failures of this class,
what Elsaesser calls Hitlers willing executioners,615 Kluge is fulfilling the utopian task of the
murderous revenge that never lifted itself out of the concentrationary walls. Its silent murmur is
the fulfillment of a promise. The Reichs dead become the occupiers of the absent murdered
Jews in this highly unequal exchange.
But the question is not whether the lower middle-class Nazis should be held accountable
and thereby punished in a fiction, which some will argue is the ultimate form of history. Thats
the internal business that the Germans did not work through and thus remains an unfinished task,
but the silence in Kluge, Reitz and Syberberg about the Holocaust cant be redeemed by
analogies to ventriloquism or satire. By punishing and humiliating the petty bourgeoisie, Kluge
is somehow performing a therapeutic mourning does not pass the muster; for Elsaesser himself is
not sure as he more than once remarks that he is not making this up.616 The German peoples
need and their inability (Fehlleistungen) to mourn in order to recover from their psychological
impasse to come to terms with reality cannot be assuaged by building Holocaust monuments in
Berlin and elsewhere. Elsaessers provides an alternative insight into why the Holocaust cannot
615
616

The Title of Daniel Jonah Goldhagens famous book on the Holocaust.

Elsaesser, p. 188.
315

be representedand the monument mania only makes it even more invisible, as Robert Musil
has already observed at the turn of the last century.617 It is because of the negative symbiosis
that exits as a deadlock between the ordinary Germans and the Jews in their specular
relationship in both politics and film. But one should not only be concerned with the
psychoanalytical model of mourning, but also with the ethical dimension of mourning, a point
that is repeatedly made by Santner in Stranded Objects. True mourning takes place only through
the trace of the other at the finitude of memory. The responsibility that comes before the other is
not fulfilled by simulating the self as the other, or through self-flagellation, and certainly not
through recourse to sadistic irony (which in Kluge by any means not restricted to the petty
bourgeoisie alone). I dont think anyone really cares how Kluge humiliates a Nazi accountant or
a shopkeeper who profited from the war and the suffering of the other? The formal questions of
historical representations of the past have already acquired a historical form in the discourse of
Historikerstreit (Historians debate in the 1980s). History has, in that sense, become the arena of
battle between the forces of post-histoire and Vergangenheitsbewltigung. While the latter sees an
abyss (an end of history) that separates it from the Nazi period, the former finds the National
Socialism as an aberration, the crisis of capital, the loss of reason.

617

The most striking feature of monuments is that you dont notice them. There is nothing in
the world as invisible as monuments. Doubtless they have been erected to be seeneven to
attract attention. Like a drop of water on an oilskin, attention runs down without stopping for a
monument. Robert Musil, Denkmale, Nachlass su Lebzeiten (Zurich, 1936), pp. 87-93,
translated and cited in Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female
Form (Oakland: University of California Press, 2001), p. 21. See also Derrida on forgetfulness
and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument. Archive Fever, p. 12.
316

One cannot hope to ethically muster much in a climate where the debates center upon the
question of special status of the Holocaust in the twentieth century! The question that Germans
must ask themselves is not that why are they incapable of mourning the Holocaust without
resurrecting their own dead, but do they have the right, or, for that matter, do we have the right?
Do we have a right to mourn the dead to whom we owe a debt? Kluge has pondered this
question nonetheless as he mourned his friend Heiner Mllers death on his television program
by calling it Ich Schulde der welt einen toten (I owe the world one of the dead).618 What is this
subjectivity that Kluge often reiterates if not this terrible solitude between the self and the other,
between the living and the dead? The voices of the dead Reich have many stories to tell, and each
voice must re-tell its story (Geschichte), as if for the first time, for this story cannot be represented,
because it has not, yet, been presented. Its story as many stories told by many voices of the dead
Reich, in either Kluges or Syberbergs works (and I am uncomfortable to put them in the same
bracket), to re-place the status of official historiography, to re-address the apologetic tendencies in
German history, despite its noble claims to think anew as to how to even begin thinking about its
own history designed in the framework of absolute horror.
The New German Cinema had one singular project that unconsciously organized the
diverse talents of the post-war directors, some of them, like Kluge, Reitz, Schamoni, Syberberg,
grew up as teens or preteens during Hitlers regime, to erase the thorny presence of the
Holocaust amidst its history through a disavowal of their fathers generations historical legacy.
They, especially Kluge, also wanted to restore the right to mourn, whose inability was, according

618

See Elsaesser, New German Cinema and History, p. 190.

317

to Mitscherlichs, located in the German consciousness of their parents generation to separate

themselves from their beloved objectthe Fhrer.619 One of the ideological projects of the New
German Cinema was to rewrite history in a manner that foregrounded the subjectivity of a new
generation as a form of rejection of the objective history that has come to define Germany as a
monstrous nation. The anger of this new generation was not only concentrated against their
fathers and mothers, Hitlers willing executioners, or the Murderers are among us,620 but
against the imperialist power of American cultural domination. The Holocaust was not a trauma
for Germany. The Germans were not traumatized by the Holocaust, and if they were they would
have tried to stop it, but there is very little evidence of that. If there were resistance, then they
were mostly directed against Hitler or the Nazi Party, and there have been numerous films on
that subject matter including the recent Hollywood blockbuster of Bryan Singers Valkyrie
(2008), starring Tom Cruise as Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the German Army
officer who unsuccessfully tried to blow up Hitler toward the end of World War II.621 Then there
were the so-called Werwolfs, (the association with the Thirty Years Wars should not be missed
here) the juvenile terrorists, whose execution by the Allied firing squad is the subject of deep
mourning in Kluges The Patriot. Kluge shows the real archival footage of the execution in
spring 1945 (one of the victims is recognized as Captain Kurt Bruhns from Bad Kissinger who

619

Alexander Mitscherlich and Margareta Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of

Collective Behavior, trans. Beverly R. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1984).
620
Murders are among us (Die Mrder sind unter uns) is a film directed by Wolfgang Staudte in
1946
621
There was a controversy about shooting the film at the Bendler Block in Berlin, where
Stauffenberg was executed in July 1944, due to Tom Cruises religious affiliation with
scientology.
318

gave the order for execution of two American POWs) is depicted in a great length with
excruciating details as eight of these Werwolfs are lined up and shot one by one by the firing
squad. Kluge adds sound of the gunfire and elegiac music to the original silent footage to
enhance the impact of these gruesome executions on the viewers. (No such image the of Jewish
victims of Nazi atrocity can be found in any of his films, not even in Brutality in Stone, where he
chose to read from Hitlers close associate Rudolph Hsss diary of the quotidian details of
transportation of the Jews to the Concentration Camps. As if the associations of the words evoke
greater revulsion than the images in Resnaiss Night and Fog? By not showing the images of
Shoah, is Kluge, then, already fulfilling Claude Lanzmanns future obligation? Since Hitlers
name Adolf is etymologically related to Noble Wolf, and Hitler used the word Wolf as
pseudonym for himself on many occasions, and his World War II Eastern Headquarters were
known as Wolfeschanze (Wolfs Lair), could we then assume that Kluge is using the association
of the execution of the Werwolfs as a wishful utopian desire for Hitlers execution (as in the case
of Mussolini, for there is an iris shot of him in the film that comes before the honeymoon shot of
the Nazi officer Fred Tacke and his wife, Hildegard, ne Gartner, in front of the mirror in a hotel
room in Rome) that was prevented due to his suicide? For Kluge, Germany is a victim nation,
not only because of Hitler, but a victim of a great historical injustice, the humiliation of a country
at the hands of the Americans starting from the World War I. Germanys victimization can be
traced not only with the Napoleonic march in the early nineteenth century through Germany but
its continuation with the treaty of Versailles, which was, in Kluges valorized metaphor, dictated
from the above. The true patriotic nature of the theme of mourning is intimately related to the
319

identity of Germany (Deutschland) as a nation which appears in the last scene of the film as a
word in capital white letters on a dark screen before it fades out.
The fundamental aspect of any discourse that is related to the question of Germany as a
nation is necessarily tied to the politics of identity. The discourse of German history is therefore
intertwined with the question of identity. Kluges film, The Patriot, is a supreme example of the
impossibility to differentiate between national identity and its history. For him the search for a
German identity is intimately linked with the search for a German history.622 Both the
archaeological and cinematic metaphors of excavations in his film lend their weight to such
assumptions. Literarily, it seems, Kluge wishes to dig up the German identity from the stratified
layers of history, that he associates with the wishes and fantasies of a people, the utopia which is
sustained by mistakes of a peoples capacity to reorganize their subjective desires (subjectivitat ).
He wishes to join the quest for a national identity with the historical question, because in doing so
he replaces the current identity of Germany from its immediate relation to the past, to Nazism, and
brings the question of identity into a broader perspective of historical discourse. The identity of
German history with its past is too painful and highly destructive from a certain nationalistic
perspective. Klugs voiceover mournfully tells the audience in Die Patriotin: Es ist namlich
Schwer, deutsche Geschichte in eine Patriotsche Fassung zu bringen (It is awfully difficult to
bring the German history in a patriotic context). Kluges project is to correct the mistakes of
history, bring it back to the analytic and critical method of Western (ir)rationalism from its wayward
ways. Not only the German history stepped totally out of line by falling in line in the Nazi era, and
622

Anton Kaes in From Hitler to Heimat has rather aptly named the title of chapter on Alexander
Kluge as In Search of Germany.
320

it is hardly coincidence that the goose step of the Nazi march is particularly singled out for
criticism in The Patriot for not bending the knees (but they rather must bend),623 as we see Nazi
soldiers marching and saluting Hitler in a military parade, but it also side-stepped the boundaries,
the horizons, of German identity. Kluge argues that if we want to change the history then we must
do it according to the necessity of a political future.
For Kluge, both history and identity are the twin faces of a single coin. In order to rescue
history from its murky fall we must also fashion a new identity which would not be embarrassed of
its earlier fall. Identification with ones own identity, suggests Kluge, is the starting point
(Anknupfungspunkt) for the formation of the future. Are these oppositional frameworks: Geschichte
und identitt? The lack of internal necessity which constitutes the proper being has also been
characterized as internal misery. The ambiguity of the presence and the absence of the self from
what actually constitutes an identity proper, the discovery that what it considers its own internal
being, is, in fact, determined by external, outside categories. Two factors dogged the predicament
of what eventually is associated with the question of German identity, and they always accompany
it: anxiety and internal misery. The lack of an internal political unity of Germany as a nation
indicates the presence of an outside can be read specifically in reference to The Patriot. This
internal misery as the dilemma of inside and outside constitutes Kluges most productive polarity
and it remains stubbornly present in the cold exteriority of FRG and its persecutory practices from
which Anita G. is constantly running, in Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl), to seek internal
623

During the goose step sequence we hear Kluges voiceover: Witches tales! And what will
be said about the knees? The reference to the knee is important because it serves as a dialectical
concept. It joins, connects, the lower half of, the leg, down below, with the upper half of the leg,
the part above.
321

warmth (she is cold even in the summer as she testified to the judge after stealing her co-workers
cardigan) that she ultimately receives, ironically, from within the secure walls of a prison.624 PartTime Work of a Domestic Slave is a virtual testament to this social polarization of the conflict
between Inside it is warm, outside it is cold, which also defines historically the division
between Germany, as a landlocked country, from the maritime adventure of the Mediterranean
countries, like Greece, that I spoke before.
Kluges programmatic strategy of reorganizing the discourse around the question of
German history and national identity, both of which are, he claims, essentially one and the same, is
based on assumptions that present history is a failed enterprise. Gabi Teicherts search for history is
similar to her search for Germany, thats how Kluge settles the history between the stretches of
strangeness (fremd) and familiarity (vertraut) in the end of the film: Je naher man ein Wort
ansieht, desto ferner sieht es zuruk. Deutschland.625 Kluge puts this sentence, in the published
version of Die Patriotin/Texte distinctly in negative print on a dark screen and thus differentiates the
printing of this sentence from the rest of the sentences for the first time by printing it in small print
form at the end of the seventh capital called Merchenwelt, in which the working of the collective

624

This focus on women as thieves that began with Anita G. is a recurring phenomenon in
Kluges films. Gertie Kahlmann, the buxom worker, is a thief who has to surrender her body to
the security chief Ferdinand in Die Starke Ferdinand (Strongman Ferdinand, 1976). Ferdinand
also finds another thieving worker whom he coerces to give him her urine sample that he can
palm of his own to pass the heath test in order to keep his job. The strongman Ferdinandwhy
he is called the strongman we dont knowis never punished for his sexual exploitation or for
his strong-hand tactics in the film. He does get arrested because he tried to assassinate a visiting
dignitary. In his defense, he says that the shot was a job application for him to be become the
security chief of the firm.
625
The phrase belongs to Karl Kraus. Kluge added the word, Deutschland. Die Patriotin, p.
129/165.
322

experience of the German people is thematically processed. That brings him back once more in the
twelfth episode (abschnitt) in the image (Bild), in the 130th sequence; and these situations will also
be blended by him as an insert in the film. The insert appears in the film through the movement
(aus der Bewegung)626 of entire series/row of stereotypes, the ones that strongly represent
Deutschland: a Christmas tree stands allegedly for the typical German spirit, old houses and
street-lamps speak of the German joviality (Gemtlichkeit), churches bear witness to devotion and
thoughtfulness; a higher cathedral refers us back to the middle ages, thats how mostly the focus
on the national feelings (Nationalgefhls) of Rhein in the 19th century was seen. The last section of
the 9th Symphony of Beethoventhe Lied an die Freude is the acoustic accompaniment
(begleitet) of the images of the Deutschlandsuggests underlining the images once again. The
reader/audience must hold it fast in his hand the shining/appearing (scheint) of Deutschland that
Gabi Teichert so laboriously seeks, till Kluge counterposes these sure feelings (sichere Gefhl)
through his insert: Je naher man ein Wort ansieht, desto ferner sieht es zuruck, Deutschland.
The metaphor is taken literally; the closer the Gegenstand (object, theme , topic, subject matter) gets
with the help of a telescope, all the more distant the perspective of reversal (umgekehrten) of the
oculars. For the contemplation (Betrachtung) of Germany means that consternation, amazement,
surprise, (Befremden) and Fern (distance, remoteness), originated (ensteht) in that sense, that one
so closely contemplates as supposedly familiar and close, is also not accepted as selfunderstandingly evident, but rather objectively explored (Erforschendes objektiviert). Gabi
Teichert seeks that in Die Patriotin, but also in the metaphor for the difficulty (Schwierigkeit), the

626

Die Patriotin, p. 164.

323

complex reality of how to represent the German history in proximity, and also the literary or the
filmic form, in which the German history would be represented, must not for its object fix its stare
on the stars, rather it must ever return in a new form; it returns and is explored in different periods,
must it give itself to Suche (Search).627
Hence, two kinds of approaches could be taken to intervene in the discourse of German
national cinema, a project of the New German Cinema to construct and revise the national identity
of German history. One approach establishes the politics from the outsidea politics open to
constituting the German identity by re-locating itself in the global international contextusing the
discourse of German culture having continuity with its heritage, language and culture. A
nationalistic discourse founded on objectives of reclaiming and revising the question of German
identity in the global contextposing the problem of zero stundeagainst the clean slate of history
that begins after 1945what John Davidson has examined in the light of Deleuze and Guattari,
taking their formulation of minority discourse against the dominant and hegemonic discourse of
Western cinema/Hollywood films and presenting the case of New German Cinema as a minority
discourse in the struggle for creating a national identity that finds continuities in the discontinuous.
Second approach, which is also built upon the discourse of national identity, is examined
from within, from the inside. For keeping the agenda in its dialectical mode, the revision of German
history from the perspective of its repressed origins, that of fairy and folk tales, this is a construction
of history from within the promises of a mythological order. The fairy tales in Kluge constitutes the
utopian wishes and desires of a community that finds its expression in this allegorical form. The

627

Kluge, Die Patriotin Texte/Bilder, p.129.

324

question of the void of German identity is reflected upon its traditional form, its narrative surfaces
are explored from the play of history and story. From within the inside one fashions a new sense
of identity of a history by releasing the potential that is always present in any disrupted energy,
cathexes, latent in the sufferings of fairy tales. What lies in these fairy tales is all that energy of
protest that has been repressed by the institutions of representation and publication that stole its
independence, its relationship to the actual experience of the people.
VI. The Utopian Archive and Fairy Tales
If utopia is the place inscribed in the future that has always been present in the past, then
that inscription already has a place in the archive. Because without the future there is no archive,
for what will be the purpose to stock all those documents in its domicile? Since utopia is
determined by its promise or pledge to the future, to escape from the vicinity of the unlivable
present, and also because of its absence in here and now, its future like the archive is awaited
without apprehension.628 Kluges obsession with typographyas illustrated in his nine and half
hour film that instead of recreating Eisensteins Marx, which incidentally is less about Marx and
more about Joyce, a connection for one who is primarily concerned with connection is virtually
lost and remains unacknowledged, reconstructed in the fashion of his literary tome, Geschichte
und Eigensinnis the closest one would come to his archival commitment for the future of his
cinematic document. It ultimately establishes his project as a collective endeavor of producing an
archive of German cinema, which is identical to his nation building project. Kluges
628

For a most illuminating analysis of utopia, see Ernst Bloch, A Philosophy of the Future, trans.
John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), pp. 86-97. See also Blochs The Utopian
Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988).
325

archivization involves the aggressive death drive, forever striving to destroy the existing pattern
of structures that construct the psychic and mental framework of the German history. It wants to
reestablish the foundation of Germany without the altercation of the present disaster that is
dissembling the cumulative labor of German historical project started two thousand years ago.
The Nazi derailed German history by pushing the history of the Jews in the forefront. If they had
not embarked on a murderous escapade of historical punitive measure against the Jews and had
left them to stew in historical and social oblivion, the German history might have a redemptive
conclusion. But Kluge cannot say it for it cannot be articulated after the Holocaustal events.
Although Novalis is not cited, whose statement I have already quoted aboveWith time
history must become a fairy tale, it becomes once again what it was at the beginningbut
Kluge and Negt, took that statement with utmost urgency. They devoted a whole section (printed
on black page with white ink) of Geschichte und Eigensinn differentiating the Mediterranean
mythology of seafaring heroes (imperialist adventurers) from the history of German (landlocked,
feudalistic) fairy tales in Grimm Brothers Collection. Kluge also includes a large section of Die
Patriotin tracing the history of the fairy tales in the public sphere. Gabi Teicherts search for
Germany exceeds the limits of Erlebnis, the everyday reality of Bundus Republik, is not limited
to the postwar Adenaeur era, and plunges into the orbit of Erfahrung (as a form of timetravelling in the space of the public sphere). In discussing the term public sphere, Kluge has
actually always defined it in oppositional terms. By this he means a type of public sphere that is
changing and expanding, increasing the possibilities for a public articulation of experience. In
order to accomplish the task Kluge says we must very resolutely take a stance regarding the

326

right to intimacy, to private ownership of experience.629 In the light of Derridas later work on
the Archive, can we find some affinity in Kluges preceding remark that public sphere is a space
of private and intimate fantasy and wishes. Although such affinity cannot be directly found in
Derrida but the impulse for the utopian dimension of the archive does find some remote murmur
or echo that links him to Kluge in a more paradigmatic fashion then it has been noted before.
Derrida emphatically, in fact, he reiterates, that we should not condemn the archive to merely a
representation or question of the past. The concept of the archive is primarily turned
towards the future, to the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise
and of a responsibility for tomorrow (emphasis added).630 The meaning of the archive, like the
utopian promise, will be revealed only in the time to come. Kluges utopian characters, Leni
Peickert and Betty-Knautsh, know that the promise of utopia gets better the longer we wait.
Similarly the opening of the archive for the messianic does not entail messianism, as Derrida
clarifies, but it defers both the meaning and action to a possibility of the future for which its
gates will never be closed. The archive waits for the future, the promise of the future, with a
glimmering hope for the past to re-enter its portal as an invited guest and not as a prisoner in
Resnais/Markers Tout la mmoire du monde.631 Kluges invitation to the variety of items (old

629

Alexander Kluge, On Film and the Public Sphere, p. 211.

Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 36.
631
Noel Burch describes Resnaiss portrayal of the Bibliothque nationale thus: Finally, having
got past all the barriers separating the prisoners from the outside world, we reach the cellblocks: the stacks, with the long dark aisles filled by the echoing footsteps of invisible guards.
Four Recent French Documentaries, Film Quarterly 13, no. 1 (Fall 1959): 59. Cited in Naomi
Green, Alain Resnais: The Ghosts of History, Landscapes of Loss, p. 42.
Naomi Green.
327
630

films, photographs, maps, drawings, etc.), the cinematic scraps632 littering his films, critical
and literary writings, like Sebalds, which he collects from the past in their dislocated fragments
are re-membered, relocated, rehabilitated in the futuristic dimension of his archival fiction. They
are not necessarily are always narratively motivated.
In Derrida the institutional function of the archive determines the role of the authorial
displacement of the documents from their personal possession into the public domain where the
access is limited by copy right stipulations. The personal becomes public, the subjective turns
into an objective signification. The archive renders the document a historical signification that is
imposed by the structures of codification and serialization which provides it with relational
context in a broader division arbitrary imposed by a system that strips the autonomy of the
document as a production of an intentional labor. Derrida is taking a point of view in which we
can contrast the institutional and normative constitution of the public sphere belonging to the
archival axis, arguing for a less institutional or archival status of the public sphere, like
Habermass critique of the bourgeois public sphere, with which Kluge and Negt will perhaps not
completely disagree. The discourse of the archival status of the public sphere is most vividly
illustrated in Die Patriotin in the scene in which a former high-ranking Hessian school official,
Herr Heckel, who collects fairy tales as a hobby, provides analytical judgement from a
jurisprudence point of view.
The fairy tales session begins with a painting of Napoleons army marching in
Germany. Next painting we see Napoleon on a horse with other officers. Followed by a

632

Lutz, p. 151.
328

drawing of the image Napoleon projected on wall by a slide projector as children are
watching. Kluges voiceover, If this emperor were still ruling, Hessens history at least, so
says Gabi Teichert, would have been different. Another shot a painting of tents and army
with horses in snow. Kluges voiceover: During the emperors reign, Jacob and Wilhelm
Grimm dug intensively into German history. They dug and found fairy tales. The
commentary carries over the shots of archaeologists with spades. Their content: how a
people dealt with their wishes over 800 years. They dug and dug and studied the fairy
tales. 633 Kluges voiceover once again: One of the women who told fairy tales. Brother
and Sister. The voiceover is accompanied by the images of a painting of an old woman and
painting of a boy and girl under a tree. Little brother in the lake so deep, how my heart
weeps. The cook already whets his knife. The end of Kluges voiceover. Then we abruptly
cut to a close-up of Heckel: All my life I've loved reading fairy tales, not in a very orderly
or systematic way, but simply taking each tale point by point. I read them aloud with my
wife and then dictate an analysis to her which she records in short hand. We've done about
30 concise analyses from a legal point of view. I want to collect this material. Cat and
Mouse in Partnership. Verdict. Story of a swindler, or better: the cheating of t he mouse by
the cat with a deadly result. The Wolf and the Seven little kids? The earlier part is read by
Heckels wife, but the latter part is explained by Heckel: Thats a story of a mass murder
with a curiously happy ending. A fairytale full of legal points is Table Set Yourself. Its
overflowing with legalities. What about the witchs estate in Hansel and Gretel?, asks
633

For a detailed analysis of fairy tales in Grimm Brothers, see Kluge and Negt, History and
Obstinacy, pp. 279-295.
329

Kluge off-screen, a style that will continue later with his television interviews. Heckel: The
witch made no will. Kluge: May the children claim the gold, silver and jewels? Heckel:
Obviously the estate is not theirs, but belongs to the witch family. If she has none, its the
states. Now Gabi Teichert asks him, The Poor Boy in the Grave? No! Says Heckel,
what a horrible title! They are folklore or legends! No...Teicher says. Kluges voiceover
tells us, Hans Heckel, former chief of Hessens school supervisory board. What did your
job entail at the Culture Ministry? Heckel: Coordinating the sub-departments. Heckel:
When you ask about Sleeping Beauty and the 12th fairy thats an area thats legally beyond
grasp, because it concerns things above and beyond the law. The 12th fairy wishes for
Sleeping Beauty to prick her finger on a spindle and die, or at least seem to be dead. Then
the 13th fairy comes and saves the day. Fairy tales usually have happy endings. She wishes
Sleeping Beauty doesnt die forever, but that after hundred years she is saved by a prince
who braved a thorny forest. You can see the 12th fairy as a murderer in the legal sense. Not
exactly a cold-blooded killer, but almost. She tries to kill with evil desires, but it doesnt
work. Kluge: And the 13th? Hackel: She undoes the evil. In The 7 Ravens the king
and the queen finally have a daughter after seven sons and many years. And they are so
happy that the father decides to kill the seven sons so his kingdom will go to his daughter.
Its all told in the style of Biedermier or late Baroque. The parents are so insanely happy to
have their longed-for daughter that out of pure joy they kill their own seven children.
Kluge: And the legal interpretation? Hackel: Legally its nothing. The father has patria

330

potestas, and as king and absolute ruler he can kill his children unpunished. Isn't that
obvious?634
The scene ends with an abrupt cut to a pre-World War I map showing Verdun (the
site of a fantastic massacre of history) 635 and the voiceover comments: Fairy tales have a
historical core. And that tells of great disaster. According to Kaes, the mont age between
the fairy tale and the map of Verdun forces viewers to make connection between the king
who gets all his seven children killed for the love of his daughter and Kaiser who sent
hundreds of thousands of his sons to die in the battle there. The montage establishes a
constellation whose critical potential sheds new light on the circumstances of domination
and the power over life and death in fairy tales as well as history. 636 The shot is followed
by a montage of a black and white painting of old model airplanes in the sky. It could
possibly be interpreted in two ways: either this shot represents a perspective from above,
associated with power and technology, or, it represents the airborne souls of the dead
soldiers. The shot is violently juxtaposed with blooming flowers down below on the earth,

634

Kluge, Die Patriotin, pp. 123-126. For Miriam Hansen, Heckels rendering of the wellknown fairy tales in legal terms is not only hilarious but also creates an estrangement effect,
suggesting that these familiar texts could just as well be read from a historical point of
view (emphasis added). The Stubborn Discourse: History and Story-Telling in the Films
of Alexander Kluge, Der Schrifft an der Wand: Alexander Kluge: Rohstoffe und
Materialien, ed. Christian Schulte (Hg.) (Osnabrck: Universittsverlag Rasch, 2000), p.
126.
635
OKane, p. 15.
636
Kaes, p. 124.
331

the perspective from below. The fairy tales, Kaes reminds us, are history written from
belowanonymous, ubiquitous, full of excessive, often hidden subversive energy. 637
In Kluges works, the numerous references to folk tales and fairy tales are a reminder of the
potential or latent protest that continues to underline the basic structure and form of these
tales. As a pre-capitalist and feudal cultural form, these tales have their historical origins, in
Kluge/Negts political idiom, in the proletarian public sphere of class struggle. 638 By
adapting the folk tales into the bourgeois literary form of fairy tales, the bourgeois and
aristocratic writers of 17 th and 18th centuries basically compromised the utopian impulse of
these tales. By relocating the historical origins of the folk and fairy tales in politics and
class struggle, the essence of its durability and vitality will become more clear, and its
magic will be seen as part of humankinds own imaginative and rational drive to create new
worlds that allow for total development of human qualities. 639 These utopian tendencies
can be viewed in Corporal Wielands fragmented knee and Zirkuss proprietress fate.
One of the most memorable lines in the film is spoken by Kluge in his gentle and soothing
voice: Anybody who laughs at the fairy tales has never suffered (Wer ber die Mrchen
637

Kaes, p. 124.
According Miriam Hansen, the term proletarian public sphere for Kluge and Negt,
transcends it empirical reference point, not to mention the political scope of the traditional labor
movement. Furthermore, in a subsequent footnote she refers to the last sentence of
Negt/Kluges ffentlichkeit und Erfahrung (n, 3, p. 486; Public Sphere and Experience, n.3, p.
297) , which, according to her illuminates their use of the term proletarian as oscillating
between literal-historical and metaphorical-utopian meanings: Proletarian public sphere is the
name of the socially collective process of production the object of which is the redemption of the
integrity of the human senses [sinnlichkeit]. Oakar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Early Silent
Cinema: Whose Public Sphere, New German Critique, no. 29 (Spring/Summer 1983): n. 22, p.
157.
639
Zipes, p. 118-119.
332
638

lacht, war nie in Not). 640 The origin of this sentence could be located in Ernst Blochs
interpretation of fairy tales, who presented the fairy tales not only as an embodiment of
utopian resistance against real oppression of peasant life but also against the strictures of
instrumental rationalization. 641 In a conversation with Adorno, Bloch says, The fairy tale
is not only filled with social utopia, in other words, with the utopia of the better life and
justice, but it is also filled with technical utopia, most of all in the Oriental fairy tales. 642
He goes on to compare the magic wooden horse in the Arabian Nights with the modern day
invention of the helicopter. But, for the moment, let us stay and meditate for a moment on
Kluges sentence. What does Kluge mean by equating fairy tale, which is equivalent to folk
tales, the narrative of the collective, or the collective narrative, the public sphere, with the
idea of suffering? Where is the common ground between them? The enigmatic and haunting
nuances of this sentence is perhaps nowhere so brilliantly articulated and demystified as in
Jack Zipess Marxist analysis of the fairy tales.
Drawing sustenance from the works of Vladimir Propp, who was probably the first,
in the 1920s, to recognize the morphological pattern and structure of the fairy tales, Zipes
provides an illuminating interpretation of the history of archiving of the fairy tales by the
Grimm Brothers in 1812 in Hessen as the beginning of the dispossession and disinheritance

640

Kluge, Die Patriotin Texte/Bilder 1-6 (Frankfurt am Main, Zweitausendeins, 1979), p. 129.
Jack Zipes, The Instrumentation of Fantasy, Breaking the Magic spell: Radical Theories of
Folk and Fairy Tales ((Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2002), p. 137.
642
Ernst Bloch, Somethings Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W.
Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature,
trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1988), p.
5.
333
641

of the collective memory of the community, the community of storytellers. 643 The process of
collection and recording became a means of systematic appropriation of the realm of
memory into the archive of remembering which is, as Plato taught us, simultaneously also
the realm of forgetting. 644 Zipes claims that by collecting the folk tales of the people, the
Grimm Brothers also at the same time consigned the place of the tales away from the
experiential realm of the people into a body of book, a statistical datafrom surplus to
mere remainder, from substance to aggregatethat sealed their fate once and all as history.
The people have been robbed twice. First they are disinherited of their identity as the
authors or producers of their own (hi)story by a systematic and ruthless campaign of collecting,
cataloguing and archiving, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth century reached an
unprecedented height. As a result, the peasants and the lower middle-class people found
themselves to be not only dispossessed of their actual and symbolic experiences by the bourgeois
authors, who collected and rewrote their authentic experiences in a language that further
removed it from any real historical context. The recording and rewriting of the folk tales were
accomplished, however, in a medium of (written) language that disregarded the materials
authenticity (i.e., the oral tradition) in the first place. The early nineteenth century folk tales

643

Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Politics and the Fairy Tale, New German Critique, no. 6.
(Fall 1966): 116-135.
644
Plato, The Phaedrus, 274c-275b, Vol. 9, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1925). Ricoeur also tells us that the Archive serves the dual purpose or
meaning of the pharmakon as both a cure and a poison in Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 168.
See also Derrida who claims in Archive Fever that there is nothing in the condition of
archivization which does not a priori induce forgetfulness. P. 12.
334

collectors, like the Grimm Brothers in Hessen,645 felt that the content of these folk tales
unsuitable and rather incorrigible, and, therefore, substituted their own rational prejudices as
amendments to the actual meaning of the tales. Folk tales became fairy tales, removed from the
content of experience; they became, all of a sudden, a world of supernatural elements divorced
from the world of here and now. Thus the people were not only disinherited from their historical
identity as producers and custodians of their memory/history, but, incredulously they were once
again robbed of their authorship to their own experience, because their history was now being
produced by a consortium or cartel of bourgeois authors. Hence, we have a case of double
whammy: first they were robbed of their essence and subsequently their names as authors were
also stolen from them.
Therefore, it is a case of a degree of double dispossession of right of authorship. By
translating the folk tales (Volksmrchen) into fairy tales, the bourgeois writers achieved a double
displacement of the authorial category from the actual people whose lives were connected by the
symbolic and allegorical form of historical memory, i.e., the folk tales, and simultaneously these
bourgeois writers also wrote themselves in as the real authors of these peoples own stories,
albeit in a very distorted form, given the socio-historical context in which this political act of
appropriation of memory into atrophied form of history was realized. It took place at the height
of the enlightenment period. As the disciplines of anthropology and ethnology expanded their
dimensions, the study of fairy tales in its psychological, sociological, and philological aspects

645

Hessen is also the place where the legislative authority decided to exclude history from the
school curriculum and a site for Gabi Teicherts interventions.
335

became all the more desirable for understanding the secret and the repressed contents of the
unconsciousness of the social mechanism.
During the nineteenth century, a period of intense appropriation of folk tales by
bourgeois authors, the folk tale no longer behooves to the community of its own production
relations, especially to the oral traditions, a tradition that emphasized the role of storyteller more
than the consciousness of the listener, the moment these tales acquired the industrial and
commercial packaging of literary production. Zipes, in his Marxist analysis of the politics of
fairy tale, describes this intensive appropriation of the folk tales by the literary and commercial
production of fairy tales as the obliteration of their real historical and social basis and to
abandon oneself to a wondrous realm where class conflict does not exist and where harmony
reign supreme.646
On the other hand, there were other bourgeois writers, such as Wieland ( Der goldene
Spiegel, 1772), Musus (Volksmrchen der Deutschen, 1782-86), and Mozart, (Die
Zauberflte, 1702), as Zipes reminds us, who saw the folk tale as a part of a national
heritage which had to be recovered if a native German art of high quality were to be
developed. 647 From the Sturm und Drang, from Herder to Novalis and Schlegel, to the
entire German Romantic tradition culminating in the stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann, the
bourgeois writers of that period borrowed and drew heavily from the folk tales and
committed themselves to forge a sense of unity among the German people. 648 The

646

Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Politics and the Fairy Tale, p. 116.
Ibid., p. 121.
648
Ibid., 122..
336
647

Romantics, by the end of 1790s, were involved in a more sustained effort by radically
utilizing the folk tradition in a heavily symbolical literature to critique the restraints and
hypocrisy of bourgeois codes which were gradually being instituted in public spheres of
interest. 649
One can locate the intensity of this particular feeling which Kluge aims at the bourgeois
public sphere in terms of its opposition against a system that is increasingly being dominated by
bureaucratic and industrialized market economy. The intensity of feeling and the work of
imagination and fantasy have always been seen as utopian features in Kluges work. Its power,
die Macht, lies in its imaginative elements, in precisely those elements that have the minoritarian
aspects, and it is those utopian impulses and qualities of the folk art that the bourgeois public
sphere goes on dismissing as nonsensical, irrational, and trivial.650 It gradually starts to make
sense why Kluge relentlessly champions the underprivileged sensorial organs, for example, such
as the olfactory sense against the regime of sight, the panopticon, from the Greek word panoptes,
for all-seeing, which is central to Foucaults thesis in Discipline and Punish.651 The
institutionalization and bureaucratization of the bourgeois code became the ground for resistance
for the writers who invested in the emancipatory potential of these tales and in the process also
managed to revolutionize the entire genre. But, on the other hand, the growing standardization
and mechanization of the entertainment industry, that is, the consciousness-industry was rapidly
transforming the habitus of the spectator-reception nexus. The folk tales (volksmrchen) were
649

Ibid.
Ibid.
651
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1979).
337
650

transformed into Kunstmrchen (fairy tales), a term Zipes claims to have been invented in the
nineteenth century, which further relegated the status of the folk tales to a lower strata while
perverting the original intentions of the formers subversive and utopian impulses directed
against the oppressors. Kluges strategy to appeal to the authentic revolutionary form, the folk
and fairy tales of a pre-capitalist period, should be seen in the light of his critical philosophys
main objectives for creating an alternative or counter public sphere in opposition to the tradition
of metahistorical narrative represented by George Lukcs and the entire tradition of German
Idealism. By calling it a product of irrationalism, Lukcs and the others misinterpreted the
entire history of the romantics and their reassessment of the folk tradition in their writings as a
literature of flight and fancy in the German tradition.652 The prejudice of Marxist enlightenment
persists in all its forms as we glean through Zipess analyses of the politics of fairy tales. But
without the aid of a Marxian framework, it would be hard to produce a worthy critique of the
bourgeois literary production of the fairy tales from a socio-historical perspective.
The originary moment of the fairy tales is constituted by the sufferings of concrete
historical moments, much less by the ahistorical dure, that separate us from the past not by an
abyss but by, what Kluge calls, a changed circumstance. In other words, what changes between
the relation of the present and the past is not the chronology of the logocentric narrative, a linear
and teleological progression, an anti-archivist stance from Foucaults point of view,653 but what
really separate us from the past is the circumstances, the changing of the constellation, the

652

Zipes, p. 134.
The archive is not inscribed in an unbroken linearity. Foucault, The Archaeology of
Knowledge, p. 129.
338
653

realignment of the astronomical signs that Benjamin attributed to the power of mimesis.654 The
true historical identity of the fairy tales is constitutive of a collective memory absorbed in its
mode of production, translation and interpretation.
The appropriation of the peoples memory by an archive fever, the machinery
responsible for the care of its documentary heritage, was, on the one hand, dedicated to the
principle of accessibility of archives to the public, but, on the other hand, it is also a sign of
enlightenment philosophy, which not only revised, stylized and improvised the contents and
forms of these folk tales for universal applicability, but also hidden behind these impulses to
provide authentic folk tales were a commercial logic of universal applicability. This forced
abdication of the realm of memory, from its intimate and collective persona to the public domain
of universal history, is the great reminder of the historical injustice and the cultural genocide
committed against volkgeschichte, the community of storytellers.
Fredric Jameson, On Negt and Kluge, states that In fairy tales, which are not merely
the repository of peasant utopian wishes (those who dont believe in fairy tales were never in
distress)655 but also preserve the most characteristic collective experiences of danger or menace,
along with the age-old solutions devised to ward them off. In Germany, fairy tales are thus a
collective testimony equivalent to, but significantly different from, the myths and sea-based epic
654

In On the Mimetic Faculty, Benjamin alludes to astrology, the alignment of the stars in their
constellation first as a reference point to an understanding of the concept of non-sensuous
similarity. Reflections, p. 334. Mimesis is the remembrance of language, whose origin is best
represented by the constellations of stars. The non-sensuous similarity between mimesis and
language is, for Benjamin, inscribed in the constellations of stars, from which the human
language itself is an evolution, since the first reading itself is a mimesis of the arrangements of
the stars.
655
Kluge and Negt, Geschichte und Eigensinn, p.619, n. 48.
339

legends of the Mediterranean classical world, to which it is instructive to compare them. 656 He
juxtaposes Kluge and Negts analyses of fairy tales in Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and
Obstinacy) with the contemporary studies of the literature of modern imperialismalso
essentially a literature of adventure, found especially in the work of Edward Said on Kim657 and
others. The literature of colonial adventures of the classical world of the Homeric myths thus
provides a testimony for the activities, the skills, strengths and capacities celebrated, preserved
and transmitted by the Greek storiesthose well-known virtues of shrewdness and cunning,
resourcefulness and wiliness, of which Odysseus is the prototypeare the professional attributes
of a world of commerce and trade, of merchant ruse and imperial diplomacyshipboard
attributes, augmented by ultimate recourse to the sea, to sailborne flight or the return, at night,
with muffled oars.658 But these characteristics of the Mediterranean epic are quite different from
the land-locked mythologies of the folk tales in German peasantry. For a peasantry, however,
such narratives are problematic and unserviceable: unlike the great ships, house, farmyard, and
field cannot evade their dangers.659 The last quotation from Kluge and Negt also appears in The
Patriot. For Kluge and Negt, the seafaring proto-bourgeois entrepreneurs like Jason and the
Argonauts, Odysseus, etc., who represent a world of commerce and trade, pose a real external
threat to the mode of production and experience of the land-based peasantry. Throughout
Homers Greek stories, it is, however, possible to imagine an alternative, an inversion, a point of

656

Jameson, On Negt and Kluge, p. 165.

Edward Said, Introduction, Kim (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), pp. 7-46.
658
Jameson, p. 165.
659
Kluge and Negt, Geschichte und Eigensinn, p. 715; History and Obstinacy, p. 297. Jameson,
p. 165.
340
657

view, perhaps another perspective, to the imperialist adventures of their protagonists, in which
the struggle of the Other, the indigenous population, is attributed to nationalistic and patriotic
movements against the invaders from outside. From a purely political and economic perspective,
these threats from the outside are aimed at the wholesale liquidation of the indigenous and the
local economic structures tied to agriculture and communal system, in other words, to
primitive accumulation, with a view to replacing them with the new forms of market economy
and exchange. A radical assessment to this violence from without, from the outside, is
presented in the form of a protest of those unrealized potentials, of the political and sensuous
axioms of interiority required for necessary defensive mechanism, in the following analyses by
Kluge and Negt of this particular German fairy tale, The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.
What the enemy is is no longer clear. It requires a very different sort of defensive mechanism
symbolizing the violence of commerce, threatening to rupturing and opening the inside of
the German interioritymost poignantly analyzed in Kluges film, Gelegenheitsarbeit einer
Sklavin (Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, 1973), the dichotomy of Inside is warm and
outside is cold.
History as a fairy tale660 is one of the major preoccupations of Kluge and Negt in both
Geschichte und Eigensinn and in Kluges The Patriot. It is formulated by the inside and outside
dichotomy, a distinction crucial to understanding both the ontogenetic and phylogenetic
make up of Germany as a nation. Negt suggests that the German imaginary, in both its myth and
its literature, has always been preoccupied with the distinction between inside and outside. It

660

Zipes, The Instrumentalization of Fantasy, Breaking the Magic Spell, p. 104.

341

seems that the other national imaginaries do not exhibit the same obsession with this boundary.
The loss and control over the relations between inner and outer, between inner world of the
house and of the family, on the other hand, and society, political institutions, and the state, on the
other: has this been especially pronounced in German history down to the present day? I do not
know, but it is astonishing how many stories, plays, tragedies, and novels have taken this
imbalance between inner and outer as their subject matter. The territories and kingdoms that
engage with the inner world of the subjectwith the noumenon, the intelligible, the space of
pure purpose and freedomhave had an immense scope in German literature.661 Further: The
world of German fairy tales is full of themes that circle around the broken connection between
inner and outer, between revolution and obstinacy. Again and again people have pointed out that
we live in a country that occasionally lapses into a phase of political depression whenever those
who have power in this world use excessive force to retaliate against the obstinacy of the
populace and the public audacity of its claim to political participation.662
The obsession to keep the two apart, as Negt has already clarified for us above, in
order to ward off the danger or menace, the outside threat to the safety and security of the
inside, is of paramount interest for Germany. According to Kluge and Negt, The W olf and
the Seven Young Kids best describes the specific dilemma connected to the defensive
production of security, the confirmation of the world, and interiority and exteriority, that is,
the basic theme of German Enlightenment. 663 Both Negt and Kluge, according Devin Fore,

661

Negt, Die faust-Karriere, pp. 48-49. Cited in History in Obstinacy, p. 448, n. 26.
Ibid., p. 157.
663
Kluge and Negt, History and Obstinacy, p. 280.
342
662

emphasize the importance the story places on the ability to differentiate between an
intimate who can be trusted and an intruder who must be kept out. The questions raised by
this tale are ultimately of an epistemological nature: On what basis can we recognize a
threat from without? What belongs properly to the self and what is foreign? Further: Where
is the line that divides the subject from object? For Negt and Kluge, the complex and artful
epistemology of German fairy tales exercises our Unterschiedungsvermrgen, the faculty of
critical distinction between self and the other, between human and thing, which has
dissolved into sprawling and diffuse actor networks. At the historical transition when capital
has shifted its locus to targets within human subject, our capacity to distinguish between
inside and outside has become increasingly important, if not vital to our very survival.
These tales are the instruments of thoughts for our age. 664
The story is also specifically connected to German history. Kluge and Negt find in
this fairy tale a correspondence, a prophetic connection (Zusammenhang)a structure that
Novalis inscribed to fairy tales in general 665between Hitler and the figure of the Wolf. I
have demonstrated elsewhere in the chapter the correspondence between the word Adolf and
wolf, and Hitlers predilection for using Wolf as a pseudonym on many occasions, both
Kluge and Negt take this association as well to comment on the meaning of this particular
fairy tale. They write in History and Obstinacy: If we applyContinental myths about the

664

Devin Fore, Introduction, History and Obstinacy, pp. 21-22.

The genuine fairy tale must be at the same time a prophetic portrayalideal portrayal
absolutely necessary portrayal. The genuine fairy tale writer is the seer of the future. Novalis,
Werke und Briefe, ed. Alfred Kelletat (Munich: Winkler, 1962), p. 506. Cited in Zipes, The
Instrumentalization of Fantasy, Breaking the Magic Spell, p. 105.
343
665

labor of securing ones home, it is no longer surprising why the kids have difficulties
differentiating between what they should definitely allow inside and what they should keep
outside, whatever happens. The fact also comes into view that on account of the specific
relations of German History, it was initially difficult to determine whom Germans let in with
Hitler (emphasis in original). 666 In their interpretation of fairy tale as history, Hitler is the
Wolf and the Germans are the children who were deceived by the Wolfs deceptive tactics
of successfully impersonating the mother with flour pelted paws and a voice sweetened by
chalky falsetto. 667 According to Elsaesser, Their interpretation culminates in the
conclusion that, with this fairy tale in mind, it was indeed difficult for Germans to know if
with Hitler, they let in the wolf who would eat them up, or the Motherwho would fill their
starving bellies. 668
In order to figure out how to avoid Adolf, the Wolf, it would require a certain stage
of production in the evolution of the capacity of differentiation. But can we let this
statement just go under the radar without any critical scrutiny? Their interpretati on implies
that the Germans were tricked or deceived by Hitler when his National Socialist Party came
into power in 1933. The other point that could be contested as well is that Hitler was not an
outsider. He fought for Germany and almost died in World War I and was awarded a medal
of honor for his heroics. So he did not come from another world like Jason or Odysseus who

666

Kluge and Negt, History and Obstinacy, p. 282

The theme of Hitler duping Germans is also explored in Kluges short story E. Schincke.
Case Histories: Stories by Alexander Kluge, trans. Leila Vennewitz (new York: Holmes &
Meier, 1988), p. 41.
668
Elsaesser, Melancholy. Trafic, p. 81.
344
667

tricked the indigenous population with cunning; instead, he was a very successful
politician admired by the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpen proletariat, and the nationalist rightwingers. His party platform was organized around the popular myth, the stab in the back
legend (Dolchstosslegend), perpetrated by no less than the Field Marshall and later the
Chancellor Hindenburg and General Ludendorff, who blamed the subversive elements at
home, including pacifists, socialists, Communists, liberals and the Jews, as traitors. Hitlers
political career began as early as in 1920 and by 1922 he boasted to have 40,000 members in
his National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeitpartei, called the NSDAP or Nazi Party). At a time when a single bread roll cost
20,000,00 Marks and a quart of Milk was selling for 300,000,00 Marks, Hitlers fiery
oratory for a revolution and a complete political dictatorship sounded attractive to many
Germans. From the Beer Hall Putsch on November 8, 1923, one can systematically trace
Hitlers Nazi Partys rise and eventual takeover of the Reichstag in 1933 through strong armed political machinations. 669 Therefore, this idea that Hitler was the Wolf who deceived
and devoured the German people is a myth, a revision of history. Moreover, what comes
after this analogy between history and the fairy tale is their characterization of Hitler that i s
perhaps even more problematic. Here is what they write about Hitler/Wolf: The man
privately called himself Wolf, but actually was Adolf. He kissed womens hands, issued
criminal commands, was a vegetarian, cared for both a chicken in every pot and equa lity,
eliminated an entire people in the cruelest of ways, and brought about unity (emphasis
669

See Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., Why Hitler? The Genesis of the Nazi Reich (Westport,
Connecticut: Praeger, 1996).
345

added). 670 The above sentence contains a direct reference to the Holocaust: eliminated an
entire people in the cruelest of ways. The sentence possesses many antithetical elements.
On the one hand, Hitler possessed good and commendable qualities (which obviously were
not extended to the Jews and others); he showed courtesy and respect to women; he was a
vegetarian; he was a true socialist believing in equality and unity amongst the German
people; but, unfortunately, he was also a criminal and a mass murderer. This is a
trivialization of both history and the fairy tales. There were more than tell -tale signs of
whom the Germans were letting in, and there was also sizable opposition against him.
Hitlers rise to power was not a historical accident or deception, but a right -wing coalition
to drive the socialists and the Communists out of political power from the Weimar Republic.
In the next paragraph, Negt and Kluge mention Hitlers last will and testament where
they register his only regret that being shackled to appeasement he couldnt take action
from the bottom to the top. Otherwise the oppressed people in the Arabic world would
have been on his side in order to secure the final victory over plutocracy. I will be brief in
my comments. Hitlers relationship with the Arab nations was a marriage of convenience
fostered by shared hostilities toward the common enemies, Zionism, British Colonialism,
French Imperialism, and Communism. Hitlers popularity among the Arabs wasnt
universal; many progressive and leftist organizations influenced by Western Enlightenment
theories were opposed to him. Both Fascism and Nazism had a broad appeal among the
Arab population, but the political alliance between Hitler and the Arab nations should be
670

Kluge and Negt, History and Obstinacy, p. 282.

346

seen in the bigger picture of anti-colonial struggle for national independence against
European colonialism. Not only Hitler exploited the Muslim anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist,
sentiment in that region but made it even more incendiary by his policy of active
deportation of the Jews from Europe to Palestine from 1933 to 1939, a policy that was never
made clear to the Arab leaders. Britain had earlier allowed limited number of visas for
immigration to Palestine. Hitler admired Islam, even considered Indians as descendants of
Aryans, but he also believed Muslims to be an inferior Semitic race and hoped to rule over
them one day. Therefore, the status of the statement from Hitlers testament that if it were
not for appeasement he would have liberated the Arab people from plutocracy needs
further clarification than what we receive from Kluge and Negt. Their reading of The Wolf
and the Seven Little Kids thus, perhaps, amounts to a wishful fairy tale, which we have
learnt from them is a lesson in suffering that history bestows to us.
Elsaesser points out that Eigensinnstands in Kluge for the way the popular
imagination works through historical trauma and memorizes its lessons, deriving from them
the peculiar obstinacy and persistence, which continues beyond death, and for this very reason,
can emerge as the suitably cautious hope that there might be a future after the death of 1945
which can give meaning even to the deaths that have preceded it.671 Jameson, on the other hand,
suggests that despite history lessons of the fairy tales well-learned in Negt and Kluge, there
can still be mixed consequences. For instance, Sleeping Beauty, incorporates the hopes and
wishes of a collective German history that has been put under the magic spell of an evil

671

Elsaesser, Melancholy. Trafic, p. 81.

347

thirteenth witch, who was excluded from the feast.672 It is not the stupidity or the mistake of
the people that they have patiently waited for a thousand years to be awakened by a magic kiss.
Even if the prince Charming looked like Bismarck, Hindenburg, Hitler, or Adenauer, who turned
out be false a hundred times over, it does not necessarily disenfranchise the peoples urgent
need to give objective expression to the ongoing immemorial desire for the wish-fulfillment.673
It is the eigensinn, stubbornness, obstinacy, not of history, but of fantasy and wish-fulfillment
that haunts the nature of our next fairy tale, The Willful Child (Das eigensinnige Kind), that
Kluge and Negt analyze in detail in their book, History and Obstinacy. The fairy tale is also
reproduced with illustrations in Die Patriotin. It is the shortest and one of the most reprehensible
tales in Grimm Brothers anthology about a young obstinate boy (das kind) who was
continuously disobedient to his mother. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him
and let him make sick. The doctors could not cure him. He eventually died and was buried in
the grave. But no sooner they buried him that his little arm reached out from the grave. Every
time the hand was pushed back it would stubbornly pop out. Eventually the mother had to go the
grave and smack the little hand it with a rod. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and
then, for the first time the child had peace beneath the earth. The visuals that accompany this
story are as follows: A painting of a mother and child in snow, followed by a painting of birds
gathering over his grave. As we hear the words and yet every night he buried, his hand reached
out of the grave, we see the famous painting Winter Landscape by Casper David Friedrich.

672

Revenge, too, is a stubborn motive that persists even after death as demonstrated in the Park
Chan-wooks Oldboy (2003).
673
Cited in Jameson, p. 167.
348

The next shot is another painting of crosses with people in a graveyard. This scene mourns the
Eigensinn of the spirit of German Romantics by paying homage to Brothers Grimm and Casper
David Friedrich, and later in the last scene of the film Beethovens Ninth Symphony would be
celebrated with a dedication to the hopes of viewing Germany (Deutschland) once again in a
patriotic veneer.
Kluge has repeatedly inscribed the rationale of the resisting hand as a sign of eigensinn,
self-will, stubbornness, obstinacy, autonomy (the various English translation of the German
word) and compared it to the rebellious eigensinn, obstinacy, of Antigone for insisting on the
burial of her brothers against Creons law.674 Kluge and Negt use the Greek Antigone myth in a
form of a political rebuke675 to the agrarian Grimm tale for limiting the potential of eigensinn
to merely the shame of obstinacy and thereby failing to develop the ethical and political
consciousness of the eigensinn that Hegel attributed to her death as a mark of tragedy in the
Phenomenology of Spirit.676 Elsaessers reading of the stubborn girl elevates her to the female
revolutionary martyr figures of Antigone, Ulrike Meinhof, and Gudrun Ensslin. She becomes a
reincarnation of Kluges other self-willed, restless female heroines like Anita G, Leni Peickert,
Gabi Teichert, Inge, Rita, Knautsch-Betty, etc., who are hyper-active and full of life-plans.
Restlessly driven by the urge to be at work on something, hatching designs, using their ingenuity,
their vitality, they are possessed by a relentless motor-sensory apparatus, which always seems to
674

The figure of Antigone plays a significant part in Kluges omnibus film Deutschland im
Herbst in relation to the burial of the RAF terrorists in Stuttgart state cemetery which was
opposed by the State, but ultimately allowed by Rommels grandson, who was the mayor of the
city.
675
Jameson, p. 170.
676
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 284.
349

be set to the level of emergency, their self-steering mechanisms driven by such mottos as I
must try even harder' or I shall make the extra effort.677
But we should not forget that the Eigensinn that persists even after death is remarkably
repugnant in this fairy tale in which both God and the mother appear to be equally detestable. In
one of his television programs, Kluges guest was the renowned Austrian filmmaker Michael
Haneke who was invited to read and discuss the short fairy tale with Kluge. After the reading the
following conversation was recorded:
Kluge: It is a central European tale about self-will. The child was wilful. That means that
even in death self-will wont go away. First someone must intervene, a person of
reference, or what would you call her? After all, the mother isn't evil.
Haneke: The child isnt evil either. On the contrary.
Kluge: Rest is no bad thing. Death is merciful here, it saves me from having to fight
back all the time.
Haneke: Yeah, you could say it like that, or you might say that Death in this case assists
repression. Look at this nice phrase. Or rather not nice, more horrible. Reads: For that
reason God had no pleasure in her and let her become ill. And no doctor could do her any
good. And in short time she lay on her deathbed. Thats pretty heavy stuff.
Kluge: Not a benevolent God.
Haneke: No, not really.678
One can probably discern from the above conversation that Kluge had misinterpreted
the story. In his zeal to interpret the story according to his political and ideological reading
of the text as self-will (Eigensinn), his privileged trope to describe the innate working of
instinctual/bio-evolutionary capacity against the instrumental reason, he is blinded to the
issue of authority and repression and also to cruelty, horrible cruelty against a childs
677

Elsaesser, Melancholy. The phrase does not appear in the French translation of the article in
Trafic.
678
The above appears on the collaborative project between Cornell University, Princeton
University and Bremmen University to put Kluges digital work on a website.
https://kluge.library.cornell.edu/films/history-obstinacy/film/2195
350

stubborn behavior. For Kluge the young girls (the gender of the child, das kind, shifts from
a boy in the book to a girl in the television show) hand that the mother so cruelly chops off
does not make the latter an evil person (although in print Kluge and Negt acknowledge the
mothers brutality) because she is a mother. And a mother cannot be evil to her child in
Kluges world. Haneke, on the other hand, immediately perceives that Kluge is exploiting
the story and providing an ideological misreading to prove his political philosophy. Haneke
interrupts Kluge by saying: On the contrary, this is a horrible (schrecklich) story about
repression, about an unmerciful god and an awful mother, both figures of pure authority,
punishing the child with death. But what he does not comment upon is the last act of the
mother to take a switch and chop of the childs hand sticking out of the grave as a mark of
protest against the crime. Could this act be also interpreted as an act to erasing the evidence
of her crime? By chopping off the hand she has effectively destroyed the evidence of her
crime. Both Haneke and Kluge fail to see this last act as an act of the destruction of the
incriminating evidence. In all probability, the mother had deliberately killed her child, and
thus she is evil, despite what Kluge says, through poisoning (or other means) and then
after she went to the grave and destroyed the evidenceto which the hand pointed out
which the exhumation of the body might have yielded to the authorities, as Herr Heckel
might have also thought given his interest in the judicial angle of the fairy tales. Another
possible reading is that The Willful Child is a self-portrait of Kluge himself. He is both
the mother and the child. After all it was his great labor and pain that gave birth to the New
German Cinema of which he became the stubborn, obstinate willful child. It was he who
351

wouldnt submit to any authority, even after his symbolic death, his departure from the
scene. His obstinate and stubborn hand still kept protesting the death of his cinema in the
form of his television programs that keep resurrecting his films in a defiant gesture as the
childs hand. Since he is both the mother and the child he is unwilling to cut the defiant,
obstinate gesture of his hand from protruding in not only in obstinate but also as obscene
gesture as in giving a finger.
Der Tod der lachen musste: Wie man ein monsterum los wird und sein kind zurck
bekommt (The Death had to laugh: How to get rid of a monster and get your child back). This
is a rather quaint and weird fairy tale which also appeared on Kluges program as a part of
History and Obstinacy. Its a about a child who has been exchanged by a monster child by elves.
The mother goes to neighbor for an advise as to how to get her child back. The neighbor advises
her to boil eggshells and that would make the monster child laugh which will bring her child
back. The idea is that the laughter will break the magic spell and reality will be restored. And the
tale proves the restorative power of the laughter and cooperation that changes a monstrous
situation into an acceptable and normal situation.
In Die Macht der Gefhle, the power of cooperationwhich sounds anachronistic to the
laws of dialectics in which opposition plays a crucial role for synthesis through the reconciliation
or neutralization of thesis and antithesis, of nature and historyis brought to a fruition that has
curiously combined the utopian elements of both mythology and fairy tales. The scene, titled
Ein Verbrechen (A Crime), takes place almost at the end of the film. Here is the gist of the
story: Manfred Schmidt is in love with Mxchen (without a surname), a shop manager. Schmidt
352

comes from a good family (gutem Hause) and dreams of a better life. Mxchen follows his
wishes and joins in his murderous plan. Schmidt kills a Yugoslavian diamond merchant,
Allewisch, steal his merchandise and the couple flee to Barcelona to avoid being apprehended by
the law. Knautsch-Betty, ex-prostitute, and her lover, Kurt Schleich, a fur thief, (who has paid
for Bettys freedom from her pimps) discover the body in their apartment where Schmidt had
killed the Yugoslav. The next section of the story is called Abbau Eines Verbrechens durch
Kooperation (Reversal of a crime through Cooperation). Schleich and Betty wrap the body in a
carpet and put in the trunk of a car and bring it to a cabin in the wood. The two tend after the
body by giving treatment and alternatively reading to it from catalogues and various books and
play classical music from Verdi. These acts of kind mercy and cooperation bring the dead man
back to life. They cover him in furs and put him back in the trunk and drive him across the
Eastern border to Yugoslavia. The moral of the story: Reversal of fortune through cooperation.
In the meanwhile in Barcelona, Schmidt and Mxchen live trapped in a in a narrow room (2 x
3.80m) not bigger than a prison cell, with their stolen diamonds in a state of constant panic and
despair. They constantly fight and physically abuse each other out of sheer frustration. The act
that was supposed to bring them happiness and success has the opposite result. They are free to
be in their own prison. The moral of the story: Reversal of fortune because of evil deed.
Analysis: Can we conclude from the action of those two, who after killing the Yugoslavian
merchant flee to Spain, as characters embellished with flaw, imbued with moral or intellectual
weakness? But in any case, the life of freedom which they espoused so passionately is only
attained in the prison of their own recluse. They hide in a small room in Spain. The freedom they
353

exchanged for those diamonds resulted in a bargain proved to be more repressive and twisted
than their undetected crime, which undone by someone else unbeknownst to them. Their
criminal act does not accord them with freedom, because they are afraid to sell the diamonds in
the market.
The action of the ex-murders is reversed by the action of the fur thief. We are dealing
with a situation that Aristotle has defined as peripeteia or reversal,679 which should not be
confused with the exchange of fortune. Through the power of cooperation the fur thief and the
ex-prostitute, Knautsch-Betty resurrect the dead (reviving a secular Marxist Lazarus myth);
while the fortune of the couple, who thought that they had killed the Yugoslav merchant, suffers
in self-exile. The change or reversal (peripeteia) occurs after the dead body is found and later
with the effort of cooperation brought back to life, as if the greed of someone else is the
redemption of someone elses misfortune.680 The meta-basis here refers to change from good
fortune to bad, as in the case of the couple hiding in Barcelona, but, on the other hand, reversal
means that a situation that seems or is intended to develop in a certain direction suddenly
develops in the reverse direction, as here in the case of the resurrection of the dead man. The
ignorance of the redemption of the crime that someone has or has not done something turns the
knowledge into a bond of hate for the couple in Barcelona, whereas the reversal of the crime,
with the assistance of the thief and the prostitute, turns the knowledge (of whether someone has
or has not done something, i.e., both killed and not killed) into a bond of love. By tracing
679

Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater; Modern Library College Editions, New York, 1984.
1452a.
680
The redemption here lacks theological connotation and is better served as redemption of a
coupon or receipt in a pawn shop, etc., a point that Andrew Bowie has made.
354

Aristotles exposition of plot and action in a tragedy that evokes pity and fear through this
recognition or reversal, it brings us, instead, to another level altogether, where the situation
through recognition has transformed itself closer to comedy, in which no one kills anybody. In
that sense a possible tragedy is avoided. Thus tragedy does not come to fulfil its proper function.
The good man does not suffer, and hence a change from prosperity to misfortune is clearly not
established, at least, in the case of thief-prostitute duo. Whereas the misfortune of the alleged
killers does not pass into prosperity, but stays with them like nothing has happened except that
their situation has worsen. They, through wickedness and vice, fall into misfortune, only because
their plan was mediated through a flaw. There is a doubling of the plot. Not a good story indeed,
Aristotle would say. The change of fortune is not destined to individual fates, rather, it is
premeditated by chances that enhance the possibility of reversal, and yet what ultimately pays is
ones own relentless pursuing of the impossible as opposed to direct catharsis.
VII. Kluge and Foucaults Archive
How does one accept Kluges claim that in order to mourn Germanys past he must
include all of her dead, including the Nazis? Is it possible to isolate this proposition from the
other contexts which emerge as soon as the proposition of the mourning of all of Germanys
dead is raised? Can it be deemed to be a neutral statement or a deliberately provoking one? Let
us describe the enunciative field in Foucaults own words: The statement is not the direct
projection on the plane of language (langage) of a particular situation or a group of

355

representations.681 Two propositions come out of reading Foucault: 1) In Kluges films the
subject of the proposition is neutral, as in his use of illustrations in his films which hold the
interior and the exterior boundaries of his montage, the zusammenhangthat it is an
accumulation of words that have no referent outside themselves; and 2) irrespective of Kluges
claim that cinema is an associational medium a priori located in the experience or head of the
people that is almost ten thousand years old, the associations are firmly grounded in themselves
and are as such not available to others. But the context of these associated forms is
inseparable from the proposition.682 Which is to say that Kluges highly subjectivized
objective imagesof illustrations, photographs, even found musicare also highly singular
in their nature and character, and, in addition, they comprise the signatorial or auteuriel function
of Kluges mark as a filmmaker, as an autor,683 who is inseparable from the proposition. Kluge
tries to blur the boundaries of difference in the context of a proposition. For instance, in Die
Patriotin, a physicist explains an axiomatic principle of a mathematical natureat 317 Kelvin
matter comes to a standstillmost at rest. The enunciative function of this address is related
to the collateral space of another enunciative field, that is, to the establishing the relationship
between history and abstraction, between experience (Erfahrung) and the law. Kluge poses the
experimental with the experiential.684

681

Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A.
M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972), p. 99.
682
Ibid., p. 96.
683
The concept of author puts the maximum difficulty in applying some of Foucaults
structuralist philosophy to Kluge, although there are some areas of Foucaults philosophy that
work very-well in Kluges own philosophy that I am attempting to explore in this chapter.
684
Foucault, p. 98.
356

Corporal Wielands knees address must also be understood from a perspective of

enunciative function, which is determined by its objective presence as a historical a priori. The
enunciative function of the knee determines a priori not only what is said but also what it
speaks of, its theme, Deutschland, of German history as catastrophe and restoration of the
fatherland.685 These are Kluges grand narrativethe question of history and national identity.686
The minoritarian narrative consists of those esoteric scenarios and illustrations that hold the
moving episodes between themthe standstill of time occurs in Kluge with the intertitles,
illustrations, found objects, photographs, etc.
The archive in Foucault does not constitute the library of all libraries, and it also cannot
be described in its totality as something outside of itself. Instead the archive is first the law of
what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.687 In
other words, the archive constitutes the space of discursive statements that are issued depend at
the very outset on the conditions of the operation of enunciative function. It defines a field in
which formal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemical
interchanges may be deployed.688 Now lets apply these Foucauldian a priori constitutive
elements of the archive to Kluges discursive corpus. Let us try the first principle of formal
identities of the archival principle. The actual materialization of a cinematic textfor example,
Die Macht der Gefhle or Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die brige Zeit (The Assault of the

685

Foucault, p. 90.
Here I disagree with both Kaes and Davidson on the lack of grand narrative in Kluge, but I
agree with Davidsons minoritarian discourse in Kluge.
687
Foucault, p. 129.
688
Foucault, p. 127
357
686

Present on the Rest of Time)is not necessarily the films visual representations of those ideas,
but the material book is in fact a cinematic text. The materialist composition of his films: they
are filled with excursus, commentaries, illustrations and typographyall these material
evidence are part of the composition of the Kluge and Negts book, Geschichte und Eigensinn,
as Jameson noted. The actual material of the book10 X 11, 5lbs, 1249 pagesis the most
telling example of the context of the book. The footnotes and appendices, as Jameson
characterizes Kluges writings, can well apply to his films.689
The story of Anita G. was first published in Case Histories before it was translated into
Abschied von Gestern. Simultaneously with the film appeared the book Die Patriotin. In the
Foreword of his book Kluge explained the relationship between the book and the film: One
must not expect (erwarfen) that this book directly deals with the film Die Patriotin. It is a printed
testimony/evidence (Drucker zeugnis), an absolutely another product. The book is not a fresh
film. That is the weakness. In order to make the art of the book into film, it would take 600 hours
of film. That is the strength.690 Furthermore, he differentiated the book from the film by
referring to the theme of the book (Kooperation) and outlined it in a few words that ironically
stretched out to 478 pages. He suggested that the text and the printed images in the book are not
identical in the film. The film shows the images in color and in motion. The optical charm,
that comes out of the film images, is also amply strong, than those (often bad) black and white
reproductions in the book. The film texts were interpreted through mimicry (Mimik) and gesture

689

Jameson, On Negt and Kluge, p.151.

Ulrike Bosse, Alexander Kluge: Formen Literarischen Darstellung von Geschichte (Frankfurt
am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 249-250. Translation mine.
358
690

(Gestik) of the figures; they acquire through voice and diction (Stimme und Sprechweise) the
commentators a specific color (Frbung). The suggestive action (Wirkung), the images and texts
of the film pursue (ausben) the spectators, is above all stronger than reading of the book. On the
other hand, the film provides the spectator through its rhythmic movement
(Bewegungsrhythmus), through the bound temporality, linear succession of the images and Tne
a reception, that only under the loss of perception (Wahrnehmungsverlusten) can be broken
through/pierced (durch brochen): a spectator can reflect longer on an image as he sees it on the
screen (Leinwand), than, for instance, a sound or textual matter that he hears from the next scene.
The book moved itself away from the film, to the inside, with which I was occupied at that
moment. That is my motive. It is but also the genre of the film, porous as it is, to go over to that
which is outside of it.691 In other words, we are once more moving back into Kluges
predominant analogy or theme of the inside and outside. With the book, the spectator tends to
move inside, has to reach for the texts and illustrations. For Kluge, it has a personal meaning of
reaching inside himself at the time when the book was written and published. With the film, as
Kluge claims, the movement tends to be outside whose reception work (Rezeptionsarbeit) in the
spectator cannot be neglected while he sits motionless in the theater. A book, on the one hand,
does not allow the movement inside but it can be moved and read while moving as in walking
from one room to another, from one place to another.
Foucaults second propositional condition of the archive in its discursive form is the
thematic continuities. The frequent autobiographical reference of a childhood trauma of the air

691

Ibid.
359

raids signifies an essential archival function in the film. One of the most recurring motifs of the
thematic continuity appears in the figure of Gabi Teichert as a history teacher in a school and as
an amateur archeologist. She collects fragments, objets trouvs (another archival principle in
Foucault as opposed to totality), of German history as an act of practical remembering.692 In a
true Foucauldian sense, as Ricoeur would say, here the motif of archive yields to archaeology,
an inversion of the past to reclaim the future.693 And within the cinematic discourse, her
transformation from an archaeologist to an archivist, from Duetschland im Herbst to Die
Patriotin respectively, similarly attests to the very nature of these two transformative disciplines
and their inter-relationality. The theme of the amateur archeologist recurs again in Die Macht
Der Gefhle with Frau Brlamm played by the same actress, Hannelore Hoger. Almost all his
films contain the recurring binary opposition of the inside warm, outside cold and the
strategies from above, strategies from below. There are also thematic continuities in visual
dimensions permeating almost all of Kluges films, for instance, the moving clouds over the
shots of Frankfurt skylines in the night with the traffic light in time lapse photography. The
various themes of opera, recurring scenes from the early Soviet and German Expressionist films,
history and memory, impossible love (Anita G. and Pichota in Abshied von Gestern, Fred Tacke
and Hildegard in Die Patriotin, Mxchen and Schimdt in Die Macht der Gefhle, etc.),
documentary footages of World War II, images of Hitler and Nazi parades, photographs,
illustrations, old songs, etc.

692
693

Kaes, p. 110.
Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 200.
360

The third proposition: translation of concepts. In Die Patriotin there is an enigmatic scene
that has been commented by almost all Kluge scholars in the field. I shall describe this scene as a
hieroglyphic of concepts. Because it contains not one theoretical concept but many, just as
Kluges stories are micro stories of many different themes. Anton Kaes calls this scene a
surrealistic image-pun in the tradition of Buuel or Karl Valentin694 that translates the
philosophical or conceptual thought into literal images, into a sort of Jamesonian linguistic
archaeology. For instance, the metaphor of digging for truth has already been translated via
Benjamin into the figure of Gabi Teichert literally digging into the earth in search for the
foundation of German history. After a frustrating day in the classroom, where the strategy from
below of fictional Gerta Baethe, who perished in the bomb shelter in 1944 with her two children
(she is invoked in Kluges Fontane address), has been a subject of animated discussion by her
students (only male students participate in the discussions, female students are bystanders), Gabi
Teichert returns to her underground lair/workshop/study. The analogy is unmistakable. Both
Teichert and Baethe are presented in their underground shelters as victims of a disastrous
German history. Teicherts prolonged utopian excursions that include meeting with political
delegates in a live SPD political convention and her nightly excavations into the cold, hardened,
surface of the German soil to implement positive changes into its collective historical narrative
are similar to that of Gerta Baethes strategy from below.695 Both share the perception of history

694

Kaes, p. 110.
Gerta Baethe is a character who appears both in Kluges short story and in Die Patriotin as
the mother of two who was hiding in the cellar down below and praying for her life and her
childrens life. Although she is a fictional character, Kluge cites her without naming her in his
acceptance speech for Fontane award. See also Flinn, p. 113.
361
695

from below. One the victim of circumstances of history beyond her control (it would have
required the organization of seventy thousand men and twenty years of progressive labor to avert
the disaster for the woman cowering in the shelter in 1944), the other a victim of history
because she could not avoid the consequences of the dead labor (that includes both Nazism
and capitalism).696 Drawing on the previous lessons of history from Corporal Wielands
wounded kneeHow can we escape history? History which will kill us allto its tragic
fulfillmentjust like the inevitable truth of every 5th act in the opera when a woman is killed
one can, thus, conclude, vindicating Wielands knees above statement, that one (Baethe) was
killed by history and the other (Teichert) did not escape from its deadly effect (tdlichem
Ausgang). Like the operas Kluge likes to deconstruct, in his own universe women are
unprepared, disorganized, and unequipped with proper historical tools to deal with the
organizational task of averting looming disasters in their world, because their matriarchal means
of production, the mode of social production of children (handling the child in accordance with
its capacities, satisfying its needs at any cost) is not recognized by patriarchy and capitalism.697
Both Teichert and Baethe are framed as victimsvictims of historical forces, the forces from
above, but, unlike the walking and talking knee who blames the forces of history and whose
point of view is endorsed by Kluges own voiceoverwho are blamed because of the lack of
their organizing capacities to produce real alternative modes of living.698 In Kluges
calculation (which is neither historical nor statistical, but a satirical farce), Baethe had to

696

Bowie, p. 114.
Kluge and Negt, Public Sphere and Experience, p. 50.
698
Kluge, Zur Realistichen method, Flinn, 116.
362
697

organize seventy thousand men plus sixteen years of hard labor on the raw materials of German
history to avoid becoming a future victim of the allied bombing, which means that in 1928 not
only she had to be a part of the labor organizations but had to be politically active in opposing
the nationalists, the Christian conservatives, Hindenburg and, of course, Hitler. Like her Gabi
Teicherts effort to change the course of German history seems futile and pointless in the present
for she lacks the organizational capabilities of producing an alternative public sphere
(gegenffentlichkeit) to convince either the actual politicians or her fictional colleagues to take
her concerns seriously. She may have to wait for an eternity with an optimistic look every
passing year until there is a thaw in the icy surface of Germanys frozen history and her wishes
are realized like the discovery of the mammoth frozen in ice for thousands of years in a scene in
Abshied von Gestern.
We see Teichert in her workshop working on the bookssawing, hammering, drilling
and making concoction. The blue shaft of light hitting her cluttered desk reminding us of the
shaft of light on the reading desk in Thatcher Memorial Library in Citizen Kane (1941), the
difference being one as the rubble of historical debris (Benjamin) and the other a pious
mausoleum of historical vanity (Welles here evokes Adornos sense of museal in the museum).
She attacks the history books using workers tools, more masculine than feminine in Kluges
binarism, turning the scene into a literal metaphor for deconstruction alluding both to Kluges
own filmic practice as a demolition artist699 and to Derridas philosophy. The project of
history, of its sensuous assimilation into the body, as a lesson fully digested, is accomplished
699

Yvonne Rainer and Ernest Larsen, We Are Demolition Artists: An Interview with
Alexander Kluge, The Independent (June 1989): 21.
363

through Gabi Teicherts Witches brew (fairy tale) that she concocts like a medieval alchemist,
channeling both Rotwang (Metropolis)700 and Faust, inducing sorcery as an art of modern
historiography. But before she drinks the potion, she takes the hammer and the sickle (Marx) to
the history tome, cuts it up with a saw and drills holes (Derrida) through it, then nails the cut-up
book on the wall with a hammer (Nietzsche and Heidegger). She tears off the pages (Foucault),
soaks it in a beaker in orange juice and then uses a blender to dissolve (Postmodernism) the
content. She drinks the potion so she can literally digest the lessons, the shocks
(Benjamin/modernity), of German history. Those fragments of history that she digests in Die
Patriotin is finally excreted or expelled from the body as human/industrial waste in The Assault
of the Present.
Another fortuitous image that also enables the translation of a philosophical concept into
a literal metaphor occurs in Die Macht der Gefhle with Frau Brlamms face stretched with
clips to make it wrinkle free as she goes out to sell her body to the market executive. This is a
literal translation of Adornos phrase from Transparencies of Film, just as the cosmetic trade
eliminates facial wrinkles, cited above. The blind director in the eponymous film hates images,
I hate images, I hate images, I hate images, which also corresponds to Adornos famous
apodictum: I love to go the movies, but the only thing I hate is the image on the screen.701 As
700

For an interesting comparative analysis of Gabi Teichert as a producer of history and

Rotwang as a producer of life, their common interest in the things of the past, and their status as
outsiders, she being a woman and he being a Jew, see Flinn, pp. 113-114.
701
Klaus Eder/Alexander Kluge, Ulmer Dramaturgien: Reibungsverluste, (Munich: Hanser,
1981), p. 48. Adorno writes: Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance,
stupider and worse. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (New York:
Verso, 2005), p. 25.
364

an archive of Marxian dialectics, one of the associations (and here I am forcing myself to take a
particular example as opposed to numerous other examples that abound in Kluges films) that
takes place as an enigmatic encounter between Gabi Teichert and a Peeping Tom from the
German Secret Service. The scene begins with a man massaging his eyes with his hands. He
speaks: I work with my eyes. I am interested in perception (erkentnisse intersiert). Cut to his
point of view shot of him peeping at Gabi Teichert undressing in her apartment. In the next scene
Teichert speaks to him about his voyeuristic tendencies and asks him to relax his eyes by
squinting rapidly, which we can safely assume to be a comparison between the blinking of the
eyes with the mechanism of film camera/projector that moves at 24 fps, and also a direct homage
to Dziga Vertovs The Man with a Movie Camera (1929). In addition, Teicherts lesson that you
must practice if you want to improve your work has a direct reference to the human body as a
mechanical/industrial organization that needs maintenance as any industrial product. The scene
of the voyeur in the film has also been compared to the distracted (Kracauer and Benjamin)
spectator. The above is just a list of images that constitute the veritable archives, as modes of
translation, in Kluges modus operandi. In his films, we are amidst a plethora of images, images
that abound in both in form and content, substance and structure, words and images, or sound
and music. But whatever the appearance may be, Kluges films are, primarily, polemical (the
fourth archival principle) in nature as we have seen so far in most of his films.
Foucaults fourth archival principle refers to polemical interchanges. For brevitys sake I will
point to a few of these exchanges from Die Macht der Gefhle. In this scene, an interviewer,

365

played by Kluges sister, Alexandra Kluge, asks a famous opera singer about how he maintains
a spark of hope on his face in Act 1 when he knows how disastrously things end in Act V.
The Singer replies: But I dont know that in act 1
She: Yet you have played this role eighty-four times.
He: Yes, It is a very successful piece.
She: Then you really ought to know the awful ending by now.
He: I do, but not in act 1.
She: Then at 8:10 in act 1 you know from previous performances what is going to happen
at 10.30 in act 5.
He: So?
She: Then why do you have a spark of hope on your face?
He: Because I dont know act 5 in act 1.
She: Do you think that the opera could end differently?
He: Of course.
She: But it doesnt, eight-four times in a row.
He: Yes, its a very successful piece.
She: That explains the eighty-four performances. But it still doesnt have a happy ending.
He: Do you have something against success?
This particular humorous exchange is only one of the numerous instances of polemical
exchanges that dominate Kluges mock (fake) interviews in the film. Another polemical
exchange, from the same film, occurs between Schmidt and Mxchen:
He: Are you saying you dont love me?
She: How much do you love me?
She: How much should I love you?
He: exactly as much as I love you
She: Not more?
He: No more, no less.
She: And if I loved you less, then what?
He: Then you would owe me change.
Both these examples clearly exemplify the polemical nature of discourse in Kluges film that refer
both to statistical data and exchange value. In the Artisten, we find another form of polemics that
refutes the power of love to bring any change in reality. Kluges voiceover: Leni Peickert said: I

366

will change the Circus, because I love it. Answer: Because she loves it, she will not change it.
Why? Because love is a conservative drive. Leni Peickert: That is not true!
I have above enumerated the conditions of the possibility of Foucaults archive that can be
traced in Kluges imageries as a system of representation. Foucaults archive is neither inside nor
outside the institutional framework, but in the liminality of the discursivity, a place from which
the statements are made without any speaker, not unlike the offscreen statements of the
omniscient narrator that we encounter in Kluge. Foucaults archive is different from Derridas
despite many similarities of enunciative and nomological functionality of their respective
archives. Derridas archive is indicative of a domicile, the address and the residence of the
authoritycloser to his ideas previously elaborated in his paper on Economimesis.702
Foucaults archive, on the other hand, is a system of representation, whose marked affinity with
Kluges discursive normativity has already been disclosed, of statements that find their
discursivity in their enunciative function in the system of enunciability. Both functionally and
institutionally the archive remains a discursive concept that lays down the rules for both the
possibilities and the impossibilities of what could be staged as a system of enunciations
providing a system of rules that governs the operation of statements outside the intentional locus
of the subject and the transcendental position it normally occupies vis a vis the real.703
But Derridas archive is also much like Foucaults panopticona seat of power through
classification, taxonomy, and epistemology, that is, knowledge. In Kluge, the resistance is

702

Derrida, Economimesis, trans. Richard Klein Diacritics Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer 1981): 2-

25.
703

Foucault, p. 129.
367

always to be found in the pastin the archive. Every glance in Kluge supports the paradigm of
the retroactive gazelooking back, just like the angel of history, that Klee/Benjamin found so
redemptive. There is, of course, this absolute Benjaminian faith in the redemptive mode of the
past which is purged of its messainism; its cataclysmic and absurdist symbolismin Kluges
hand the past is a work of mourning as long as it remembers everything and everyonean
essentialist position.
The archive is predisposed to the reception of the past in the future. But not as a return of
the past in a repressed form, as in Freudian psychology, whose interior archive is conflagration
of the past for lacking the means to activate the work of mourning or a complete repression. This
archive in the future awaits the past, not in order to reconcile and liberate it from the historical
jurisdiction, to inform us how it has survived through guile and reasoning from abdicating its
duty, its responsibility, to the other, that is, the future. There is not one past, but many pasts that
require new membership in the citizenship of the new order of things that are being assembled,
disseminated, and proliferated through the agencies of the New Media and technologies, which
shape the contour and lineaments of this new archive. What is at issue here is nothing less than
the future, according to Derrida.704 A mark of archivization is not simply to collect and process
old documents, but its task consists in a transformation of the technique of archivization, of
printing, of inscription, of reproduction, of formalization, of ciphering, and of translating
marks.705 The archival document, as we know, from the writings of Foucault, Le Goff, and
Derrida, is certainly not objective, innocent raw material, but expresses past societys power
704
705

Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 14.

Derrida, p. 15.
368

over memory and over the future: the document is what remains.706 But the definition of the
archive has changed enormously in the second half the twentieth century. It is no longer
contained in the historical documents, but includes spoken and ethnographical texts and
testimonials. The twenty-first century has created a vast virtual archive of digital storages which
is not necessarily aimed at becoming a token of the future, in Derridas sense, but a storage of
what constantly is: a huge global wasteland of images that are the result of multiple purposes
that span from surveillance (CCTV) to the instant demand of global communication or the
narcissistic inscription of oneself in the constant flow of the present.707 Archival documents
have also been radically revamped with the introduction of computers. The computer does not
fare well in Kluges world, and it is singularly featured with an utmost contemptuous regard in
Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die brige Zeit (The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time) in
the scene with the family where they gather around the computer in the form of receiving a
benediction. The metallic touch of the keyboard by the finger is ironically compared to the
fathers finger touching the babys cheek. Once again the binarism and polarity is invoked in the
irreconcilability of soft and hard, between the human and the machine. Nonetheless, Kluges
television programs feature computer graphics as an essential component of his visual
experimentations in form and content.
VIII. Modernism/Postmodernism, Women, and the Other

706

Le Goff, p. xvii
Hudson Moura ,The Becoming of Archival Image in Documentary Filmmaking, http://callfor-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/57918. (accessed July 8, 2015).
369
707

The New German Cinema that lasted for almost two decade, from early sixties to the
beginning of the eighties, under extremely trying conditions, and survived largely due to the tireless
interventions and extensive lobbying by one of its most important proponent, Kluge, had basically
one serious flaw. And that flaw, even to date, is not seriously attended by the German film
directors. Even in the hay days, the glory days of New German Cinema, when people talked
obsessively about the power of this new brand of cinema, the days from Oberhausen manifesto to
the Hamburg Manifesto in 1975, one did not hear much about the so-called non-German in
Germany, except for exceptions like Fassbinder and, perhaps, in the feminist director Ulrike
Ottinger.
The question as to how do the non-German determinants figure in German film history is
essentially a question that attempts to address a problem largely ignored by the self-obsessive
project of the now defunct New German Cinema. The fundamental tenets of the New German
Cinema involved around the question of a new cinema, a cinema whose language would be
different from the language of the traditional, read Hollywood films, cinema. The decisive shift
from a language of authoritarianism to a language of authority, autor/auteur, marked the beginning
of a language of politics and resistance in German films. For once the image on the screen was not
supposed to control us, make us stupefied and mute, but this new experience that the modern
directors of the German films were supposed to usher was a uniquely distracted image of a new era
of political struggle. The very existence of new German cinema was the condition of possibility for
a radical displacement of the old hegemonic order of images that severely undermined the
participation of the viewer in his/her capacity to be the interlocutor between the image and the film.
370

But it appears, in all probability, that Kluge took the high road, consistent with his high
modernist stance,708 of steering clear of the masss rather lugubrious taste (as he proclaimed
unhesitatingly in a recent interview: I dont pay attention to target audiences and therefore I
often hear that I am a ratings killer, somebody who fundamentally doesnt care whether one
person is watching or an entire soccer stadium)709 and was highly susceptible to the same elitist
malady that allegedly affected most of the Frankfurters (Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse) in
the heyday of their theories. In Kluges defense, one can most certainly argue that with regard to
theoretical pragmatics, it is better to be confused than to be cocksure in the matters of cultural
and historical discourses. I am certainly not defending or endorsing the archaic model of
narrative coherence sutured by the absence and invisibility of the cut between the two shots,
which has been enforced and legitimized by Hollywood editing machinery through its faith in a
continuity system. But, before, in our untimely meditation and celebration of postmodern culture,
we ascribe to Kluge the Raison dtre of incoherence, disjunction and fragmentation as a fullfledged postmodern aesthetic practice, we need to explore further the dialectical nature of
Kluges work and whether his practice can really be considered compatible to the tenets of
postmodernism, a genre which is most assiduously associated with the deconstructive works of

708

Peter Lutzs book Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist is the most definitive book on
Kluges high modernist sensibilities, pp. 207-212.
709
Nettime, Interview with Alexander Kluge by Hans Ullrich Obrist. Sun, 1 Feb 1998 07:24:04
+0100 (MET). http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199802/msg00000.html
371

Jacques Derrida and Jean-Franois Lyotard and with the postcolonial writings of Stuart Hall,
Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.710
The subject of modernity and postmodernity in Kluges work is the central theme of Peter
Lutzs book, Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist. As the title indicates Lutz defines Kluge as
high modernist and mentions numerous times his works as examples of eclecticism. Kluge has
described himself as arrire-gardiste of the modernist movement and his films and writings are
significantly devoid of any traces of minorities and/or diversities of popular cultural expressions.
One of the essential tropes of postmodernism is the critique of the subject. The subject as defined
by humanism, with its essentialism and mistaken historical verities, its unities and transcendental
presence, occupies a central homogenizing position. The principles of modernity, on the other
hand, are highly geared toward the principle of differentiation. They are also closer to the
concept of author and canon formation. Whereas postmodernism intends to shift and, indeed,
displace the emphasis from the author-centered specificities, the narrative voice within the text
positioned by the author herself, the fragmentation of the subject and object, into the arena in
which the emphasis is placed on discontinuity, catastrophe, indeterminacy, and paradox. In short,
postmodernism is a kind of a philosophical inquiry which regards the world as an infinitely
complex phenomenon, which requires a multiplicity of perspectives for the interpretation
(hermeneutically, so to speak) of its dynamic and linguistically charged reality. When we think

710

Both Anton Kaes and John Davidson regard Kluges narratives as postmodernist. His films
can be seen in correspondence to the decline of the grand narrative as Lyotard described in The
Postmodern Condition, or it can be seen in consonance with Davidsons appraisal of Kluges
work in relation to the Postcolonial discourse of minority stories/discourses derived from
Deleuze and Guttari in A Thousand Pleateau. Kaes, p. 108. Davidson, p. 51.
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of Kluges work, we realize that the emphasis on Autoren cinema, the valorization of the vertical
integration of the authorial subject with production-relation, does not indicate the decentering of
the subject or the authorial voice from the corpus. In fact, as Lutz explains, Unlike
postmodernisms multivocal expressions of diverse subcultures. Kluges suppression and
channeling of dialogue is more of a multifaceted expression of his voice than an embodiment of
true diversity711 (emphasis added). Similarly Kaes suggests that the extradiegetic voiceover,
from the off-screen space is both engaging and distancing the viewer from the display of the
images on the screen. It functions as an authorial consciousness that selects the images, controls
what is shown, tries out experimental arrangements and tests new combinations.712 In Kluge, it
is, however, not only the matter of who speaks, but also of on whose behalf one speaks.
Henceforth, as a figure of disembodied voice, Kluges voiceover locates its discursive origin in
the primacy of the voices architectonic presence in the entire philosophical orientation of
Western metaphysical system from Plato onwards. It remains fundamentally throughout in his
filmic oeuvre the operation of a discursive theology in which the supremacy of the voice gains
ascendancy over the rest of the narrative material. But it should also be pointed out at the same
time that the function of the voiceover is besmirched in the narrative as a remainder, as a surplus
or superfluous, of the remains of a disastrous context. The voiceover struggles with the
possibilities of being seen.
Another significant feature of modernism is its blatant sexism that has systematically
excluded the representation of female voice as autonomous. Back in the 70s and as late as the
711
712

Lutz, p. 107.
Kaes, p. 115.
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last year the feminist critics and scholars have found Kluges omniscient voice commenting on
the futile but utopian conducts of his women characters like Antita G., Leni Peickert, Roswitha
Bronski, Gabi Teichert, Frau Brlamm not only condescending and patronizing, but oblivious of
its phallocentric bias, that subjects the womans space, especially her body and mind, within the
logic/instrumentation of the rational structure of Enlightenment philosophy. The characters
seem like voiceless puppets scurrying around, while the male narrator explains and criticizes
their thoughts actions from a position of omniscience.713 In the American academic
surroundings B. Ruby Rich was one of the first to fully articulate the vituperative and sexist
nature of Kluges voiceover, although, before her, Miriam Hansen had also concluded that the
projection of the transsexual nature of Kluges disembodied voice explaining the behavior
of his female protagonists from an authoritative position as questionable.714
Kluge sometimes not only confuses the proposition with the statement, or the
experimental with the experiential, he also takes over the function of the archive by creating the
very possibility of what can be said, which is already a priori determined by its collateral
enunciative function. Here is a statement from The Assault of the Present which is directed
towards a rich woman whose conduct he disapproves of (she is not paying attention to the needs
of an orphaned child, her dead sisters daughter, whose custody has been granted to her by the
713

B. Ruby Rich, She Says, He Says: The Power of the Narrator in Modernist Film Politics,
Discourse, vol, 6 (Fall 1983), p. 32.
714
Hansen, Cooperative Auteur Cinema and the Public Sphere, p. 55. In his earlier films like
Artists and The Middle of the Road is a Very Dead End, the polyphony of voices that undercut
the author as narrator paradigm, but this practice of polyphony will be soon abandoned in his
later films, where Kluges sotto voce becomes the dominant authorial presence with which the
spectator had to identify. Lutz, p. 194. See also Flinns trenchant critique of Kluges voiceover in
blaming the victim, Gerde Baethe, in The New German Cinema, pp.115-116.
374

state): She is busy arranging furniture for husband who will leave her in five years. The
statement is absurd from the point of view of its foreknowledge of an event that has not yet
occurred. This is neither a factual statement nor a prediction. But instead it is a statement with a
view to punishing the woman by making the audience privy to his (Kluges) hostility towards the
woman. In that sense she is a perfect straw man. How does the author know this as a fact that
her husband will leave her in the future, and why should the audience be told what lies in the
future for the woman when the former is not even exposed to the nature of relationship between
the couple whether it is loving or quarrelsome. In this particular instance the intentionality is
clearly distinguished from that of the enunciation. The statement falls into a category of general
enunciative function of a patriarchal mode critical of this type of feminine behavior. But what is
being criticized is itself a product of that very sensibility, for example, like the femme fatalthe
discursive formation of misogyny at a particular historical juncture exploited in the genre of Film
Noir in Hollywood and elsewhere.
In The Assault of the Present, Kluges animus for women, especially against professional
women reaches a level of cynicism that is quite disconcerting. Peter Lutz provides a list of
Kluges voiceover ruminations on a woman doctors predicament after she has been demoted in
her rank as the chief medical officer because she took a leave (as if such incident can happen in a
most casual manner without any legal consequences) to embark on a vacation. Here is Kluges
narration regarding the woman doctor who has become superfluous:
1.
She is a doctor. She goes on vacation.
2.
That was her office.
3.
During her vacation her boss, whose practice she has developed for years, hires a young
[male] doctor fresh from a university clinic.
375

4.
The two hundred thousand marks machine, with which the young colleague has bought
his way into the practice.
5.
He gets her room.
6.
The staff shows the problem
7.
Superfluous.
8.
The colleague is ambitious.
9.
She has received a new place in the basement.
10.
Professor Wederhoff has gotten old.
11.
Hes sorry.
12.
She has resigned without notice.
13.
She has been standing here now for two hours.
14.
The admission ticket, unused.
15.
For a moment she thought she was needed here.
16.
A person who loses his job
17.
A person who loses his job, doesnt take the next best but rather the sixth worst [is this
based on real statistics, or Kluge has just made this up?], provided that it is professorial.
18.
She behaves professorially. For a hundred years people have constrained their lives
professorially, because otherwise they couldnt survive.
19.
The present expands itself.
Lutz provides a critique of the above narration: Most of the comments are straight forward and
factual. There is a touch of irony in their brevity and abruptness, but they do not question the
authority of the narrator. Comments 17 to 19 are less factual and more reflective. All three of
them include sweeping statement that, while suggestive, are ambiguous and vague. They sound
profound, but may or may not contain any useful or valid insights. Although there is certainly a
shift in discourse here, this does not constitute a significant shift in the point of view or the
authority of the narrator. If anything, the last three comments simply deepen the sense of the
narrators omniscience (emphasis added).715 Ruby Rich, in her article She says, He says, also
comments on Kluges general tendency to undermine his female characters actions. For
instance, she claims that, in Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, Roswitha is last to learn the

715

Lutz, 238, n. 71
376

simple fact that the factory is moving out which was intimated to audience through a title long
ago. Second, we are informed that the factory will not be relocated independently of Roswitha
and Sylvia. In the third instance, after their complete failure to achieve any change through
laboring intensively for days and weeks, the two women instead of taking any further political
action to change the companys policy towards their workers, decide to learn a Brecht song.
Kluges usual patronizing voiceover tells us having found no better ways of experiencing
reality, Roswitha and Sylvia learn a Brecht song by heart.716 Such extraordinary trivialization
and futility of womens efforts to make any real changes in the factory politics in which they not
only openly try to challenge the companys decision for relocation, which their male counterparts
accept as a matter of fact, but that they were so ignorant of the companys later decision to not
relocate after their back-breaking tireless utopian political engagement makes them appear
genuinely incompetent and ignorant. By learning a Brecht song, they are finally coming to
realize, according to Kluge, that the true political action can only be learnt by subjecting
themselves to the authority of Brecht who symbolizes the true meaning of the revolutionary
praxis.
The images of women, for instance, in Kluge, are invariably accompanied with the images
of degradation. There are repeated instances in his films where the images of violence against
women work in two different ways. Much of the power of Kluges sharp wit, which at times sends
the audience to bellyful laughter, declines, however, due to his persistent gender blindness. His
portrayal of Roswitha Bronski (played by his sister, Alexandra Kluge), in Gelegenheitsarbeit einer

716

Rich, 32-33; Lutz, 239, n. 75.

377

Sklavin, who is fiercely trying to accommodate the division of labor between the public and the
private is a case in point. When Roswitha is put to verbal abuse by her husband, Kluge appears not
only being critical of the husbands abusive behavior, he also seems to criticize Roswithas overall
being, for who she isan abortionist.717 To preserve her maternal instinct via the circulation of
matriarchal production, she is a willing accomplice in the murder of other peoples children.
One of the explanations Kluge provides of her contradictory behavior that conflates the
division between Inside it is warm, outside it is cold, 718 a condition that most of her female
protagonists congenitally suffer from in both his literary and filmic narratives, is that she is not yet
politically savvy to understand that her private spherethat is her family and her marriage
depends upon the public and the political sphere. By performing abortion, she is merely preserving
the natural order of the family (an institution that has never been questioned by Kluge, and the
preponderance of the presence of his own family history in his films points to a tendency beyond the
significance of the presence of the private sphere; instead his reliance upon his family, particularly
his sister, whom he threw under the bus when he was confronted by the feminists,719 indicates a

717

Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin was severely taken to task by the West German feminist
critics for its anti-abortion rhetoric. On Kluge's anti-feminist patriarchal viewpoint, see Helke
Sander's "'You Can't Always Get What You Want': The Films of Alexander Kluge," in the
special issue on Alexander Kluge, New German Critique, No. 49 (Winter 1990): 59-68. Also in
the same issue, see Heide Schlpmann, Femininity as Productive Force. 69-78. See Heide
Schlpmanns What is Different is Good': Woman and Femininity in the Films of Alexander
Kluge, also in the special issue on Alexander Kluge in October, No. 46 (Fall 1988): 129-150.
718
See Fiedler for a metaphorical reading of this divide, p. 216.
719
Kluges evaluation of his sisters contributions to the film were (sic) not always consistent.
In one interview he suggested that her insistence that Roswitha move outside the family was
perhaps a mistake. He felt that the issues should be resolved there and, until they were, she
would not be able to function effectively out of the family. She wants to turn to politics. Now
such a decision is first of all abstract. If one gets out of the family into the public sphere, into the
378

highly conservative streak that many adherents of classical Marxism have in common, for
instance, homophobia and xenophobia in most Socialist and Communist countries. By illegally
performing abortion, interesting to note that Kluge is silent about the judicial decree that makes
abortion illegitimate, Roswitha is merely obeying the laws of the preservation of family as a natural
order for the female species. Women are required to learn before they can be admitted to the level of
mens competence and expertise.
For instance, Gerta Baethe, in The Patriot, never learnt her lesson as good as a man she
knew in Todt Organization, whose utopian project of building canals in the alpine regions is much
extolled by Kluges voiceover over her failure to organize and save her two children from the
bombs falling on the cellar below. In Roswithas case, Kluge fails to realize that by performing
abortion, legally or illegally, she is actually already performing a very political act against the
enemies (like the Catholic Church, with whom Kluge in this particular case sides with) of womens

city and searches through the city for opportunities for struggle, then one will never come upon
real concrete struggles. Because one does not bring ones own interest out of the family with
one. Cited in Lutz, p. 238, n. 70. Kluge here is walking on very thin ice. First he blames his
sister for changing the script and taking her own decision to interpret her character by bringing
her struggle in the public sphere without the consulting with her patriarchal and abusive husband.
Her decision to leave the dichotomy of inside warm for outside cold, a favorite metaphor of
Kluge and Negt, is not approved by Kluge, because it entails a certain amount of independence
and autonomy in her action that almost casts her in the role of a professional revolutionary who
is looking for action in the city. In some sense her action is not so different from the shopkeeper
in Die Macht der Gefhle who is out for some action after finishing his days work. Roswithas
action is fruitless because it is not based on resolving the dilemma of her primary obligation as a
mother and a wife to take care of children and her husband. Roswithas plunge into the public
sphere is the violation of her duties to first take care of family business. She ought to have left
the decision to change the world to men who have recourse to experience and decision making
like the bosses of the factory and the workers who submit silently to their fate. Kluge did not
stop of blaming her sister for independent decision in the film but also blamed her for lack the
warmth (remember inside is warm) in her characterization, as Lutz states.
379

bodies.720 She does not have to quit her job and become a union member selling sausages wrapped
in political pamphlets to factory workers, the last shot of the film, in correspondence to a Brechtian
figure. Her work is a true act of her will as a woman, whose choice to perform abortion cannot be
measured by those who believe in womens role in terms of motherhood.721 Roswithas act is a
public act, not a murder: she does not have to quit her job to become politically educated, in order
to conform to Kluges or Brechts masculine ideologies. In her role as a producer of political
discourse, which disavows womens fundamental right to her body, she must embrace, according to
Kluge, the theoretical assumptions of the Marxist ideology. The emancipatory program comes
from the source of her non-identityand here it means a non-identical relation to herself. By
refusing to be a killer in order to be a mother, and willingly abandoning her nurturing role for a
greater good of the people, she transcends into a pure Brechtian image as a sausage vendor outside
the factory from which she has been unceremoniously sacked. This transmigration of a real,
720

Im certainly not a Catholic, yet theres something in the Churchs argument: that if you murder
children up to the age of three months, you could equally say that people over the age of ninety or
who have mental diseases should be killed; and that they should be killed in a clinical, pure way. If
you think human life is sacrosanct, then you cant be in favor of abortion, you cant advocate it.
Jan Dawson, Alexander Kluge, p. 40.
721
In one of his interviews, after the release of the film with Jan Dawson, Kluge explained the logic
of the behavior of his protagonist: The organization of the family the private organization of
getting children and trying to be happy in an organizational ruin like the family, is something which
only exists in the imagination of the familys members.Women have to do with children, with
making human beingsproducing something no factory could do. They dont produce cars [Kluge
has never heard of Rosy the Riveter, indeed], they dont produce potatoes [this also does not make
sense since there are millions of women who are farmers and gardeners, including my own mother
and sisters], they produce children. And that involves a principle of satisfying the needs of other
human beings. A child is nourished because it needs, not because it demands. And I think that this
relationship between mother and child is a rather progressive one, rather hopeful relation between
human beings.So you get the contradiction that the female experience is both progressive and
conservative. Women cannot liberate themselves on the basis of this contradiction (emphasis in
original except for the last sentence).Dawson, p. 28
380

intimate, private person into a literary and dramatic trope is constitutive of the same sexist ideology
that has oppressed women for hundreds of years. Kluge and Brecht cut two very sorry figures as far
as feminist and subaltern discourses are concerned. Their modernist outlook fails to understand
women in their objective status in that they are more than the raw materials for mens pleasure and
scorn.
Kluges film was viewed by many as an assault on the womens right to choose, in 1973,
when abortion debate was at a critical juncture in West Germany after East Germany had
constitutionally made it legal. Kluge supports abortion legally but not morally: First, I dont think
abortion is a legal question or something that you can stamp out by legislation [In 1975 the
constitutional court banned abortion after it was legalized in 1974, the decision will change in 1976
again]. And therefore Im in favor of abolishing paragraph 218 of the Criminal Code.722 On the
other hand, I think that society, and women especially, can hardly feel friendly towards abortion. I
dont think abortion is a friendly thing for human beings. And in a matriarchy, certainly, would be
an absurd act. Im also quite sure that it does have something to do with murder. Furthermore,
[T]he actress playing Roswitha is on the whole against abortion. She says: the way that history
and prehistory has made them, the majority of women will not (and I myself certainly not) be
against children as a mark of self-determination or for reasons of common sense, if such negative

722

A law that was first introduced under Bismarck in 1871 that, without exception, defined abortion
as a criminal act was in force till the feminists (Womens Action 70) opposed it which included
Romy Schneider
381

attitude towards children is not forced upon them by circumstances. If society forces woman to fight
for abortion, then we should be struggling in the opposite direction.723
One can see from this interview that Kluges position on abortion is not only anti-choice but
also deeply aligned with the reactionary position of the Catholic Church. As a Pope or the father of
New German Cinema Kluge is clearly for the rights of the unborn fetusthe film shows a graphic
procedure of abortion with a close-up of the fetus in a trash binand he connects abortion to
murder or euthanasia (the latter particularly repugnant given its Nazi connection). Kluges
explanation for his opposition to paragraph 218 is also quite incomprehensible. He sets up
arguments that have nothing to do with the actual issue at stake. For instance, here is his opposition
to paragraph 218: If society punishes women with conflicts and withdrawal of love if they have
children, then the same society cannot set up a state monopoly against women. Paragraph 218 thus
must therefore be unconditionally abolished. It is nothing to do with judiciary. There are so many
non-sequiturs in this endorsement for why paragraph 218 should be abolished which would curb the
rights of women to abortion. Number one: Whats love got to do with it, channeling Tina Turner.
Kluge sets up an argument which has no basis in facts. Paragraph 218 does not involve womans
withdrawal of love from having children. Thats a bizarre projection. We are talking about womens
rights to exercise control over their reproductive rights, to claim autonomy to their bodies from
patriarchal and conservative forces that were active in West Germany at the time of controversy.
Kluge wants both ways. On the one hand, he sides with womens rights that paragraph 218 should
be abolished and judiciary has no ground to get involved in this case, but, on the other hand, he also

723

Dawson, p. 46.
382

takes the moral high road and proclaims the sacrosanctity of life and claims that the fetus has every
right to be treated as a child and, therefore, abortion is nothing but plain murder. The paradoxical
position ultimately made him to reach out to the feminists for reconciliation, but I am not convinced
that his later films show much improvement in his political education with regard to the issues of
the portrayal of women his films. Ruby Rich has categorically defined Kluges films as antifeminist.724 To the extent that Helke Sanders wanted to retitle Kluges The Assault of the Present on
the Rest of Time (Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die brige Zeit) as The Assault by White Man on
the Rest of Time.725
In Kluges films, the images of violence against women have two aspects. Firstly, it is a
critique of violence, and secondly, a critique of women. For some reason Kluges women character
suffer a great deal of physical and mental abuse; these character carry the material proof of violence
on their physical body by being constantly shown in a brutalized fashion. These are the images of
degradations and self-loathing. Men are normally not treated in that fashion. The things that
crucially distinguish Kluges films from that of Fassbinders are the absence of physical angst of the
male body and, of course, homosexuality. When it comes to the female body politik it is normally
measured in analytical and statistical terms. To set the score straight I would here point to a few
images only. The face of Hannelore Hoger, as Frau Brlamm, stretched and pinched with laundry
clips in order to remove facial wrinkles as goes to sell herself to flesh industry in Die Macht der
Gefhle (a literal but sadistic translation of Adornos critique of the culture industrywhose

724

B. Ruby Rich, She Says, He Says: The Power of the Narrator in Modernist Film Politics,
Discourse, n. 4 Winter, 198182.
725
Sanders, p. 68.
383

standard excludes everything but predigested and already integrated, just as the cosmetic trade
eliminates facial wrinkles); Betty and Mxchens swollen faces after they have been attacked by
their pimps and boyfriend respectively; the young woman with a deep gash on her eyebrow (Junge
Frau eilt die Treppe herauf. Die Augenbraue ist durch einen massiven Schlag verletzt.);726 Bettys
height of self-loathing when she spits on her own image in the mirror during her captivity (Betty in
einem Gitterkfig, eingepfercht. Gesicht ein Spiegel. Sie spuckt ihr Gesicht an);727 the raped woman
who finds no animosity against her rapist because he, indirectly, saved her life; the sordid story of a
woman who shot her husband who was raping her underage daughter (more about it later); the fate
of Anita G., a Jewish woman, seduced by many men, on the run who voluntarily chooses prison to
give birth, but abortion is never an option for her; the superfluous female doctor who has been
banished to the basement and replaced by a young male doctor in The Assault of the Present.728
These images are, of course, not the images of non-German from a certain specific point of view,
but they are, as far as feminism is concerned, which, too, is excluded from Kluges paradigm,
reflected in and aligned with the face of the other whose invisibility puts us in a counter-discursive
mode from Kluge.
Kluge has condoned some extremely unseemly acts of violence such as rape and incest in
his films as acts that directly or indirectly benefited the victims. His approach to these crimes
that he invents to portray the inability of women to function properly without the warmth and
726

Kluge, Die Macht der Gefhle (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1984), p. 105.
. Kluge, Die Macht der Gefhle , p 143.
728
The superfluous doctor is not only demoted and punished but she leaves without giving
notice. Why? Wouldnt she protest and resort to legal action? She goes to see a film, buys the
ticket, but doesnt go inside the theater. Why? None of these questions are answered in the film.
See Lutz for a proper evaluation of this rather strange case.
384
727

security of home and patriarchal supervision in the cold outside world is deeply offensive and
reprehensible. But in Lutzs opinion, Unorthodox sexual practices have positive consequences
in a number of Kluges films. In The Power of Emotion, a rapist brings an almost dead woman
back to life. In Die Patriotin, a Peeping Tom is befriended and given vision tips by his victim.
Leni Peickert, in Artistsen, seems most at ease with the man who seduced her as a child. Only by
breaking with social norms does sexuality seem to be reinvested with a healing or creative
power.729 Furthermore, Perverse sexuality can, however, have salutary consequences, as in the
revival of a young woman through necrophilia.730 Kluges unorthodox representation of sexual
practices and its healing power to rejuvenate or bring back the victim to life is perhaps nowhere
more clearly represented as in The Assault of the Present, but its not limited to unorthodox
sexual practices, as we shall see in Die Macht der Gefhle (The Power of Emotion), where a
dead Yugoslav merchant is brought back to life with the power of cooperation (a more positive
example if a man is involved). However, in The Assault of the Present, in a direct homage to
Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose (1980), the novel and not the film, and perhaps an
inspiration to Almodovars Talk to Her (2002), a young Franciscan monk in charge of keeping a
vigil to a dead girls body indulges in necrophilia which has a positive outcome, as the rape not
only brings her back to life but also impregnates her. Obviously one should not interpret this
scene literally. Since the necrophilia is preceded by a lecture on Lumires cinematograph
followed by a scene from L'arrive d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of the Train at
La Ciotat Station, 1895), the rape is a metaphor for the violence of cinema that brings dead
729
730

Lutz, p. 235, n.4.

Lutz, p. 150.
385

things (images/photographs) to life. Christian Metz, in Film Language, points out the difference
between a photographic image and a cinematographic image, where he takes Barthess definition
of the photograph as has been there, while in the cinema the image is brought to life through
movement.731 By coupling with the corpse the young novice creates movement inside the dead
body that like the cinematic image responds with signs of life from within. This is one of the
possible readings that can, perhaps, redeem the otherwise highly unusual episode. The frequent
recourse (mostly graphic in nature) to rape has a distinct status in Kluges oeuvre. The person
who is raped is normally saved from death by the vicious act. It is a blessing in disguise, a life
affirming act, an elixir. Whether dead or alive the sexual assault brings the woman often back to
her consciousness and fertility, even conscience.
Another bizarre incident takes place in The Power of Emotion in a section called: Saved
by the guilt of another This time we are informed by Kluges sotto voce that a woman has been
dumped by her lover and she does not want to live anymore. The scene depicts the woman
slumped over the steering wheel of her car after ingesting a whole bottle of sleeping pills. In the
next shot we are introduced to a middle aged salesman driving through the city of Frankfurt and
coming across the womans parked car. He takes the woman out of the car and walks her around
till she vomits. After that he drives off with her in his car to a secluded wooded area where he
rapes her. He is caught in the act by the police who have been informed by another man who has
been spying through a pair of binoculars while the rape was going on. The salesman is sent to the
jail and we are given privy to his cell where he is locked up. A close up of the raped woman with
731

Christian Metz, Film Language: The Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 4-8.
386

Kluges voiceover: Saved by guilt of another (Gerettet durch fremde Schuld). Kluges
voiceover now over the prisoner: To make things worse for the rescuer, the judge is just crazy
about rapists. A sentence less than 5 years is out of the question (Jetzt kommt fr den Vertreter
hinzu, da die zustndige Richterin ganz wild auf Vergewaltiger zu sein schient. Unter fnf
Jahren Gefngnis ist da berhaupt nichts zu Machen). Before I go to the trail, I would like to
point out that Kluge uses the word rescuer or savior for the rapist and shows a keen sense of
sympathy by acknowledging him as a rescuer for bringing the woman back from death, a Christlike figure. This theme of bringing the dead back to life is persistent theme in Kluge and its final
utopian denouement occurs in the last scene of the film which I will come to in a moment. The
true dialectical nature of the argument (rapist or rescuer?) will be revealed in the trial. Here I
present the proceedings:
Female Judge (Richterin): I ask you in all seriousness: your feelings were not violated
by the defendant, who, on the one hand, is your rescuer, and on the other your assailant?
(Zeugin, ich frage Sie ernstlich: Es hat Ihrem Gefhl nichts ausgemaacht, von dem Angeklagten,
der einerseitss Ihr Retter, andereseits Ihr Notzchtiger ist, vergewaltigt zu warden?)
Lets try an interpretation of this sentence. Is this a throwback to the United States liberating
Germans from Hitler (who had let the wolf back in the house, using the fairy tale analogy from
The Wolf and the Seven Kids) and destroying their culture on the other hand? I also wonder
whether the title of the episode Saved by the guilt of the other is a camouflaged reference to
the creation of the independent state of Israel. Lets go back to the trial.
Witness (Zeugin): I am under oath. At the time, I had no feelings whatsoever. I was
unconscious. Accordingly I must declare my neutrality.
387

(Ich spreche hier unter eid. Also hatte ich zu diesem Zeitpunkt berhaupt kein Gefhl. Ich
war bewutlos. Insofern mu ich mich fr neutral erklren.)
Judge: What does that mean?
(Was soll da heisen?)
Witness: That my lovers callousness and cunning hits me harder than the behavior of
the defendant, which I didnt even notice.
(Da mich die Verstocktheit und Gerrisenheit des p., meines Geliiebten, der mich
weggeworgfen hat, hrter trifft, als die handlungsweise des Angeklagten, die ich gar nict
bemerkte.)
Judge: That is impossible
(So geht das nichts)
Witness: Im not sure.
(Ich wei nichts, ob daas so geht)732
In the same film, a sequence called The Shot (Der Schuss), a woman defends the act of incest
by her husband against her young daughter as an act of love. The word shot plays on the two
meanings in that being both a component of the film and the gun that fires a shot. In fact, the
word shot in the cinematic lexicon derives from the physiologist tienne-Jules Mareys
famous chronophotographic gun that he invented in 1882 to capture through animated
photography animal and human motion. The camera was constructed like a gun, hence translated
as cinema gun, with a magazine mounted on top of it which contained 12 chambers of
photographic plates, and when the camera was aimed at an object and the trigger was pulled the
silver nitrate plates rotated within the chamber producing 12 different photographic images in a
succession that gave the impression of the object in motion. But the shot despite its ambiguity in
Kluges film doesnt refer to the cinematic gun but to an actual gun that the woman used to fire a

732

Kluge, Die Macht Der Gefhle, p. 102.

388

shot at her husband. But because of her ineptness it resulted in her shooting herself in the thigh
before she aimed at her husband. The whole point of this long scene is supposed to be comic, the
misalignment of the weapon and the target,733 but turned out to be also deceptively misogynistic.
Here is a full transcript of the proceeding that takes place in a court room where the charges are
brought against the woman for shooting her husband, which she defends was an accident and not
an act of vengeance or anger, for she loves her husband and her daughter.
Prosecutor: How did you feel when you came back from USA that your husband raped
(vergewaltigt) you daughter?
The woman defends her husband who raped her daughter.
She says: Technically it wasnt a rape, because he didnt ejaculate into her.
Prosecutor: But he touched her, although he didnt ejaculate.
She: He did the next night.
Prosecutor: Thats not mentioned in the file. How did you react?
She: Not at all.
Prosecutor: Why?
She: I had no one to talk to.
Prosecutor: You didnt ask your husband?
She: I tried.
Prosecutor: His reply?
She: Nothing.
Prosecutor: What about your daughter?
She: She doesnt talk to me. Not at all.
Prosecutor: Were you shocked or enraged by your daughters rape?
She: No.
Prosecutor: What was your emotional reaction?
She: Its hard to say. I am not jealous.
Prosecutor: But it was a terrible thing.
She: Yes.
Prosecutor: Your husband raped his own daughter!
She: With her consent. Theyre very close.
Prosecutor: What were you? If you werent shocked or jealous?
She: Envious.
Prosecutor: You loved your husband?
She: I love him, and my daughter too.
733

Elsaesser, pp. 187-188.

389

Prosecutor: So your deed has no connection to the incidents between your daughter and
your husband?
She: No. And my shot was not a deed.
Prosecutor: What was it?
She: A shot.
Prosecutor: A shot that hits a persons chest is not a deed?
She: No, not a deed. An accident (Vorfall).
Prosecutor: Perhaps a lapse?
She: What do you mean?
Prosecutor: What Im getting at is this: Because of your daughters rape, the year of
drunkenness on the part of your husband, whom you loved however, you reacted to the
act of incest with envy, You blew a fuse, so to speak.
She: My fuses were okay.
Prosecutor: You had to open the screen door, turn a rifle a rifle aroundyou shot
yourself, turned the rifle around again, and shot your husband as if you had aimed. An
enormous number of deeds, a surplus of facts. And you are saying that the chain of
events, even if we assume the shot in your leg was not premeditated though precisely
there you claim you had same intention, was not a deed, not an act, whereas, on the other
hand, you claim that your fuses were okay. I find this confusing.
She: So do I, when you put it like that.
Prosecutor: So whats wrong with your statement?
She: Nothings wrong.
Prosecutor: You wanted to fire a shot in order to say something. But you didnt know
what. What would enrage any normal person and would be a motive for confusion,
namely the rape, didnt enrage you. You claim one doesn't kill out of envy. Then why did
it happen? It would be to your advantage to be confused at the time of the crime instead
of now.
She: I dont deny that it happened.
Prosecutor: You can't very well do that.
She: It was not a rape, but a love affair in unusual circumstances. And I would like to
testify again that I would never kill for personal reasons. (Es war, wie ich sage, auch
keine Verrgewaltigung zwischen beiden, sondern ein Liebesverhltnis unter besonderen
Umstndendas auch persnlichen Grnden niemals einen Menschen tten wrde,
schon gaar nicht meinen Man.)
Prosecutor What do you mean testify again? You have never testified to that effect.
She: Then I will now.
Fade out.
I would like to suggest that the entire episode is highly problematic due to the nature of
the crime and the womans insistence that she doesnt blame her husband for raping her
390

daughter, nor she accepts the charges of incest, but condones the act as a matter of love affair
between two consenting individuals. But the larger point that Kluge is trying to make here is
different. He is leading toward the idea that the womans act of shooting her husband was a
protest and not a crime: she simply wanted to shut him up by the loud bang. But even then, he is
guilty of making the woman participate in her own humiliation and abjectness where she finds
herself unloved and blames herself and not her drunken husband who has been guilty of what
would be, technically in any court of law, considered a routine case of rape (if the daughter is a
minor) or an incestuous crime. None of that is as important for Kluge as showing the absolute
idiocy of the woman in failing to protect her own right. Not only that she didnt want to fire the
gun, which she did, but before she could fire the gun in protest (one doesnt know what is she
protesting about since she has already accepted the sexual relationship between her husband and
her daughter as a love affair of which she is envious), she shot herself literally and
metaphorically in the foot. It is, thus, her total ineptness as a woman to use a rifle properly, or,
metaphorically speaking, to make an argument pointedly, which in toto constitutes the whole
lesson of this trial.
There are many statements here that would be deemed objectionable from a womans
point of view. Kluge puts forward his theory for the proper categorization or definition of rape as
ejaculation and not penetration. Besides that Kluge is interested in making a political point as
opposed to a criminal one, but he wraps himself in too thick a veil of misogyny. Here he violates
so many ethical and political boundaries that the entire sequence appears to have been created to
fostering a great deal of anti-feminist rhetoric (in which rape and incest are trivial matters to a
391

womans real vocation, that is, love) in the garb of cleaver and quirky intellectual quips by a man
who seems to really have no clue as to what is to be a woman in a patriarchal culture. It makes a
whole lot of sense when Helke Sanders criticizes Kluge by suggesting that his own attitude
towards woman is arrested in 1529, before Copernicus changed the idea that the sun still
revolved around the earth and male was in gods image, the focus of creation734 (emphasis
added). In this particular case of the womans trial for shooting her husband, Kluge wants us to
believe that the woman is standing for her rights by fighting every accusations that the
prosecutor levels against her without realizing that her replies are actually made not to defend
her status as a victim but to defend the masculine culture of violence, rape, and incest in society.
Kluge makes the court room legal proceedings appear to be violating the womans rights, her
autonomy to bear witness to her trauma on her own terms, but, as a matter of fact, he is doing
quite the opposite. If anything, the prosecutor seems to be defending the womans right more
than she who is actually being complicit in her guilt (the originary guilt of being a woman, as an
agent of castration anxiety) through an act of defiance that doesnt allow her to properly judge
her extremely precarious situation of possibly being convicted for attempted murder. She does
not put up any reasonable defense for her act by accepting that she shot her husband accidently
when she only wanted to scare him and thereby register her protest. Why she was not represented
by a lawyer if it was an attempted murder case, or, given any legal counsel for protecting her
self-interest and thereby not incriminate herself? Kluge is a trained lawyer and what he gets

734

Helke Sander, You Cant Always Get What You Want, p. 68..
392

through this mock trial is a mockery of trial that has no basis in reality and is therefore useless
for any pedagogical or political matter.
IX. Conclusion
Kluge took his Abschied von film in his 1985 film, The Assault of the Present. Kluge,
who has a fondness for making Cassandra like statements, prophesizing the future in a
semblance of dialectical propositions, claimed the demise of the cinema with the advent of the
New Media. In the screenplay, Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die brige Zeit (The Assault of
the Present on the Rest of Time) Kluge remarks that this is a film about film. He refers to the
cinema as the power station of emotion in the twentieth-century, but fears that it may not
survive much longer: I would not be prepared to divorce myself from the illusion that the
cinema, to which I have dedicated so much of my work time, will move victoriously into the 21st
century. The notion allows me to deal realistically with the dangers that threaten the film, the
phenomenon of the so-called new media. One abandons an old illusion as one constructs a new
one. (Ich wre z. B. selber nicht bereit, mich von der Illusion zu trennen, da das Kino, dem ich
breite Teile meiner Arbeitszeit widme, siegesgewohnt in das 12. Jahrundert einzieht. Diese
Vorstellung ermglicht es mir, mich realistisch mit den Gefahren, die dem Film drohen, den
Phnomenon der sog. neuen Media, zu befassen. Man verlt also eine ltere Illusion, indem
man sich eine neue bildet).735 If anything, the New Media not only resurrected his career but
have advanced the cause of independent cinema more vigorously through private funding from
campaign driven pitches online resources like Vimeo, Kickstarter, Crossroads, indiegogo, slated,

735

Kluge, Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die brige Zeit, p. 13. Cited by Lutz, p. 236, n. 24.
393

and other private equity funds, banks, individual donors, etc. Kluge has always put forward
strategies for historical abstraction, in the sense of organizing the labor power with a view to the
future so one can avoid the looming and apparent disasters. On the occasion of the award of the
Fontane Prize for literature, which Kluge received in 1979, he addressed the problem in his
speech as follow: Fontane...didnt know the bombing raids that many Berliners can still feel in
their bones. In that situation, if one puts it graphically, there are always two strategies--a strategy
from above and a strategy from below. Clausewitz wrote a certain amount about strategy from
above, which is the strategy the bomber command has, and the bomber command has got the
means for it as well. Strategy from below would be what the woman with two children down in a
cellar could do to oppose the bombing.736 We must make it clear to ourselves that, if this
relationship of person/bomb in the emergency is the model of how our modern world intends to
deal with people and if we don't want to deceive ourselves in times of peace or apparent peace
about the fact that this is precisely the point of the emergency, then we must ask ourselves
whether there are reasons which makes us satisfied with meager means of a strategy from below
in the emergency. The problem is that the woman in the bomb-cellar in 1944, for example, has
no means at all to defend herself at the moment. She might perhaps have had means in 1928 if
she organized with others before the development which then moves towards Papen,
Schleicher, and Hitler. So the question of organization is located in 1928, and the requisite

736

Kluge actually filmed the sequence of the strategy from above, the Allied bombing squad, and
the strategy from below, the women, Gerda Beathe, praying with her two children in the bomb
shelter, in The Patriot.
394

consciousness is located in 1944.737 For Kluge, modern history consists of these images of
strategies from above, which is the perspective of technology and power.738
Given the foresight that Kluge proposes for the preparedness for dealing with everyday
reality in the state of emergency in this particular speech, but did he prepare a counter movement
to prevent the future disaster that awaited the fate of the New German Cinema in not so distant
future? Almost all Federal fundings of films in the 1960s in Asia, Africa, Latin and South
America, by which national cinemas were created by bureaucratic powers to counter the cultural
and economic domination of Hollywood films failed one by one due to the changes in the
internal political dynamics, where the liberal or left-wing governments were replaced by more
business friendly right-wing centrist governments. A case in point would be the New Cinema or
Parallel Cinema that arose in India, like the New German Cinema, in the late 1960s, as an
alternative to the flashy and artificial worlds of romances and violence of the popular Hindi
films of Bombay (now knowns as Mumbai). The films were financed by loans from Film
Finance Corporations (FFC) for the low budget quality films based on social and economic
issues confronting the modern India in the post-Nehru era. The New Cinema took lessons from
Neorealism and used locations and even non actors, rejected the Bollywood genres, adopted the
concept the auteur cinema from the French Nouvellle Vague, used Brechtian distantiation and
followed the rigor of realistic cinema.739 Despite the fact that it opened up new possibilities for

737

Alexander Kluge, The Political as Intensity of Everyday Feelings, trans. Andrew Bowie,
Cultural Critique (Nov. 1986): 127.
738
Bowie, Alexander Kluge: An Introduction, p. 113.
739
See Gerald Mast and Bruce Kawin, A Short History of the Movies, Tenth Edition (New York:
Pearson Longman, 2008), p. 491.
395

women filmmakers like Aparna Sen and Mira Nair, the movement virtually came to an end by
the late 1980s. For more than a decade the Indian public got a taste of quality independent films
by filmmakers like Mrinal Sen (Bhuvan Shome, 1969), Shyam Benegal (Ankur, 1974), Mani
Kaul (Uski Roti, 1969), Govind Nihalani (Aakrosh, 1980), Kumar Shahani (Maya Darpan,
1972), Ketan Mehta (Mirch Masala, 1986) etc. Many of the auteurs like Benegel, Nihalani,
Mehta would later join the commercial popular Hindi cinema produced by the Bombay film
studios.740 Similar fate could be attributed to the rise and fall of the national cinemas across the
globe, from Africa to Latin and South America. In this sense, both the French Nouvelle Vague
and the New German Cinema were products of their times when the idea of nationalism was still
historically relevant and culture was still defined in the narrow indigenous term as opposed to the
global cultural phenomenon that now defines the mode of production of many European
cinemas.
I would suggest that Kluge the visionary artist has failed time and again but his
predictions have not stopped. He made a number of statements regarding television in the
seventies and the New Media in the eighties as the primary cause that will destroy the cinema,
but he has been proven wrong. In his films and his short stories Kluge has pointed out the
incommensurability of the strategy from above with strategy from below. Did this foresight, the
organization of future struggle with a retrospective glance at the pile of debris, completely
missed the opportunity to forewarn his own enterprise of the New German Cinema that he had

740

The funding for short and feature films are still available through National film and
Development Corporation (NFDC) which was established in 1975 for a limited number of
filmmakers in India.
396

helped to install which by his own effort would collapse in the mid-Eighties? Did Kluge put
enough strategic insight into his plans that he had led with such enthusiasm? The success of the
New German Cinema was an international success but it made hardly any impression on the
domestic market. As a theoretician Kluge has been very successful, but as a visionary and as an
activist for heralding a new cultural scene he has been and always will be first and foremost an
utopian and not a realist.
Kluges revision of German history and national identity is erroneous in its assumption that
a discourse can be constructed around a certain principle, precisely, because it has been neglected so
far. If Germans have a nation, then how can they be denied of an identity? The question of a nation
and the question of an identity are intertwined within the politics of such discourse. Yet what one
claims as necessary condition for the other, that nation without an identity is historically
inadmissible and lay claim to historicity of such facticity; a national identity is basically the essence
of historicity. Some such thoughts of historicity were always to be found in the philosophy of
Martin Heidegger. But curiously enough, in Kluges and Negts writings, the appeal to historicity is
completely submerged within vast surface of historical narrative. As if suddenly history has become
a powerful mediation of various historical stories, a vast surface of stories, a blank page that records
the infinite variations of protests and struggles, of failures of emotions and feelings, because they
were not strong enough to join in the protest of the narrative structure.
Kluge argues for a national identity with the help of a history which belongs to the forces of
construction. He wonders how a people can have history if the power of that history is weakened by
the past. The robust model of history forms the transition to utopia. One cannot build a positive
397

identity of a nation and its people with the help of a weak power of history. A strong nation needs a
strong history. Thus the challenge of the present times is to change the weak power of history by
empowering it with stronger concepts of wishes and desires of a protestful energy, which battles
with the crippling forces of the past representations of history that hinders the people from
recognizing anything positive in it. Thus for the people to engage in the transformation of history so
that it can be reorganized for the use of building future, it is necessary, then, to organize this history
in a way that its face no longer resembles a singular identity, but an unique identity which is
composed of many wishes and fantasies. Nation, for it to actually exist, does not always require a
geographical boundary. There are examples of nations that have existed in exile and diaspora or
simply in the mind of a people for a very long time.741 Some nations do not bodily exist as yet, but
they exist spiritually, nonetheless. For Kluge the history of a nation cannot be single mindedly
determined by its failure to protest, by its complicityfor it is not history but some people who
have corrupted the process. But then what is the basis of Kluges so-called principle of reorganizing
the whole corpus, the entire body of history, from spiritual to corporeal, in a manner that in its
defense it must refuse to identify itself fully with some action, which, for that matter, is already been
formulated as a mistake? Should history correct its own mistake by correcting the mistakes of the
other?
To conclude, AKluges films are an ongoing dialogue with the identity of German
history, between the reality of everyday experience and its ever-present antagonism with German
history. His films deal with history in an imaginary vein, through dreams against the logic of
741

See Ernest Renan, What is a Nation?, Nation and. Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha
(London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 8-22.
398

meaning, through playful manipulation; he sets up his images as a gigantic collection of

heterogeneous materialsan order of reality which he calls history. Kluges historiography
rejects the narrative thread of the conventional cinema of Hollywood, which follows the official
project of logical continuity; he reveals the inadequacy of such projects to confront the
peculiarities of a history, especially of German history.742 His redemptive project of history is
constituted through the stories of the failures, parapraxes (Fehlleistungen), as Elsaesser puts it;
the failures of the gigantic project (ganzliche ausbau) of fascist ideology of aestheticizing
politics.743 Against such enormous historical errors of judgment, Kluge posits the small but
determined hope of Gabi Teicherts Brechtian tomorrow against the eternity of yesterday.
Although one cannot truly say farewell to yesterday, but tomorrow doesnt have to be a
continuity of yesterdays old song.744 A better tomorrow is the utopian notion of Kairos that
exists in its dis-temporality, in its failure to continue, in the gaps and the fissures of Cronos.745
Thus, in order to avoid the fate of a nation from the catastrophic project of the nation
building of Hitler and Speers utopian wishes for the eternity of yesterday, the longing for
742

Sinha, The Intertwining of Memory and History, p. 348.

Benjamin, The Work of Art, p. 242,
744
The last shot of Die Patriotin shows a hopeful Gabi Teichert on the new years day looking
outside the window as the snow is falling, while Beethovens 9th symphony is played in the
background, and the film ends with a quote from Bertolt Brecht:
Tausend Jahre fiel der Tau morgen
bleibt era us,
Sterne treten ungenau
in ein neues Haus.
(The dew has fallen for 1,000 years
Tomorrow it will stop.
Stars disorderly enter a new house.)
745
There is a long discourse of the Greek pedagogy of the Kairos and the Cronos in The Assault
of the Present on the Rest of Time.
399
743

Cronoss power to transform history into the eternity of mythology, Kluge proposes the
strategies from below for the small victories of Kairos, of the moment that escapes the grasp of
the chronological time slowly flowing into eternity. 746 Like Schleich and Knautsch-Betty in The
Power of Emotion, Kluge clings to the hopes and methods of the non-despairing couple for
bringing life to an already dead organism through persistence and imaginative solutions. And by
jumpstarting the stalled motor of the powerhouse of feelings and emotions (the operatic motifs in
his films), whose connections (zusammenhang) have been weakened by the corroded cables,
he hopes for the transfusion of those utopian longings and fantasies, that still lie buried beneath
the surface like archaeological relics, into the veins of the atrophied body of a nation. To be sure,
it is impossible to say farewell to history in our everyday politics, but, history does not have to be
seized by the spirit of Cronos, the chronological time. Kairos, on the other hand, represents a
concept of time that comes quickly and goes after a moment; it exists only for a moment and it
does not wait for man. But what neither Cronos nor Kairos can do is to reverse time, to undo
what has been done. But for the truth to be visible it must also endure in time (Chrono

746

The strategy from below needs time, and it must be carried out with all means, for it to be
successful. Kluge named the three organs Pedagogie, Press and Politic, and stressed the
democratic character of these movements from below. The strategy from above is abstract and
functions as a factory (Fabrik); the strategy from below must turn around itself individually in
its strength (krft), must make an effort (Versuchen), to mobilize against the real danger. The
resistance against violence and for the prevention of war (which Gerta Baethe was helpless to
prevent) could have opened up a new a strategical perspective only if the well-brought up
children had seized the reins (Zepter or Zgel ergreifen). These images stem out of
preindustrial time (vorindustriellen Zeitalter) and is the process of a direct mastery of practice
(Herrschaftsausbung), that is that the abstract power relationship (Gewalt-verhltnis) of the
objects of Halberstadt are, in the same way, less attainable as the wishes of Baethe. Without the
individual power of practice (Machtausbung) the strategy from below cannot be successful.
The necessary keyword is organization. Ulrike Bosse, p. 201. Translation mine.
400

thygater). This is the lesson of history that Kluge provides in Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die
brige Zeit (The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time) in relation to the paradoxical element
of temporality in Greek mythology: the eternity of Cronos, of evolutionary history, and the
transitoriness or momentariness of Kairos. Kluges redemptive history is not the grand rcit but
the minoritarian literature of Deleuze and Guattari.747 His films deterritorialize and map the
collective history of a people from a marginal position by making it impossible the usual
reception of German identity (by the others) in the New German Cinema as either German
Romanticism or German fascism. What else is the history of a country but the vastest
narrative surface of all? Not one story but many stories? (Was ist die Geschichte eines lands
anderes, als die weiteste Erzhlfche berhaupt?) These stories in his films are not consistent or
continuous; they are a vertiginous collage of many fragmented and disrupted stories which are
linked together in free association. Kluges films do not reconstruct the past: they deal with
history from the perspective of the present (Kairos) against the rest of the time (Cronos).

747

Deleuze and Guattari, What is a Minor Literature?, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature,
trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 16-27.
401

CHAPTER 4
Memories of a Catastrophe: Trauma and the Name in Mira Nairs The Namesake (2006)748
What does one call thus? What does one understand under the name of name? And what occurs
when one gives a name? What does one give then? One does not offer a thing, one delivers
nothing, and still something comes to be, which comes down to giving that which one does not
have. Derrida749
Introduction
At the end of last millennium, starting in the early 1990s, the experiences of migrant and
displaced populations around the globe began taking on an unprecedented urgency in the critical
discourse of diaspora and memory in the works of many of the South Asian filmmakers of Indian
origin, especially women filmmakers, such as Mira Nair, Gurinder Chadha, Deepa Mehta, and
Pratibha Parmar. Their films, made in both North America and Britain, have been primarily
engaged with the notion of the diaspora as a mode of cultural production: a place of
contestation and negotiation for the production of cultural identity in a globalized world.750
The politics of identity in the South Asian diaspora is strategically employed by these
transnational filmmakers in their numerous films. By emphasizing transnational identities that
are mostly invisible or sublimated in the dominant culture, Mira Nair and others have
successfully managed to decouple the discourse of diaspora from its uncritical allegiance to the
essentialist dogma of the homeland and have returned to narratives that primarily engage with
748

Published in Millennium Cinema: Memory in Global Film, ed. Amresh Sinha & Terence
McSweeney (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 117-138.
749
Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. David Wood et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995), p. 30.
750
Yasmin Hussain, Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, Culture and Ethnicity (Hampshire,
England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2005), p. 6.
402

the marginalized and racialized politics of the nation-state of the host country. Their
deconstructive strategy signals the end of the symbolic vestige of Indian national
consciousness, a consciousness predicated upon the emergence of the nation that views itself
symbolically in eternal terms.
Nairs quest for a proper cinematic representation of the naming of the diasporas in exile
and minority groups, especially the politics and language of multicultural identity but not
necessarily limited to a stable South Asian identity, persists throughout her oeuvre, from
Mississippi Masala (1992) (Indian diaspora displaced from Africa to Mississippi) and The Perez
Family (1995) (Cuban refugees in Florida) to Monsoon Wedding (2001) (homecoming of Indian
transnationals). The Namesake, adapted from the novel of the same name by the Pulitzer Prize
winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri, represents the complex saga of intergenerational trauma and
trans(nationalism) of an Indian Bengali family, the Gangulis, who have transplanted themselves
from Calcutta to Cambridge, Massachusetts. The husband, Ashoke Ganguli, a professor at
M.I.T., lives with his newlywed pregnant wife, Ashima. Ashoke belongs to a generation of
Indian immigrants, who were educated in India but due to heavy unemployment and poverty in
the 1960s left mainly for England or America for better employment opportunities.751

751

This phenomenon of educated youth leaving their country for jobs abroad is known in India
as the Brain Drain. A great number of highly educated Indians, doctors, engineers, professors,
scientists, etc., left India for the United Kingdom or the United States in the late 1960s, a period
on intense unemployment and economic stagnation. Although the fact is that a very marginal,
miniscule percentage of Indians have settled in America, a mere 4.3 percent of total graduates in
India (checked in year 2000). The perception indicates that it has a huge impact on the Indian
psyche.
403

The Indian transnational diasporic community, historically speaking, has not been
subjected to the same level of racism and violence in the United States as the South Asian
diaspora in England (where the migratory process began in the 1950s) well documented in My
Beautiful Launderette (Stephen Frears, 1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Stephen Frears,
1987), The Buddha of Suburbia (Roger Mitchell, 1993), and My Son the Fanatic (Udayan
Prasad, 1997). In the United States, it has been mostly defined, which is to say, named, by the
difference of its rich cultural and linguistic heritage. The persistent lack of power of the South
Asian diaspora to name itself within its own multiplicity and diversity is further compounded by
the dominant (American) cultural institutions that resist the insertion of the unpronounceable
names of the Indian bourgeoisie in the mainstream culture. As a minority community in a
foreign nation, the Indian immigrant bourgeoisie experiences the loss of its power of exnomination. Where once it stood for the no-name universal in the nation of its origin, it now
perceives itself (and is perceived) to be in a position defined by difference. It now risks being
named.752 The immigrant would rather sink in the darkness of anonymity in which the tenuous
relationship with his/her own identity and past shall never be revealed. The motto is: No need to
draw attention to oneself. The dominant ideology hails (to use an Althusserian image) the model
immigrant thus: you are granted permission to stay here as a model immigrant, but you will

752

Anannya Bhattacharjee, The Habit of Ex-Nomination: Nation, Woman, and the Indian
Immigrant Bourgeoisie, A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Woman in America, ed.
Shamita Das Dasgupta (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998), p. 165.
404

never be really one of us so stay on guard and on display as an approved, tokenized prototype,
for other potential and future immigrants to model themselves after.753
The film mostly avoids the usual juxtaposition of Indian diaspora and the antagonistic
host culture in which the latter continues to marginalize the former. Though there are some racial
tensions in the film between the South Asian migrants and the local racist elements, the film does
not make that as its essential theme. The second generation immigrants, in some sense, occupy a
space of culture more fraught with their own identity crisis (hyphenated or hybridized), in which
home and the world are no longer separate entities but are united in their opposition. Unlike the
first generation of transnationals, who live in one space in absence of the other, as naturalized
citizens, the second generation in the United States has rights of citizenship that far exceed the
civic rights of his/her transplanted first generation parents. The first generation lives at home
deprived of the world, shunned from outside and hermetically sealed off. Outside in the world,
the home exists in its complete absence, having no cultural space of its own except in the
marginalia of the diaspora.
In more than one way, Nair contests the essentialist notion of Indianness, that is,
ontologising of the conceptual, as a form of identity that transcends all the regional, religious,
and linguistic differences.754 What is particularly relevant here is the understanding that instead
of magically uniting under the banner of Indianness, the individual identity, whether it is

753

Cited in Samir Dayal, Diaspora and Double Consciousness, The Journal of the Midwest
Modern Language Association, vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 50.
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315257 (accessed January 1, 2009).
754
David Schalkwyk, Whats in a name?: Derrida, Apartheid, and the Logic of the Proper
Name, Language Science, vol 22, no. 2 (2000): 179.
405

defined by the name of expatriate, immigrant, transnational, postcolonial, second

generation, etc., should not be ex-nominated for the sake of a collective, hegemonic national
identity. Similarly, it can be said that the politics of identity in The Namesake is not completely
wrapped up in the nationalist politics of the Indian bourgeoisie, either here in the diaspora or
back at home. Instead of girding in Gandhis loin cloth, the Indian immigrant, the educated
bourgeois, is expressing his identity by wrapping himself in Gogols overcoat.
Trauma, Memory, and Name
The novel begins with an epigraph from Gogols famous short story The Overcoat:
The reader should realize himself that it could not have happened otherwise, and that to give
him any other name was quite out of the question.755 The premise of the story is based upon the
decision of Gogols parents, Ashima and Ashoke, to postpone the decision of naming their first
baby. The decision to name later is due to a simple fact that they are awaiting a letter from the
babys great-grandmother which contains two names, one for a boy and the other for a girl.
These names have not been revealed to anyone. In Ashimas family, it is a tradition for the
grandmother to choose the name of the newborn in her family. Thus, Ashoke and Ashima
decline to fill out the birth certificate form in deference to the letter that was supposed to arrive
soon. The hospital, however, will not allow the release of the patient and the baby without the
couple signing the name of the baby on the birth certificate. Despite their protestation to the
hospital staff that they are waiting for the babys name to arrive from India and thus they cant

755

The epigraph is absent in the film.

406

name him yet, they are forced to give him a name, and Ashoke, the father, chooses Gogol, his
favorite Russian author.
The Naming Ceremony, Namakaran Samskara in Sanskrit, absent in the novel and in the
film (like all cultural loss in a foreign land), is replaced by an absent letter.756 Unlike Derridas la
carte postale, Ashokes grandmothers letter that contains the secret name(s) of the baby doesnt
arrive until the end of the film. Instead something of an extraordinary nature takes place in The
Namesake. The father or the fathers law, or name, crystallized in the name of Gogol, is
privileged over the (grand)mothers law, the mothers name. The relationship between the law
and the name, the logogram, the letter or symbol that represents the word, the name, is deferred,
delayed, in its arrival. How do we read this letter, sort of providentially delayed, mysteriously
absent, forever traveling and never reaching its destiny? Just like any other word which can
never reach or exhaust itself in only one meaning? The infinite possibility of names in this letter
is a threat to the fathers legacy, which has acquired a completely transformed meaning. The
father and son trade a secret in the form of a covenant to which the name of Gogol bears both
testimony and responsibility. The fact that the letter never comes to its proper destination as
opposed to the forgotten book, the gift, that is eventually found and accepted by the son,
clearly establishes the destined role of a fathers command.

756

Namkaran is the traditional Hindu Indian practice of naming the baby child. Nama means
name and karana means to make, to effect. The Naming ceremony depends on the culture,
religion, rituals and education of the family. The naming ceremony or Namakaran is an
important Samskara (rite) in the life of a Hindu baby. People consult elders and priests for
naming their baby.
407

One must also take into account as to how the neme, the philology and etymology of the
proper noun of Gogol appears in figural as well as referential (i.e., peformative) terms. The name
of Gogol is presented as an overarching metaphor, like the bridges (Hawrah Bridge in Calcutta
and Queensboro Bridge in New York) in the film, that spans the two continents. As a marked
and loaded signifier, this ur-phenomenon Gogol is both the name and the story. The
traumatic moment (a near fatal train accident experienced by Ashoke) marks the presence of the
book (literally a lifesaver) whose authors name stamps its signature on this terrifying moment
that will haunt him for the rest of his life. The struggle is explicitly formulated upon the
consequences of a name that a father gives to his so
The son, Gogol, now in college where he is forced to confront his namesake in a
literature class, finds his own name eviscerating (each time the name is uttered, he quietly
winces), thoroughly humiliating, for it reminds him of his namesake, who starved himself to
death in self-exile.757 It dismays him that his parents chose the weirdest namesake. Leo or
Anton. He could have lived with. Alexander, shortened to Alex, he would have greatly preferred.
But Gogol sounds ludicrous to his ear, lacking dignity or gravity. What dismays him most is the
irrelevance of it all.758 To him, the name not only signifies the utter ridiculousness of his
existence as someone who he is not (thats not really me), but also denies him the possibility of
assimilation and anonymity because of the constitutive difference, that is, the inferential and

757

Lahiri, p. 91.Nair refuses to deal with the history of Gogols twelve year self-exile after a
lukewarm reception of his comic play, The Government Inspector, in Paris, Rome and elsewhere.
Jhumpa Lahiri is quick to point that out and she clearly sees a parallel between Ashokes selfexile with his favorite authors.
758
Ibid., p. 76.
408

referential claims, of his proper name from any other common noun.759 To a young and
impressionistic Gogol, his name sounds ridiculous, idiotic, and perhaps even marks the end of
any possibility of future romantic entanglements. He can only blame his parents for afflicting
him with a weird name (signifying absolute otherness) that he cannot bear to bear. The
conflict, the generational conflict, which is also the conflict of cultures within a culture, is played
out in the struggle for the son to accept his fathers heritage which is symbolized in the name.
The name Gogol, therefore, signifies both displacement and trauma, yet, it also has a provisional
status of a pet name that has become permanent, and it cannot be subsumed by the good
name that one inherits from the traditional Namakaran (Naming Ceremony) ritual deeply rooted
in the Hindu culture.
In the Hindu/Bengali tradition the identity of an infant is not necessarily officially
established till the child enters the social life, i.e., school. The naming process in Hinduism is
both culturally and sociologically different from most European and American cultures in which
the infants name is officially consecrated in the birth certificate. In India, the author Lahiri
writes, names can wait.760 Most parents normally take their time before naming their children.
It wasnt unusual for years to pass before the right name, the best possible name, was
determined....Besides, there are always names to tide one over: a practice of Bengali
nomenclature grants, to every single person, two names. In Bengali the word for pet
name is daknam, meaning, literally the name by which one is called by friends, family,
and other intimates, at home and in other private, unguarded moments. Pet names are a
persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal,
so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people. They all
have pet names Every pet name is paired with a good name, a bhalonam, for
identification in the outside world. Consequently, good names appear on envelopes, on
759
760

Ibid., p. 89.
Ibid., p. 25.
409

diplomas, in telephone directories, and in all other public places Good names tend to
represent dignified and enlightened qualities ... Pet names have no such aspirations. Pet
names are never recorded officially, only uttered and remembered. Unlike good names,
pet names are frequently meaningless, deliberately silly, ironic and even
onomatopoetic.761
The Namesake traces the journey of the pet name Gogola provisional or supplemental name
as it is transformed into the good name and to the ultimate revelation that to give him any
other name was quite out of the question, as Nikolai Gogol wrote of his protagonist Akaky
Akakyevich in The Overcoat. But the political aspect of Lahiris novel comes from her effort
to wrest the power invested in the American culture to nominate, to name, the other as
unnamable in its irreducible singularity. She names her protagonist Gogol, a name that signifies,
to many, the very logos, the patronym, of modern literature. Remember, we all came from
Gogols Overcoat, reminds Ashoke to his son, the namesake of Gogol, on his birthday, lest he
forgets the defining power of the name.762
What is peculiar about the process of naming in The Namesake is that the name, a
surname, has a certain disruptive potential within the normative naming process.763 Now here
instead of place or the name of the father or the place of the fathers ancestry we have a
supplanting/transplanting of Gogol that jettisons the first name with the surname. The first name

761

Ibid., pp. 25-26.

See the dust jacket of the book, The Namesake.
763
There are various arts of permutation and combination that signify the presence of a surname in
the selection. In some instances, people coin a suitable name from a combination of the parents
names. In certain communities, the first child is named after the paternal grandparent; in others, the
first son is given the same name as the father. Sometimes, the baby is named after the nakshatra, or
star, of its birth. The child could also be named after the family deity or guru. The father leans
towards the babys right ear and whispers its chosen name.
(http://festivals.iloveindia.com/rituals/naamkaran.html (accessed April 12, 2009).
410
762

has no authority, but it would be obviously impossible to designate a name like Gogol simply as
a name, a pet name, given to a child. The supplanting of the legitimate paternal origin by the
name of literary origin is the very act of subversion that the novel and the film are trying to
perform. The name Gogol is a global sign of the events gathered around a singular crisis, a
marking of the archetypal trace, from which both the film and the novel derive their sustenance.
All beginnings and endings are ultimately realized, given a meaning and solace, in Gogols
name, in the name of Gogol. For Ashoke, every critical moment, every crisis, can be understood
by thinking of Gogol and The Overcoat. As if the answer to the trauma lies in the trauma itself.
This trauma that is named after Gogol is the naming of the trauma, which leads to its own
annihilation in memory. In other words, the significance of naming and narrating cannot be
exaggerated in the discourse of memory, especially in the film.764
Nairs film is an exemplary cinematic adaptation of Lahiris novel representing a rich
cross section of themes, issues, and characters in the Indian diaspora, although some crucial
details of Gogols young adult life is missing in the film. Taking the name as the source of the
narrative, the film depicts the problematic and vexed relationship between the first and the
second generation Indian immigrants struggling to maintain their independent cultural identity
while, at the same time, being told to become invisible in the dominant culture. For example, in
one of the scenes, when the furious son, Gogol, wants to confront local racists who have defaced
his family surname Ganguli on the mailbox by spraypainting it to Gangrene, while the family
was away holidaying in India, the father, Ashoke, tells him to take no further notice.
764

For a brilliant reading of the relationship between memory and narration, see Caruth,
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, pp. 25-56.
411

Complaining about such racially motivated action, in Ashokes mind, would simply draw more
attention to their already precarious and marginalized existence in the diaspora.
The film incorporates in itself some of the major problems and issues that are directly
related to the South Asian population in the diaspora. It foremost engages with the difference
between the immigrant experiences of first and second generations, which can no longer be
simply governed within the normative logic of homogeneity in the diaspora. The primacy
accorded to the ontological connection, to the place of origin, defines the first order of
immigrant, whose identity is rooted in the cultural and linguistic milieu of his/her home country.
But that unity is radically ruptured by the arrival of the second generation, whose continuity
depends on this very separation from the country of origin and integration into the host culture of
the first generation.765
The first generations of South Asian immigrants have not found it reasonable or even
essential to assimilate within the American culture. Their refusal to assimilate is not due to their
revulsion of the other, but is simply a matter of their preferring their own identities as Indians
and maintaining a closer relationship with their national culture and values. Apart from
professional relationships in the work and in limited social spaces, American and Indian cultures
remain blissfully apart. These moments are crucially highlighted in scenes of parties thrown in
the traditional style by the Ganguli family which are mostly attended by an assortment of South
Asian friends from MIT. Gogols fianc Maxim, an American, is completely left out and is
baffled by the Indians sticking to their culture in her own country. What appears as a benign and

765

Hussain, p. 6
412

playful curiosity, for Maxim, will soon be overcome by abject frustration and cultural isolation.
She cannot fathom what Nikhil (Gogols new adopted name) finds so intimate and close to him
in this bizarre display of cultural difference.
The cleavage or lack of relationship of social and cultural form between the Indian
diaspora and the American society has changed in the last decade or so as many transnational
generations of Indians, who are born and brought up in the United States, are now completely
assimilated and yet not fully integrated into American society till they form matrimonial
alliances with the latter. The easiest way for an Indian to enter the socio-cultural sanctum of an
American family is through marriage. This is seen as a threat to the authentic Indian identity, a
kind of mythology deconstructed in Monsoon Wedding, when an Indian woman teases an Indian
NRI (Non Resident Indian) living in Australia, who has fallen in love with her, by reminding him
that she did make him into an Indian after all. For Indians, matrimonial alliance with people
from another country and culture is looked upon with a great sense of remorse and loss. It
signifies a loss of identity and capitulation or seduction to the other as opposed to having
remained faithful to ones own cultural and social values. This is clearly evident in the behavior
of Gogols parents.
Devoid of history and identity, Ashoke (named after the great Mauryan King who ruled
India from 273 to232 B.C., and also a Sanskrit word meaning a man without mourning or grief)
and his wife, Ashima (a name that signifies without borders), live a life amidst an atmosphere of
acute cultural isolation devoted to the fervent remembrance of the family and country left
behind. The idea of assimilation only increases the fervor to never forget the family members
413

and friends left behind, to continuously dwell in the memory of the happiness of life, the
prelapsarian phase of life, before the catastrophe. One should realize that space and time intrude
into a transnational life in a manner that is profoundly afflicted by the pain of separation from the
loved ones now in a distant land, not because one was connected before being uprooted, but
because uprootedness forges the strongest bond between the transnational subject and his/her
history, which has now congealed and frozen into a memory closer to nostalgia.
Ashoke, it appears, neither belongs to the moment of the catastrophic memory before nor
inherits the life after. His life signifies a cleavage, a tear, from the past into the future, where the
present simply becomes a domain of memory. There are two things, or two kinds of traumas, to
be specific, that we need to take into account: the fact that Ashoke is a diasporic subject, which
entails a physical or spatial separation that defines the condition of an immigrant, and that he is
also a victim of temporal loss that occurred after his accident. So, Ashoke is traumatized both
spatially and temporally, whereas Ashima remains a disconsolate figure due to her traumatic
separation from her parents rooted exclusively in the spatial dimesion and not the temporal loss.
The fathers secret trauma assumes an overt shame for his son in this complex interplay of
intergenerational trauma. Gogol detests the name that means everything to his father. An
incident, in fact an accident, dedicated to the name of the renowned Russian writer, inexplicably
surfaces in the form of intergenerational clash between the father and the son, between the name
giver and the named. Who has the authority to name the other? And what this intergenerational
struggle among the transnationals reveals is a breach in identity of a self named after a memory
and the lack of memory in the one who is named after the memory.
414

The name Gogol, in Nairs The Namesake, however, redefines the language of identity of
the transnational community of the Indian diaspora in the United States in a manner that
challenges the traditional mode of identification reserved for foreigners in an alien society. It
signifies an irreducible otherness the individual names are sacred, inviolable,766 says
Lahiri because it is neither a Bengali name nor an American name, thus it names the very
condition of the possibility of the second generation immigrant who is neither an Indian nor an
American.767 This condition, neither-just this/nor-just that, is often referred to in the
contemporary discourse of disaporic studies within the framework of double consciousness, a
term first coined by Du Bois in Atlantic Monthly in 1897.768 It has now been re-inscribed by
postmodernist and cultural critics like Hall, Bhabha, Gilroy, Clifford, to denote a specific type of
consciousness that aspires to move beyond essentialising notions such as ethnicity and race
in order to celebrates the notions of hybridity, heterogeneity, identity fragmentation and
(re)construction, double consciousness, fractures of memory, ambivalence, roots and routes,
discrepant cosmopolitanism, multi-locationality and so forth.769 Could the name Gogol be also
taken as a sign of a double consciousness that rejects the ontopology, axiomatics, that
conflates the ontology and topology and biology, as Derrida defines it, the mundane and facile

766

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake ( New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), p. 28.
E. Peaco, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Antioch Review, vol. 62, no. 3 (Summer
2004): p. 581. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4614714 (accessed: January 20, 2009).
768
The concept of double consciousness first made it appearance in an article by Du Bois,
Strivings of the Negro People, in 1897 in Atlantic Monthly. He defined it as this sense of
always looking at ones self through the eyes of others, of measuring ones soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
(New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 2.
769
M Baumann, Religions in the Disenchanted World, Numen, vol. 47, no. 3, (2000): 324.
415
767

discourse of cosmopolitanism?770 Isnt it the irreducible foreignness of the name Gogol in

the American/Western hegemonic culture that exceeds the discourse of identity so commonly
held in the narratives of origin and displacement, race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc., which cannot be
synthetically or dialectically resolved? Gogol, divided into English Go, to move, and gol, in
Hindi and also in Bengali, meaning round, as in the earth or the planet being round. In other
word, the name Go-gol, as hyphenated and hybridized word, could also mean to go around the
world. See the worldyou will never regret it were the last words uttered by the Bengali
businessman Ghosh, whose name easily rhymes with ghost, a revenant who spoke reverently
of England and America on the train to Ashoke, just before the fatal accident. Ashokes real
departure from India began the day he commemorated his life to Gogol in both figurative and
literal sense. Ashoke identifies with Gogol on multiple levels and feels a special kinship with
Gogol. Aside from being his favorite author and the savior of his life, he finds in Gogol a
reflection of his own exilic life. He spent most of his adult life outside his homeland. Like me,
asserts Ashoke when confronted by his son.
Being at home does not always mean truly being at home. Gogol is not at home in his
name. But by cutting his name from himself, he becomes more attached to it. Ironically, this act
binds him even more to the name than before. Like the cinematic cut, the name is marked on
the body as both presence and absence. Gogols identity, too, belongs more firmly to the name
he cuts loose with the stroke of a pen. The newly adopted name, Nikhil, the foreskin of his

770

Cited in S. Dayal, Diaspora and Double Consciousness in The Journal of the Midwest
Modern Language Association, vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 46.
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315257 (accessed January 20, 2009).
416

new identity, seems as unreal to him as his new life without his old name. What he misses now,
after he has legally changed his name, is the former life, a life that he shared with his family.
With the arrival of the new name, the old name has simply become a memory of his old life that
he cannot access. As he cuts himself legally adrift from his original given name, Gogol, he is
more drawn to it in its absence, much like the transnational who pines for the country that she/he
has voluntarily left behind. The parallelism cannot be more acute.
In many senses the novel/film challenges the idea of name changing, a right that Lahiri
admits is the right of every American citizen. So what is the falsehood in our true identity if
the name by which we are known is replaced by another? Does one become another person after
the name change? Should we take it for granted that Gogol does not exist after he has been
officially and authoritatively replaced by Nikhil? The banishment or exile of Gogol sets the
intergenerational trauma of transnational historical subject in play. Gogols identity is inherently
linked to the name by which he is identified by his family (in which the roots of his fathers
identity are secretly buried). By casting his name Gogol out of his life like an old worn-out
overcoat out of embarrassment, reciprocating Akaky Akakyevichs embarrassment and shame
toward his tattered overcoat, Gogol symbolically banishes his fathers sign from his signature.
The postcolonial (with or without the hyphen) multicultural identity in Nairs film works
from within the logocentric patricidal logic (phylogenetic model in Freud) of the literary and
filmic narrative that attempts to de-center and thus re-place the symbolic father (Gandhi, Nehru,
etc.) by the signifying father (Gogol). The neme of Gogol, in The Namesake, is governed by a
sign creating activity that produces multiple resonances and textual readings. Displacement

417

and patricidal forces operate here: the logos of natural father, symbolized in primal father figure
(represented by Gandhi, symbolizing the ancient, or Nehru, symbolizing the modern, India), is
replaced by the ghost (once again we must remember The Overcoat) and its trace, the
signature, the haunting, of the literary father, the exilic father. As opposed to symbolizing a
mythical consciousness enshrined in the image of eternal India, the name, in The Namesake, as a
sign creating activity, aligns itself to a thinking memory that thinks in name, as Hegel
reminds us:
The name is...the thing (Die Sache Selbst) ... In the name, Reproductive memory has and
recognizes the thing, and with the thing it has the name, apart from intuition and image.
The name, as giving an existence to the content in intelligence, is the externality of
intelligence to itself; and the inwardizing or recollection of the name, i.e. of an intuition
of intellectual origin, is at the same time a self-externalization to which intelligence
reduces itself on its ground. The association of the particular names lies in the meaning of
the features sensitive, representative, or cogitantseries of which the intelligence
traverses as it feels, represents, or thinks. Given the name lion, we need neither the actual
vision of the animal, nor its image even: the name lion alone, if we understand it, is the
unimaged simple representation. We think in names.771
Name and Memory
In his 1982 classic essay, Sign and Symbol in Hegels Aesthetics, Paul de Man
introduced us to Hegels thought, in Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830), on the
relationship between the name and memory.772 The importance of the name for Hegel remains
consistent with his pedagogical theory of learning and especially learning by heart. In thinking
through the name, we must also not lose sight of the sign-creating activity which produces words

771

G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. W. Wallace (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 219-220.
772
Paul De Man, Sign and Symbol in Hegels Aesthetics, Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4
(Summer 1982): 761.-775.
418

and names. Name, first of all, is the synthesis of content and meaningintuition and ideaand
is unfolded in the sign.
Hegel devotes sections 452-54 of Encyclopedia to recollection (Erinnerung) and sections
461-64 to memory and remembrance (Gedchtnis). The middle sections, from 455-60, deal with
imagination, with general representations of ideas and images in terms of signs. The first stage is
referred to by Hegel as recollection or Er-Innerung (inwardization), as he sometimes writes it
with a hyphen, which is often translated as interiorizing memory that consists in the
involuntary calling up of a content which is already ours.773 This stage of involuntary recalling
or Erinnerung in Hegel is, according to de Man, rather like Prousts mmoire involontaire.774
And since de Man equates Erinnerung with mmoire involontaire in Proust, it is but natural that
Gedchtnis is similarly identified with mmoire volontaire. For Proust, we must acknowledge,
the significance of mmoire involontaire is definitely of a higher order than mmoire volontaire
in aesthetic representations. De Mans argument consists in establishing that memory in the
name of Gedchtnis, which he explains as thinking memory, is always in relation to the future,
whereas recollection (Erinnerung) maintains itself within the confinement of the past
The dialectical relationship of inside and outside, of Gedchtnis and Erinnerung, of
thinking memory and interiorizing recollection, for Hegel, is performed within the insignia of the
name. Gedchtnis, the thinking memory, which functions more or less like a technique or
machine, as tekhn, is regarded a higher form of memory than its counterpart Erinnerung, the
memory that is normally associated with subjectivity, the interiorized memory in which the other
773
774

Ibid., p. 772.
Ibid.
419

is made a part of us, the metonymic form of memory. Memory as the name within the
Hegelian dialectic is primarily directed against Erinnerung, that interiorization of memory
which cancels what is outside of memory which in the name of memory is always already in
advance, in memory of and preserves what is already inside.
The distinction between recollection and memory in Hegel can truly be appreciated in the
light of his most important distinction between sign and symbol. Hegel aligns recollection with
symbol, while the latter, he explicitly announces, forms the transition to memory. For Hegel, the
symbolic, the subjective element which gives itself objectivity in the image and thereby
authenticates itself, is still conditioned by the relatively less free symbolic imagination, because
of its grounding in natural and anthropological elements.775 The sign, on the other hand, has a
privilege of not having a natural or subjective correspondence to its signification, but rather,
must be constructed or learned from the very beginning. In the general economy of the sign
producing activity, one learns by deleting the connotation which properly and naturally belongs
to it, and conferring on it another connotation as its soul and import.776 The sign-creating
activit is aptly named by Hegel as productive Memory, which in ordinary life is often used as
interchangeable and synonymous with remembrance (recollection).777
The true relationship between name and memory reaches a point, in Hegel, where the
distinction between the two, which we initially surmised to be sign and symbol, is determined by
the activity of thinking, which closely resembles the functioning of a machine. According to

775

Hegel, p. 212.
Ibid., p. 213.
777
Ibid.
776

420

Hegel, the distinction between meaning and name is abolished in mechanical memory, because
intelligence or thought is at once that external objectivity and the meaning, whereas the latter
no longer has a meaning, i.e., a meaning that is independent of objectivity. Memory is that
which is bereft of itself, a memory without memory, as Derrida calls it.778 It is the highest
stage of remembering (learning) by names or rote, where the word and the meaning are no longer
separate but united in the function of thought, which no longer has a meaning, i.e. its objectivity
is no longer severed from the subjective, and its inwardness does not need to go outside for its
existence.779 In thought meaning no longer has a meaning, because it is the meaning. Similarly
in mechanical memory there is no interiorizing memory, there is no recollection, for the names
are already bereft of any significations.
We think in names.780 Gedchtnis, the thinking memory, which thinks, as Derrida says,
in the name of memory and [in] the memory of the name forms the basis of some of
Derridas most profound interrogations of this subject, in works such as On the Name, Acts of
Literature (Aphorism Countertime), and Memories for Paul de Man, to name only a few. In
The Art of Memoires, Derrida tells us that memor is first the name of something [which]
preserves an essential and necessary relation with the possibility of the name, and what in the
name assures preservation. It has to do with the very possibility and preservation of names.781
Similarly, in this case, Gogol, too, functions as a name that preserves the memory of the

778

Derrida, Memoires For Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo
Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 65.
779
Hegel, p. 223.
780
Hegel, p. 220.
781
Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 49.
421

catastrophe (the interiorized (Erinnerung)/terrorized memory, the traumatized memory) and, at

the same time, it is also a form of Gedchtnis, the essence of remembering, that it, the name,
signifies in the future. Thus Gogol at once is both the sign of the trauma and recollection of the
trauma that negates or voids the interiorized and subjectivized memory of the past by sublating
(aufhebt) it in the memory that opens up to the future in which all events are recalled: in
memory of.782
The ineradicable alterity of Gogols name cannot be ruptured by a disavowal for it
contains the deepest semblance of mourning that all names represent in a strict sense. In a
profound sense, the name reminds us that each invocation of the name is inexplicably related to
the anteriority of mourning and memory. We remember in name what cannot be truly present in
real life (death marks an absence); the latter in its infinite scattering and fragmentation can only
be inadequately and provisionally re-membered in the name. One only comes back to oneself
through a detour; in Gogols case, this detour is already symbolized in his fathers choice of his
name that traces the detour of memory: to be named after someone, to be that someone who
bears the name. The name as a trace, a memory, of what he lost and what he never indeed even
had, his own name came to him via the detour of his father who named him after his favorite
author, which has now acquired a larger significance in his life for it is now both the name and
the memory of the name. This double helix of name, the double bind of language that all names
782

For Benjamin the real task of translation is to render the traditional concept of translation, in
which the meaning of the foreign words and sentences are made comprehensible within the
reader's linguistic milieu, incomprehensible in such a way that the familiar sight of the reader's
own language turns radically different in its foreignness. The foreignness is not made ours, on
the contrary, what is ours, our own language, is made foreign. The Task of the Translator,
Illuminations, pp. 69-82.
422

conceal and reveal, constitutes the primacy and anteriority of response and responsibility to the
name.783 The name lives leaving death behind, and is always responsible, i.e., performative, to its
name. The name continues, it goes on, it survives the bearer, but it also reminds us that, as
Derrida says, it is always from the outset in memory of.784 For Derrida, we cannot separate
the name of memory and the memory of the name; we cannot separate the name and
memory.785
Gogols identity crisis begins with his name, a name that inscribes otherness in its very
presence. The film/novel is about Gogol ultimately coming to terms with his name, i.e., his
irreducible otherness. It is a search for an identity that begins with an accidental pet name that is
rejected by the bearer only to be mourned later in his life as his true identity. At the end of the
film Gogol accidentally finds the hardbound volume of The Overcoat, a birthday present from
his father, as a testimony of memory to the debt of memory. The thinking memory, the memory
that thinks in name, Gedchtnis, leads to the thinking of the name in terms of his fathers
memory and thus becomes indebted to it. It leads to his origin via this detour of remembering
through the act of reading that joins him to his fathers memory; it becomes the memory of his
father. His name Gogol is now fully realized because it is now both a name and a memory, both
Gedchtnis and Erinnerung. The fathers journey was interrupted by the near fatal railway

783

To name and to cause a name to disappear is not necessarily contradictory. Hence the
extreme danger and the extreme difficulty there are in talking about the effacement of
names...very often to inscribe the name is to efface the bearer of the name (emphasis added).
Derrida, PointsInterviews, 1974-1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others. Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 390.
784
Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 49.
785
Ibid.
423

accident and the trauma of the accident that continues throughout his life; this traumatic journey
will ultimately be given a proper name in his sons journey through his own life that will be
ultimately commemorated and remembered in the name and the memory of the name of the
other. It is only after Gogol has achieved the tracing of his fathers life in his name that his name
signifies the memory of his father. Without knowing the secret of his name as a trace of his
fathers memory, a catastrophe, Gogol unwittingly separates his existence from his familys and
embarks on a life with few reminiscences of his childhood and his parents struggle to come to
terms with a world that refuses to allow their memories to be a part of the socio-cultural narrative
of the United States. As long as Gogol is alienated from his memory he will also be alienated
from his family.
What begins as a gift of death in the past becomes the gift of life in the present. What
leaves the body of the nation comes back in the name of memory of a catastrophe, the returning
that is forever deferred but always a possibility. There is a memorable scene in the film. It
follows a rather awkward domestic moment, the primal scene of culture clash (the Indian mother
notices Gogols American girlfriend Maxim holding hands with him, just a glance that speaks
voluminously of the cultural schism) between Maxim and Gogols Indian family. The father,
Ashoke, asks his son Gogol to accompany him to buy ice cream from a store. As they are
driving, Ashoke reveals the story of his accident, shown to us in a flashback (the supreme trope
of memory in film) to Gogol, the origin of his name.
Ashoke: I want to tell you something.
Gogol: What?
Ashoke: Its about your name.
Gogol: My name?
424

Ashoke: Gogol.
Ashoke: There is a reason for it, you know.
Gogol: Right, Baba. Gogol is your favorite author. I know.
And then the father narrates in exquisite detail the story of the night that almost took his life. We
see a hand clutching the title pages of the Gogol book, whose rustling was overheard and noticed
by a rescue team who untangled his body from a mass of steel and brought him to the hospital.
Is that what you think of me? Gogol asks him. Do I remind of you of that night? Not at all.
His father says eventually. You remind me of everything that followed.786
The Gift of Name
It is perhaps tempting to approach the film from a psychoanalytical angle by describing
the accident as a primal scene in the life of the protagonist. But it does not hold water. Somehow
reading Freud into in this context seems improbable. The film resists western theoretical
frameworks pertinent to its discourse, which requires a different set of approaches, based on
Indian cultural context. But the theory behind trauma is not a space and culture bound
phenomenon, for it is a condition that happens in both collective and individual lives. That by
revealing the secret behind Gogols name the father is somehow wishing to absolve himself of
the guilt of his own survival is a possibility that cannot be completely ruled out in this case. But
this moment of revelation for Gogol that he is named after an event which is intrinsically linked
to the moment of his fathers almost death and resurrection can only be grasped by him as a
moment of great horror and terror, of death. The fact that he is linked to his father through a
memory that haunts the latter forever is a disclosure that the son cannot truly comprehend. Thus

786

Lahiri, pp.123-124.
425

he asks in the film, Is that what I remind you of? Of your death? Ashokes reply is not only
enigmatic but a declaration of life embedded in his sons name, Gogol. In the film Nair
improvises the scene by making Ashoke say that everyday since then has been a gift. The
conversation leads to the defining moment of Gogols existence, which in a way is handed down
to him, a gift of life from his father, who himself received it from the pages of Gogols The
Overcoat.
The giving of the name exceeds the circulation of a gift that negates itself in return. It
imposes itself as a double bind, a name that comes from a name, the originary and improved
sign in Hegel, but an iterable signifier in Derrida that repeats itself with a difference, and the
name that one gives in the name of the other is a non-returnable name to its origin. What is
givenand this would also represent a kind of deathis not something, but goodness itself, a
giving goodness, the act of giving or the donation of the gift, writes Derrida in The Gift of
Death.787 (1995: 41). But this act of giving, this goodness of the gift, the source of it must remain
inaccessible to the donee.788 It is a gift that cannot be returned. The name, for Derrida, most of
all signifies the primacy of response. One responds to ones name in responsibility to the other,
in mourning to the other, who is no longer with us, and who can no longer respond but only in
the other way, in its name.
In Gogols name lives the other, which he cannot bear to identify with. This is the
continuous source of his trauma and until the other is banished from the self the self teeters on

787

Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: Chicago University Press: 1995), p.

41.
788

Ibid.
426

self-destruction. But ironically, after Gogol has dispelled the ghost of his name who had snatched
his identity like his namesakes overcoat, he starts to feels an uncanny melancholia for the loss of
his name much akin to the loss of a dear one. He begins to mourn the loss of his name. Reading
the book, Gogols last act in the film, is an act of countersignature, which itself can only be
understood in terms of a response that articulates itself in the double affirmative that says yes
to the work, and again yes this work was there before me, without me.789 The iterability of the
name makes the possibility of the necessary repetition entailed in any word that can be
experienced as meaningful, which is also at the same time a condition in which the name can
never be exactly repeated, since it has no essence that could remain unaffected by the
potentially infinite contextsinto which it could be grafted.790 In slightly different but similar
context, the name Gogol is a word whose iterablilty is always already preconditioned by the
possibility of changes that keeps it open, a condition necessary for it to undergo in the infinite
repetition that each countersignature, that is, reading, testifies to in the presence of writing, of
name.
The very condition of the possibility of the gift is intricately related to some secret. If
there is a secret then by its very nature it cant be intuited in the Kantian sense, it cant be
revealed to the squinted gaze.791 For the very nature of a secret, as Derrida reminds us,
depends on the fact that it is disclosed as a secret. A secret never disclosed is no secret. Whereas
a gift known is a gift returned (re-gifting, for instance); it is only when the gift is a secret that it is
789

Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. David Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 70.
Ibid.
791
Derrida, On the Name, trans. David Wood et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press
1995), p. 30.
427
790

seldom acknowledged or returned. Thus Derrida says that the a gift that could be recognized as
such in the light of day, a gift destined for recognition, would immediately annul itself. The gift
is the secret itself, if the secret itself can be told.792 Ashoke, just prior to his death, reveals the
secret of his sons name, the source of his name, that the name Gogol constitutes his existence
more than any other name, that he cannot be separated from his name.
Gogols self-analysis begins after his fathers death. For Gogol, the death of his father
breaks the specular narcissism of his self in search of a memory that is bound with the secret of
his name, in the patronym of Gogol. The significance of his name now seems to have absolute
bearing to his fathers death, and a loss that can only be recovered by going back to the source of
his trauma and memory, to the The Overcoat, to his namesake. The name, a proper noun, is a
word, pure language, or untranslatable, that differs from itself through the spacing, in its
iterability, by a trace, of what comes before, the name, and of what comes after, that is, memory.
This spacing of the transnational is constantly repeated and recalled into being through
the narratives of journey and separation in the cultural production of differences, in the
novels and films of diasporic writers and filmmakers like Lahiri and Nair. It is impossible to
mourn what is simply inside as interiorized memory. But Gedchtnis, the thinking memory
which thinks in name, in the exteriority of sign, is the other name of writing, as Derrida has
demonstrated in countless pages of his writings, associated with both exile and forgetting.

792

Derrida, PointsInterviews, 1974-1994, pp. 29-30.

428

Without the anteriority of forgetting, the forgetting of forgetting, there will be no

remembering.793
The last scene of the film partakes in the poetic discourse of prosopopeia by presenting
(through Gogols double flashbacks of his father) the absent father addressing his son via a
command to remember this day. De Man has described the figure of prosopopoeia in the
allegory as the very figure of reader and of reading794 By taking up the book of Gogol in the
end, the son, Gogol, acknowledges the metonymic relationship to the memory of his father; the
book is part of his fathers memory which is passed on to the son in an allegorical mode as
opposed to the historical mode privileged by the other discourse of transnationalism: the
discourses of neo and postcolonialism that I am unable to pursue here.795 The story of The
Overcoat, therefore, not only stands in an allegorical/metonymic relationship to the memory of
his fathers story but is also a part of Gogol that Gogol must realize in the otherness and
outsidedness of his being, in the exteriority of his name. Gogols return to his cultural roots
signifies a return to the origin of the namethe translation of nameless in names; a translation

793

See Amresh Sinha, Forgetting to Remember: From Benjamin to Blanchot, Colloquy: text
theory critique, Issue 10, 2005, pp. 22-41.
http://www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue010/sinha.pdf
794
Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 28.
795
Postcolonial theory, on the other hand, implies that colonialism is over. It emphasizes
hybridity, ambivalence, and mimicry, the state of being in between. It explores the spaces of
subalternity and feminism. Yet postcolonial theory, in emphasizing the post, risks obscuring the
deformative traces of colonialism in the present. Ella Shohat, E. and Robert Stam, p. 40. See
also Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Introduction, Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), pp.1-20.
429

of the mute into sonic to the trauma, and not a place.796 For the purpose of human language
is to call things by their appointed name, because, as Benjamin tells us, language itself is not
perfectly expressed in things themselves.797 Things are imperfect because they are denied the
pure formal principle of languagesound.798 Through sound, by translating the mute into
sonic, man establishes an immaterial, symbolic community with nature which is communicated
through the name.
The name vanishes in sound, says Hegel. The thinking memory, the Hegelian
philosophy of memory, functions more efficiently and deliberately when inwardizing
(Erinnerung) fails to materialize. Gogols memory of his father is no longer an inwardizing
memory, the symbolic grasp, that keeps the other in us, inside us, as a part of us, a part of our
history, an interiorized mourning, but a thinking memory (Gedchtnis) that is open to the
outside, that is bereft of memory.
Conclusion
One of the tasks of this essay has been to trace how the nomos, the name, of Gogol dwells
in the margin, in the supplement, and in the trace of a fathers life that the son will discover only
after he has forfeited the appellation for a more acceptable anglicized one (although not too far
an echo of the celebrated Russian authors first name, Nikolai). Nikhil (a classic Indian or
Bengali name)or Nick, for shortis exchanged for Gogol. By legally changing his name from
Gogol to Nikhil, he severs his present life from its transnational roots in favor of an assimilated

796

Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, p. 325.

Ibid., 321.
798
Ibid.
430
797

existence that also marginalizes his intimate horizon of family and friends. As Gogol becomes
the hybridized Nick, he embarks upon a life that takes him away from his transnational family
into an American arena where his past has no consequence. His family is simply a family like
any other family, as all families are in America. The traumatic existence of his parents and their
struggle not to assimilate and remain different (the struggle of the first generation), which is to
say remain identical to themselves, in the host country loses its historical significance and
becomes more or less an ever present source of embarrassment to the second generation. The
intergenerational clash of culture opens up a broader and more heterogeneous formulation of the
meaning of the word diaspora.
The Namesake is dedicated to the memory of Mira Nairs parents, and to all parents
who sacrifice their lives for their children. But most importantly it is dedicated, consecrated, to
the name of Gogol, the storyteller. The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave
you your name reads the annotation on the title page of the hardbound volume of The Short
Stories of Nikolai Gogol, a gift from the father to his son on his birthday. The father gave the son
a name that he himself received from the other.
So what is in this giving of what one doesnt have? The name signifies the power of
language whose secret can only be disclosed through its creative possibilities. Who can forget
Benjamins musings on the power of divine language which is communicated to us through the
incantation of names?799 The film is devoted to the creative and restorative power of the name.
Nair closes the film by taking recourse in the allegorical (by emphasizing the constitutive

799

See Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, Reflections, p. 318.
431

category of temporality, i.e., human finitude), the irreconcilable and inconsolable sign forever
adrift and always already displaced, like the grandmothers letter that never arrives at its
destination, to mourning and prosopopoeia, as opposed to the symbolic totality of the historical
fable, which it nonetheless is, for what is story but a way of telling the story that some people do
and the others dont.800

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