Abstract
Rather than interpreting R.W. Fassbinder’s film Lola and Helma Sanders’s Shirins Hochzeit through the usual angle of genre and melodrama, this essay used Hegelian dialectical philosophy and gender theories to analyse the prostitute characters. Taking Walter Benjamin’s idea of the prostitute as embodiment of contradictions, and Hegel’s notion of women as the ‘irony of the community’, I examined the symbolism surrounding Lola which constantly mutated to figure her as a revolutionary force outside dialectics; as outside but also inside associated with the dialectical relations between public and private; as repressed individuality which, as such, maintains the community. By making dialectics become visible as the site of constant tensions she exposed the workings the dialectic and alluded to the dysfunction of the dialectic because of the domination of the universal. Shirin, on the other hand, is positioned less complexly as marginal but oppositional voice, and the circular device of the resuscitated speaking tragic heroine created a central tension between the desire for a different speaking position and acknowledgement of the danger of repeating the same stories.
This essay examines dialectical relations and prostitute figures as sites of the constant play of opposing forces. In particular I will examine two films associated with New German Cinema, Lola (Fassbinder 1981) and Shirins Hochzeit (Sanders 1976). This movement is associated with the interrogation of the consumerist values of an increasingly capitalist West Germany, yet there has been little examination of its representation of the female prostitute. In early twentieth-century German representations of prostitutes, a common trait was their contradictory nature. Both agent and tragic victim, she frequently embodied wider tensions of the era. Walter Benjamin , for instance, saw reflected in her the tensions of capitalism. As seller and commodity, subject and object, at the same time, the prostitute allows dialectics to stand still and become visible in the form of an image. 1 More recent readings consolidate the notion of paradoxical identity. Claire Solomon interprets the prostitute as doubly alienated (from society and herself), an ineffable character mirroring her lack of legal subjecthood. 2 In her poststructuralist readings, Christiane Schönfeld suggests that the prostitute embodies two opposing values at the same time and thus becomes an illegible figure but also that her power lies in her radical indeterminability. 3
We can look back to the nineteenth century, to G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807, to elaborate further the tensions and paradoxes of the prostitute figures in the films discussed below. As I suggest in my title, the two films offer a re-working of the figure of Antigone in Hegelian thought. Hegel’s thinking on the conflictual positioning of women, relations between the sexes, and dialectical relationships between the family and the community were influential in aligning women with nature, desire, the family and individuality and can be seen to return in twentieth-century representations. In oppositional relationships between family or individual and community or polis, Hegel posits woman as a kind of ‘enemy within’ in a foundational dialectical relation which can be seen in the tensions between the private and the public, the family and the community, in the films discussed below. The community ‘can only maintain itself by suppressing this [feminine] spirit of individualism and because it is an essential moment, all the same creates it and moreover, creates it by its repressive attitude’. 4 Individuality and community are linked in dialectical relation and through the activity of repressing individuality, the community sustains itself in opposition to that which it creates as repressive principle. Individuality is posited as such through the negating relation with the community through which the community is established. Kelly Oliver reads this as the sacrifice of the feminine, the repression of which is required for the community. 5
The conflict between public and private, civic law and divine law, the community and the family is elaborated by Hegel in his reading of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. In the pagan world, the dialectical opposition between particularity (associated with the unconscious life of the family) and the universal (civic, public life) cannot be overcome as the polis only recognises the universal aspect of human action while the particular remains embedded in the family. The family is supposed to provide a transition from an unconscious immediate ethical order to a conscious ethical order mediated by reason, 6 but what happens in the central conflict between Antigone and Creon, in Hegel’s eyes, is that the woman destroys the community. Antigone represents the family as the natural ground of ethical life and disobeys the laws of the polis embodied by Creon who represents ethical life itself in its social universality in the polis. 7 The universal laws of polis prevent Antigone from burying her brother who has been slain in battle against Creon, but this comes into conflict with the familial or divine ethical order. Antigone’s tragedy is the unresolvable conflict between two ethical orders. For defying the civic laws and privileging family ties when she buries her brother, she is imprisoned and then commits suicide. According to Hegel, this sets in train the tragic series of deaths which ultimately destroy the polis. For Hegel, the seeds of destruction lie within the community in the family which is the ‘rebellious principle of pure individuality’ and aligned with woman. As particularity is not included in the polis, it destroys the polis. 8 Woman is the internal cause of the downfall.
Since the community only gets an existence through its interference with the happiness of the Family, and by dissolving [individual] self-consciousness into the universal, it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal enemy – womankind in general. 9
The irony of woman’s position is that she makes possible the ‘step into the universality characteristic of the community, while at the same time threatening this step’. 10 For Irigaray, this in-between position is revolutionary in its potential for undermining the structuring dualities upon which the stability of the community is based. 11
A close reading of Fassbinder’s film reveals that central to the representation of the prostitute figure are the tensions between the private and public, individual and the community, head and heart, the inside and the outside, the particular and the universal which mark the dialogue, the mise-en-scène and the editing with the figure of Lola mediating between the poles. For Elsaesser, the contradictions in the film are embodied in the characters themselves who are not coherently motivated but ‘torn, tormented, acting in ignorance or in contradiction to their innermost being’, what he calls the ‘double-bind as a source of energy’. 12 But read allegorically, not psychologically, Lola can be seen as both a conservative and progressive figure, victim and agent, possessing her own voice and inhabiting a series of roles, embodying the principle of particularity which is defined by, but not identical with, the universal. Does she stand for criticism of patriarchy or acceptance, an agent of change or supporter of the established order? She is outside the norm as a prostitute, potentially undermining the status quo, as well as appearing as an antidote to society’s corruption. Yet she is at the heart of the corruption as star act in the brothel where business deals are forged while she sings on the stage. In the final scenes, as a bourgeois married woman, she not only consolidates the established order but is the guarantor of its future functioning. Hence, Lola’s ambiguity ultimately does not confer her with the power of difference but reinscribes her within an economy of the same.
In Sanders’ film, Shirin is quietly oppositional, protesting when her father is arrested in Turkey, running away from an arranged marriage organised by the community of uncles, complaining when she is unfairly dismissed from her cleaning job in Germany, and as a result is raped. In the final scenes as a prostitute, she does not follow an order to get back to work and is shot. 13 She is not murdered by state power but by an insignificant pimp, and her tragic fate has no repercussions either positively as a result of her ‘sacrifice’ or negatively as destruction unleashed by the injustice. Understood within the political logic of the film, Shirin is murdered by patriarchy as the final frame of her abandoned corpse lying face-down in the empty concrete parking area in the middle of nowhere resonates with the cumulative effect of her different experiences. That her dead body is not buried both underlines her alienation from her traditional female role (as mourning and burying family members) and the destruction of the family per se as the director’s voice-over at the end briefly tells us that her relatives in Turkey cannot bury her corpse and ‘would not have recognised your face’. Symbolically prostitution is linked to defacement and death, whereas the film reveals itself as narrative re-construction which undoes these experiences as the female victim narrates her own story from the impossible perspective of her death. The first shot of the film is entirely black and we hear Shirin’s voice saying ‘now I am dead’. Throughout the film, at specific moments Shirin narrates in voice-overs accompanying the visual images and in dialogue with the director. This unusual device of dual storytellers (the protagonist as storyteller and the authorial voice of the director) is a sort of conversation between the two women located—to a certain extent—beyond the frame (of the story/film). While the voice-over narrative draws attention to the necessarily retrospective character of mediation, the film also alludes to the attempt to return to the original traumatic events, although the embodied experience of prostitution remains unthinkable. The visual presence of the dead body in the final image insists that the filmic narrative does not signify redemption but suggests a critique of patriarchy from the site of the silent, excluded other. This space outside the community and thus beyond the dialectic is the position that Irigaray says Antigone occupies which makes her such a threat. 14 However, while this perspective appears to allow the possibility of difference that Fassbinder’s more ambiguous prostitute questions, the radicality is enabled in Sanders’ film through the death of the prostitute.
Hence both prostitute characters are variations on the Antigone figure, and below I examine their multifaceted characters not by foregrounding the melodramatic aesthetic focussed on the somatic silence of the victimised female prostitute, described by Brookes , and further discussed in Chap. 10, by Hipkins and Mitchell, but by reading the films’ dialectical relations that are evoked in the tensions which the prostitute figures embody. Through their protagonists, both films refer to unease in the post-war era in West Germany surrounding the re-building process and troubling aspects of a resurgent capitalism. This is raised thematically in Lola through the character of von Bohm, the 1950s building inspector who is constantly in seen in his relations with corrupt business entrepreneurs, and in Shirins Hochzeit through reference to the collective experience of the 1970s Gastarbeiter in sequences which recall archival images of sites of departure and arrival and lengthy close-ups of the documents of economic migration such as work contracts, passports, visa stamps, money transfer forms. Lola most clearly exposes the ironical position of women through Lola’s paradoxical enabling and criticising of the power elite. Her seduction of von Bohm while hiding the fact that she is a prostitute symbolically figures her as dangerous individuality which threatens the stability of the community. Later, after he has discovered her identity and experiences a kind of breakdown, von Bohm passionately rejects the corrupt elite of the town and the ‘whole system’. Swayed by a desire for Lola, he protests about the alienation of the individual who is dominated by the whole: ‘It’s the whole that is bad, not the individual. Therefore we must fight against ‘the Whole…the whole lying/false system because it distorts and consumes people and makes them sick.’ (my translation) This revolutionary moment is suspended, however, when the community is not destroyed but renewed and strengthened by incorporating Lola and von Bohm within it. Individuality appears to be sublated in the whole, and the prostitute figure aligned with an eroded and exploited particularity as the antimony between private and public locates happiness at the end not in the family but in the whole.
Lola
Fassbinder’s film Lola (1981) was one of the last he made and part of his famous BRD-trilogy, but the theme of prostitution has not been subject to an in-depth study. In his previous films which feature prostitutes, the homoerotic relation between pimp and client fascinates him more than the experiences of sex work from the woman’s perspective. 15 The realities of sex work remain indistinct as the symbolism inherent in the figure of the prostitute herself is foregrounded. Thus Fassbinder exists in an established German tradition of male projection onto the prostitute figure, less concerned with social ills than with the ‘shock value and general tone of disaffection embodied in the character of the prostitute’. 16
In Lola, however, Fassbinder makes the brothel the centrepiece of the action and the prostitute emblematic of the film’s tensions. The film is set in 1955 and loosely based on The Blue Angel (Josef Sternberg, 1930) but relocated in time to the 1950s as a comment on the expansion years in West Germany. Fassbinder also changed the male protagonist from a schoolteacher into a building inspector. 17 Lola is widely read as a document of moral hypocrisy which typified West German society in the 1950s with the central prostitute character seen as accentuating the theme of ubiquitous duplicity. 18 The small Bavarian town, Coburg, is rife with nepotism and controlled by a ‘power elite’ and leading families. The brothel appears as a microcosm of corruption presided over by Schuckert, a building entrepreneur and owner of the brothel. We never see Lola with any other male client, Schuckert calls her his ‘private whore’ and they appear to have an illegitimate daughter (Marie) who lives with Lola’s mother. However, Lola is not defined solely in association with the ruling elite as her relation to Schuckert, and thus symbolically to the ruling class of dignitaries, is ambivalent, making her a contradictory presence both inside and outside the community. She is verbally mildly abusive to Schuckert and is shown controlling or parodying her use of sexual allure; he appears to be besotted with her but also capable of violence, forcefully reminding her at several points that he pays her to listen to him. 19 It is easy to sympathise with Lola when she becomes interested in the new building inspector, von Bohm, an outsider who moves to Coburg as Head of the Building Authority. The power elite are uncertain about him for he embodies an integrity which they lack. Schuckert informs Lola that he is ‘no man for you’ (implying that she is impure and associating her with the corruption) so she pursues von Bohm as if to prove that she does not conform to their ideas of her. The relation with von Bohm thus contains the idea of freedom; firstly, she finds out about his hobbies by visiting his rooms in his absence (her mother is his housekeeper) and then taking an active role in the courtship. Von Bohm, unaware of Lola’s true identity, quickly falls in love. What at first appeared to be a tactical move on her part becomes more genuine emotion as she falls in love with von Bohm in the scene where they sing together in an empty rural chapel after a walk in the Bavarian countryside. Von Bohm buys her an engagement ring and the subsequent speechless scene also set in the same chapel features an ambivalently weeping Lola as the contradictions between the public and the private—her life as a prostitute and ‘respectable lady’—appear to be reaching a head. The following scene is a dinner party von Bohm’s housekeeper organises so that she can meet his fiancée, little suspecting that it is her daughter. Lola is forced to stay away, and there is a cut to her looking in her mirror in the brothel bedroom, violently upset and crossing her image out with a red lipstick. (see Fig. 8.1) This point marks the moment when the contradictions cannot be synthesised and makes the prostitute the site at which the dialectical tensions are exposed.
The impasse is eventually mediated by Esslin, a left-wing civil servant, who takes von Bohm to the brothel. In his horror and motivated by sexual jealousy rather than revolutionary politics (but working initially in conjunction with Esslin), von Bohm threatens the whole order by refusing to approve the Lindenhof project, which will lead to a loss of profits for the elite. At this point in the film, those who are excluded from the ‘social market economy’, the exploited and the poor, are evoked by von Bohm as those who are ostracised from the cosiness of the system and are the real victims of the power elite.
The threat of destruction to the status quo is averted as von Bohm, unable to repress his desire, goes again to the brothel and publically demands that Schuckert sells ‘his whore’ to him. Desire and love for the prostitute is rebellious and threatening (linked to his particularity) but when publicly sanctioned becomes a conservative force. This has the effect of suggesting Lola’s ambiguity as she cannot simply be aligned with either revolution or the guarantor of the status quo but embodies both and the tension between the two. She ultimately becomes an object of a male financial transaction and accepted as part of the established order through marriage to von Bohm. At the same time she becomes the co-owner with him of the brothel, when Schuckert gives them the deeds to be held in trust until Marie’s twenty-first birthday as a wedding present. However, Lola continues to sleep with Schuckert, meeting him in her new house on her wedding day still in her bridal clothes, charging extra for leaving her veil on. This has been read as Lola’s emancipation and financial independence 20 or, more sophisticatedly, as elaborate compromise. Schuckert has ‘given something away the better to keep it’ 21 ; he embodies the energy and showbiz of capitalism, and the compromises and accommodations become a metaphor for the new democracy. 22 A feminist reading, however, which the film both alludes to and represses, would highlight the pessimism inherent in the ending where the only escape from prostitution is a bourgeois hypocritical marriage. Furthermore, Lola’s financial ‘independence’ is based on the silent, exploited labour of the prostitutes, which is glossed over.
Elsaesser’s interpretation of the tender treatment of the characters and general happiness at the end, where everyone has got what they want, is only possible if the reality of prostitution is suppressed. The fate of the girls left in the brothel is not dwelt on—they cheerily wave Lola off at her wedding but the chances of their escaping will be remote. Furthermore, the viewer is also left with dissatisfaction that the corruption has not been dealt with—an idealism is evoked in the scene where von Bohm voices concern about the poor and oppressed who are disadvantaged and ostracised by the power elite; those who are silenced and left out of the democratic contract are directly addressed without a solution being found for them, and without their being overtly represented in the film. Nevertheless we have examples of such groups who remain marginal in the film—the sex workers in the brothel, and also Lola’s mother, who works as a housekeeper and brings up Lola’s and Schuckert’s child, allowing Lola to continue to work. The peace protesters outside the church on the wedding day also remind us of the excluded—they hold banners which read: ‘Freedom for the people in North Africa’ and ‘Freedom for South East Asia’. The editing juxtaposes a tableau of bride, groom and wedding guests (Lola’s mother is not there) facing the protesters, silently evoking the exploitation which underpins the closed circle of ‘happiness’. The quotations from Bakunin throughout the film—the poem that von Bohm reads after finding out Lola’s identity, and Esslin’s direct quotation about the land belonging to everyone which he says is the ‘truth on a higher level’—also remain as disjunctive presences within the seemingly integrative ending. Equality and inclusiveness remain ideals that are invoked and taken back.
Throughout the film Lola is positioned with the repressed excluded (in her alignments with the other prostitutes and her mother) but also paradoxically by the end she is not only included, but at the foundation of the community. At times throughout the film she appears to encapsulate the spirit of revolution or, in Benjamin’s terms, makes dialectics visible and comes to standstill in an image. The moment of genuine anguish when she cannot go to her own engagement party and the gesture of self-erasure evoke annihilation of the subject torn apart by the irreconcilable tension between interiority and the external. (See Fig. 8.1) Through the clash between her private and public life, the tensions at this point in the film threaten to explode the dialectic itself at the site of the female prostitute who cannot synthesise the oppositional forces.
The scene in Lola’s bedroom cuts to von Bohm at the formal ‘engagement’ dinner party, as the editing itself moves between private (Lola’s bedroom) and public (guests at the dinner table). Lola cannot show herself in the public space, the prostitute here highlighting the external/internal positioning of women within the community, but she also more generally exposes the dialectical tension between the particular and universal which Hegel sees as something man negotiates and women enable but threaten. Hegel understands history as a dialectic of particular and universal: man seeks recognition of his own particular self from all men in the universal, he strives to achieve universal recognition of his particularity. The polis or city-state only recognises the universal aspect of human action, while the particular remains embedded in the family. Family is mere particularity, inactive, biological existence and is always aligned with women. For Hegel, women are unable to access the universal and are consigned to the unconscious particularity of the family. Men, on the other hand, attain self-consciousness through the dialectic between the particular and the universal. Not only is the interaction and tension between the private and the public required for men to achieve ethical self-consciousness, but the conflict between the two spheres is also inescapable. Man cannot renounce family as he cannot renounce the particularity of his existence but he cannot renounce universality of his actions in the polis. 23 Thus there exists a ‘fundamental antinomy between family life as natural ground of ethical life and ethical life in its social universality, or “second nature”, in the polis.’ 24
The way the film is edited constantly moves the dialectic between public and private, separating and linking them and placing Lola between the two. 25 The contrast between the domestic spaces and brothel is underlined with Lola’s costume changes as she moves between the public/private divide. The brothel as space is itself ambiguous bringing together the public and private in tension. The first location is Lola’s bedroom (linked to the bodily and private but in a public space within the brothel), then the gents toilets in the brothel (associated with the lived body as we see the men urinating but within the public space), then the stage in the brothel (the most public space in the brothel but the brothel is also an unacknowledged, ‘secret’ space), then the square outside the church (the civic and public), then Lola and her mother in the domestic space of kitchen and garden (private), then the office space as von Bohm starts work (public), the board meeting (public) and then back to von Bohm in his lodgings (domestic, private rooms). There is a Brechtian symbolic approach to space in which a picture of dialectical complexity is built up through the series of separate spaces that are then also connected in the unfolding movement of the film.
The first scene set in Lola’s bedroom in the brothel as she is getting ready to go on stage is also internally marked by implicit dualities between the natural body and its mediation in external forms (mirror, camera and speech) symbolic of the tension between private and public. The very first image is so close to the camera and light that the viewer’s ability to make sense of it is momentarily blocked. As the camera pulls back it emerges as an extreme close-up of Lola’s dyed-red hair, which she is brushing, evoking a sense of touch and intimacy. At the same time, we hear a male voice reading poetry (but do not see the speaker) while the camera pulls back to frame Lola’s heavily made-up face in close-up suffused in red light, thus juxtaposing the disembodied male poetic voice with the female, sensual body. As the camera moves further back, we see Lola’s bare shoulders and the frame of the mirror into which she is looking. We realise that the first image we saw of Lola’s face was not unmediated but was actually a mirror image, inversing our original position. The camera movement also functions to neutralise the threat of the unknowability of the extreme close-up in the first shot by reinscribing it as a point-of-view shot of the protagonists within the diegesis. 26 Thus the dialectic between the ‘raw’, unconscious, natural body and its social, external mediation through language and the universal is suggested as the face/body becomes readable with both poles of the particular and the universal remaining distinct but linked in constant relation. When Lola speaks, it becomes clear that it is she who demands that the man reads poetry to her (in a later scene in the same setting she reads her own trite poem to von Bohm over the phone) and it is she who is looking at Esslin through the mirror while he is looking down at the book, situating her as subject rather than object and making her into a meeting point for the semiotic and symbolic in her alignment both with the unconscious body and language/thought (see Fig. 8.2). The dialogue in the opening scene introduces more dualisms in the form of an opposition between Verstand (reason) and Seele (soul). Esslin claims that poetry is sad because it articulates the soul rather than the rational mind and that the soul knows more. While getting Esslin to do up the zip on the back of her low-cut black corset, Lola asserts that with her it is the other way round, the implication being that she privileges reason over the soul. This has the effect of alluding to her rationality as the lipstick and costume become functional props and her body a commodity which she cannot afford to be sentimental about. However, the mise en scène is saturated with colour and clutter, the density of the images preventing the dialogue on its own from acting as the film’s sole meaning. Here Lola’s pronouncements are silently opposed by the images of a large collection of snow globes (conjuring images of childhood), the presence of dolls and striking colourful butterflies on the wall. (See Fig. 8.2) The Greek word for butterfly is ‘psyche’, which also means soul, thus the mise en scène intimates a sense of a particular inner self in tension with the externalised self. A further contradiction emerges in this too as the pre-semantic or the soul is being expressed through kitsch fakery underlining the dialectical relation between unconscious particularity and the negating movement with the universal. As Tim Bergfelder puts it, the fundamental tautology of Fassbinder’s aesthetics is that ‘only the false and the artificial can be used to reflect the genuine and the real’. 27 Moreover, the irony inherent in the prostitute’s bedroom in the brothel as the locus of particularity and the soul can also be read as an illustration of Adorno’s aporia of art after Auschwitz. Lola as prostitute refers to the eradication of particularity or the soul yet is paradoxically associated with their expression. According to Adorno the annihilation of individuality caused by modern society, and which reached its apotheosis in the death camps, makes the poem anachronistic and attempts to write poetry barbaric so art is necessarily required to reflect on its own impossibility. 28
In a key scene with von Bohm and Lola in the car on their return from their date in the country, the dialectic between inside and outside, public and private explicitly enters the dialogue when Lola warns von Bohm that he should leave town. The extreme aural and visual complexity of the scene—there is radio broadcast over the top of the beginning of the dialogue and antirealist lighting where the screen is divided into blue-green (von Bohm’s side) and red (Lola’s)—distracts from the dialogue and underlines the pervasive sense of intrusion from outside. Lola states that people in Coburg have an inner life and an outer life but ‘the one does not have anything to do with the other’. The implication is that there is a fundamental flaw in the community which, having lost its links with interiority and the private, is all externality. It implies that the balance in the dialectic has become skewed as one term becomes dominant—people operate with a radical disjunction between the public and private, and the private loses out to the public. Von Bohm counters that everyone has an inner and an outer life, but she maintains that he is different because he does not feign. In answer to his question about where she fits herself, she replies that she is corrupt because ‘she adapts’. Lola aligns herself with the corruption and the status quo (von Bohm does not know at this point that she is a prostitute) which implies that as an adaptor to circumstances she, unlike von Bohm, fails to keep the private and public in productive tension. Implicitly, then, the dialogue raises the question as to what room there is for individual conscience and particularity if people are all public externality? Lola, however, embodies a paradox: if, as she suggests, the dialectic between the private and the public has collapsed leaving no space for particularity, from which position can she expose the workings of her community? The very fact that Lola can criticise her society for these failings suggests that the distinction has not been completely eroded, for to criticise the status quo requires a position outside it, or not wholly within it.
However, later when von Bohm is threatening the whole community with revolution, she maintains that she is excluded from the corruption in which she wants to participate. She is willingly ‘bought off’ at the end and through marriage brings von Bohm back to the community. The symbolism mutates again to suggest that Lola embodies not just the functioning of the dialectic but its breakdown as there is a reduced tension between particularity and the universal because the private has dwindled and the public is overly dominant. The potential critical power of her contradictory nature decays when she makes the transition from prostitute to bourgeois wife. This is underscored in the scene in Schuckert’s garden (the only time we see his private home) where a potentially empowered Lola is shown in opulent costume becoming friendly with Schuckert’s wife. Any hint of sisterliness between and his wife and former courtesan, however, is undermined by the editing which cuts away from the two women to focus on Schuckert feeding a caged pet peacock with resplendent tail and then later to a full frame medium close-up of Schuckert laughing while we hear the women talk about belonging and sticking together. This is not about emancipation but further encapsulation; female solidarity and pride are satirised as it is clear that power relations remain unchanged and Schuckert is ultimately still in control. When Schuckert’s wife asks Lola who will make sure that von Bohm will continue to cooperate, Lola says, ‘ich’. The camera angle for the close-up shot of her as she says this word is a high angle, from the point of view of Schuckert’s aristocratic wife looking down on her, indicating a relative lack of power even while Lola is guaranteeing the perpetual reproduction of the hierarchy. This is an illustration of the enabling aspect of women’s irony but the potentiality of women’s positioning to generate an alternative (feminist ) politics lies unrealised as here Lola supports rather than threatens the status quo.
Shirins Hochzeit/Shirins Wedding
While Lola suggests that feminism gets re-encapsulated within the whole and loses its power, the critique in Shirins Hochzeit emanates from the impossible space of the dead, tragic heroine as the film locates its own narration at the site of the dead body that paradoxically speaks. Helma Sanders (also Sanders-Brahms) is a less well-known director, and Shirins Hochzeit, originally made as a TV film, is not part of the established cannon of NGC. 29 It tells the story of Shirin, a Turkish woman from a small Anatolian village betrothed since childhood to Mahmud, whose marriage has been deferred since his departure to work in Germany. The traditional family structures are affected by mass emigration to Germany, symbolised through the almost mythical loss of Shirin’s ideal love object. Her only relation to Mahmud is through fetish objects—his framed portrait photograph and a transparent plastic bowl (an item he brought back from Germany on one of his visits)—which she carries around with her to her different lodgings. Shirin finally meets Mahmud by chance when working as a prostitute in Cologne but he does not recognise her and the only words she speaks to him are ‘payment first’. This shattering experience, however, does not amount to using Shirin’s story to construct an argument against marriage per se as Berghahn asserts. 30 An important distinction is upheld (reflecting Shirin’s own thinking) between a union in an ideal erotic love relationship (equated with her childhood love) and a mercenary arranged marriage (which is equated with prostitution). The ideal might be exposed as chimerical but is nevertheless a real driving force and exists in dialectical tension with the existing forms of contractual relations between the sexes.
The film begins in the barren Anatolian countryside with the arrest of Shirin’s father for petty disobedience to the Agha (landowners); we are told in voice-over by the director that her mother died years earlier of malnutrition, which references the abject poverty. There is no one else to protect Shirin and her uncles arrange to sell her in marriage to the Agha’s administrator, who drives her away on the back of his pick-up truck, which emphasises her status as merchandise. However, she decides to run away and, helped by a female stranger on the bus who lends her the fare, she flees to Istanbul where she prepares to emigrate as a guest worker to Germany to find Mahmud. On arrival, it is implied that she finds solidarity with other female foreign guest workers in the hostel—a replacement family—which evokes an ideal of intercultural feminist sisterhood. The workplace too, although her job is mindless repetitive manual labour, is not entirely negative as there is camaraderie between the workers and even the German foreman shows kindness when she injures her finger (although he later inadvertently insults her by teasingly pulling off her headscarf). However, this community is destroyed when everyone is made redundant and forced out of the hostel. Shirin becomes a cleaner and when she protests about being sacked from this job, she is raped by one of the men in the office block. Now without a work permit and legal right to remain in Germany, she is preyed upon by a pimp who promises her a (fake) visa. She is taken into a small group of prostitutes controlled by three pimps and in contrast to the scenes in the factory and hostel, there is a lack of female solidarity among the prostitutes. One night she is sent into a male guestworker hostel and told to sleep with the six men in her allotted room. She wanders round the room in a daze being stared at by each of the men in turn until she discovers Mahmud lying in one of the beds. Her first sexual encounter with this man should have been on her wedding night. In a violent and symbolic gesture, Mahmud puts his hands over her face and the film cuts away from the immediate environment to an imagined sequence of Shirin and Mahmud in wedding clothes surrounded by the whole family back in the Anatolian field, alluding to Shirin’s inner vision, which will be discussed below. The title of the film, then, refers to an event that never takes place except in the dream or hallucination sequence, which distances the character and the viewer from the immediacy of the prostitute’s sexual encounter.
Unlike Lola, there is a simplicity and moral purity to the Turkish female character. She is less paradoxical and more clearly an exploited victim. Her innocence is stressed when she becomes a prostitute by her inability to apply make-up properly and the scenes in the bank where she is shown sending the money she earns back to her poverty-stricken relatives in Turkey. There is no sense of the agency of a sex worker: prostitution in the film is in some ways equated with the rape which precedes it in the narrative as the rape is perceived to be the moment of ruination by Shirin herself and marks the moment when she realises that she cannot marry Mahmud or go home to Turkey—in between sobs she tells her friend that as a violated woman she cannot now have a traditional marriage. Prostitution appears as logical progression (before the pimp ‘recruits’ her, he checks whether or not she is a virgin ) and both are linked by extreme violence towards the female body (the pimps burn her with a cigarette off-camera). The plot tracks her demise with prostitution in the last 15 minutes of the film and finally death, summing up her status as a tragic heroine.
However, she is also a character who says ‘no’ at crucial moments of protest against injustice and exploitation and gains agency from being the narrator of her own story. The first shot of the film is completely black and we hear Shirin’s voice saying ‘Now I am dead, as dead as the iron mountain which separates Şirin and Ferhat’. As we hear these words, a stony mountain becomes visible and as this gradually fades a close-up of Shirin’s face becomes superimposed over it, enacting her ‘re-facement’. 31 It also evokes Shirin’s ancestral connections to landscape and homeland, which is emphasised by the reference to the traditional Turkish folk legend of Ferhat and Şirin. The opening, then, positions the narrative ‘I’ in the space of the dead, making the whole film a retrospective re-telling from an impossible position of the silenced corpse. The politics behind this shift in who is telling the story is underlined with further references to the folk legend. When Shirin decides to run away from the administrator, the director’s and Shirin’s voice-overs engage in a dialogue as Shirin is shown hiding, cowering in the corn field: ‘Director: weren’t you afraid? Shirin: yes, but more afraid of the administrator. I must dig with bare hands through the mountain. If Ferhat can’t do it, Shirin must—one of us has to.’ In the original story, Şirin and Ferhat are not allowed to marry (for class reasons) and the sultan-queen gives Ferhat a test. In order to win his love, he has to carve a channel through a mountain to bring water to the city of Amasya. Şirin is the passive character in the traditional version, waiting for Ferhat to succeed, but here the female character assumes the active role embarking on a journey and undertaking feats to be united with her love.
An ideal notion of love and future life embedded in family propels Shirin to disobey the patriarchal rules governing the traditional Anatolian community; like Antigone her actions question the ethics of the laws of the community from the different ethical position of the individuality of the autonomous family. As she is driven away by the administrator on the back of his truck and just before she decides to run away, Shirin sings, in Turkish, a traditional bride’s song. Her voice competes with the overpowering sounds of the truck’s engine, which cannot drown her out as they move through the Anatolian landscape. (See Fig. 8.3) We can interpret Shirin’s song as the protagonist’s particular voice, opposing the laws of the community, the musical medium allowing self-expression within the structures of the traditional song, similarly to the function of the ghazals and traditional songs in the Hindi film Pakeezah, explored by Aparna Sharma in Chap. 9. The wedding song suggests the power of the domestic and the family and the wife’s body; the lyrics are about preparing for the husband, looking forward to the husband’s coming and physical union (‘my sweat will heal you’), and the voice-overs from the director make it clear that she is not singing it for the administrator.
The song suspends the action allowing for critical reflection: being sold into marriage to a man she does not love suggests perversion of the more natural laws of the body, desire and eros which Shirin cannot forget and which she continues to preserve by pursuing Mahmud. However, it will transpire, individual particularity will be destroyed as the longed-for union with him only occurs when she is a prostitute in a room filled with other strange men. The temporal suspension allows these tensions to become visible. The upturned basin—a reminder of Mahmud—pressed to her stomach melancholically evokes an empty womb as unrealised fulfilment and the children she will not have with Mahmud, but simultaneously it is emblematic of the children she won’t have with the administrator and thus defiance and opposition to the community. The sequence is filled with nostalgia for what has been lost, resistance to the present and longing for a different future.
The other element that offers space for meta-textual reflection is the dialogue of the voice-overs from Shirin (speaking in broken and heavily accented German) and the director herself (speaking clear Hochdeutsch) who addresses Shirin and helps to construct the story. The relationship between them has been read as unequal 32 or as a directorial appropriation of the story of the foreign woman in order to make feminist arguments about the fate of women in general. 33 However, I read the overlapping of voices more as a conversation between the women, the director showing compassion as an act of imagination and based on their shared experiences as women, such as when Sanders wonders out loud what it would be like to carry the children of a man you don’t love inside your body. This is such a visceral idea evoked paradoxically not through directly representing sex, pregnancy and childbirth but through the disembodied voice of the director imaginatively evoking the protagonist’s embodied experience. It is almost the articulation of Shirin’s own thoughts, which at this point she can’t express as she is shown subserviently serving the men arranging her marriage in the domestic space where she is not even allowed to make eye contact as she brings them tea. However, crucially, the two narrations of protagonist and director are never elided as the director does not ventriloquise Shirin’s voice, whose embodied experience and identity remain distinct but are linked in dialogic relation to the director’s. The viewer is primed by the process of watching Shirin in a respect for what Jacobs calls the ‘energy of the lived body’. 34 The materiality of the lived body is constantly referenced—the chores of the women in Anatolia, working in the fields, falling asleep on the bus, washing after the long journey to Germany, waiting in queues, crawling into bed when exhausted, getting up early for work, an extreme close-up of blood oozing out of her finger when she cuts it in the factory. In its evocation of Shirin’s embodied experience, the film could be related to recent phenomenological approaches to film analysis and their emphasis on techniques that immerse us in a sensory encounter with the body on the screen. 35 However, in Sanders’ film, the phenomenological co-exists with crucial elements of distancing through the intrusion of the director’s and character’s voice-overs, which never disavow mediation and constitute a mode of dialectical empathy. By the time it comes to the scenes of prostitution, we are conditioned in empathetic respect of Shirin’s body and we do not need to have direct representations of these experiences for them to be made palpable.
Shirin’s rape is more explicitly represented than prostitution. While Shirin’s horror is sensitively, non-voyeuristically conveyed during the attack through a medium close-up on her face, we are not saturated with Shirin’s body to the extent of intense physical engagement. 36 Moreover, the after-effects are alluded to through silence and distanciation, the disjunction with the character’s environment reflecting the (unrepresentable) reality of her mind. She is shown curled up in a foetal position on the sofa still in the dishevelled clothes while her friend’s children jump noisily around the room. The director’s voice-over is conspicuous here in its absence suggesting both her loss of words to express what happened and deliberate non-appropriation of the trauma of the other. In this way, the film could be seen as promoting what Maya Deren called a ‘vertical investigation of poetry’ rather than the horizontal attack of narrative. 37 Verfremdungseffekt (Distancing effect) also marks the representation of prostitution, not as a political tool but to allude to Shirin’s state of mind. The diegetic and grating sound of a radio being tuned accompanies her entrance into the room of men. The screeching sounds veer into the non-diegetic as Shirin encounters Mahmud and gets into bed with him. Mahmud places two hands over her face, completely covering it, suggesting obliteration of self and there is a shift to a dream image with a close-up of the stony barren ground back in Anatolia out of which an apparently dead Shirin slowly emerges covered in mud and roots. She is helped out of the ground by Mahmud as family members congregate on the field, bringing her traditional bridal clothes and helping her to dress. She then stands next to Mahmud, and as the camera moves up and over the figures, the group converges into a tableau suggesting a family photograph although no one is smiling.
The scenes from Shirin’s imagination replace an ‘objective’ representation of sex work and replicate her mental blocking mechanisms during the encounter as well as suggesting a creative re-writing of the experience which transforms the shock into the fulfilment of her most cherished ideals. The dream sequence suggests death through being buried alive but it is also an image of birth or re-birth, awakening from the dead, being set free, and thus constitutes another symbolic resuscitation prefiguring or repeating the first lines of the film. The strangeness of the tableau and the alienating camera movement highlight the illusory nature of the apparently reconstituted wholeness of the family. There is another return to this family group in the final moments in the film after Shirin has been murdered. The images accompany the director’s voice-over, which tells us that the family grieved but could not bury Shirin’s body. The final images are not directly linked to Shirin’s inner vision but take on an independent life in the film beyond their relation to the character, aligning the film itself both with Shirin’s unconscious and the need to supplement it. We see Shirin crying, in bridal clothes, standing next to Mahmud and both are looking down at a point beyond the frame. The images morph in our minds, then, from a distorted wedding scene to a non-existent funeral whose chief mourner is the murdered victim herself as the absence of these familial ritual events are evoked in hallucinatory images. The final frame of Shirin’s unburied corpse underlines that her death cannot be redeemed through integration in the ethical order of the family.
The film creates a tension between the dead prostitute’s silence and her speaking, which has the effect of alluding to a different perspective emerging from the site of the excluded other, which would suggest a different narration, including a different discourse on prostitution. However, while the circular temporality suggests a breakdown of linear logic, it necessarily repeats a story where she is always already the dead victim. The film could even be read as a mode of grieving for the tragic heroine recalling the theorisation of cinema as a mourning or memorial art. 38 This is emphasised by the use of photographic stills within the film showing Shirin as a small child with her mother and grandparents (who are dead at the beginning of the narrative) and by-gone scenes from village life, evoking irretrievable loss. The images and devices, which suggest a return of the dead body (as a site of narration), also show that attempts to recuperate the lost object are only illusory. Birth and death are linked in dialectical tension turning Shirin into a ghostly spectre, both alive and dead, haunting her own story.
Conclusion
The corporeal politics—crucial in any representation of prostitution—of the two films discussed here diverge. Fassbinder apparently allows relatively little power for the unmediated body suggesting that it needs constant negation through the external for it to come to consciousness. In Shirins Hochzeit, there is much more focus on empathy with embodied experience and emphasis on the materiality of the pre-semantic body. The lived energy of the body is alluded to in ways that do not place it beyond reason or comprehension but almost lets it express itself through the cinematography and compassionate voice-overs. Thus while both directors do not explicitly film an embodied experience of prostitution (sexual intercourse takes place off-camera in Lola and is replaced with the dream sequence in Shirins Hochzeit), the proximity of the body in Sanders’ film allows a different ethics of filming prostitution.
In both films, the prostitute characters highlight tensions between unrealised ideals and existing conditions, between what is and what ought to be. One of her key roles is to highlight the discrepancy between the real existing power structures and differently imagined arrangements. The prostitute figures thematise ways of finding (Lola) or not finding (Shirin) accommodation with the status quo. In both films, the female protagonists intimate critical voices of opposition yet are contained within (Lola) or destroyed by (Shirin) patriarchy and capitalism, which both films suggest are inescapable. In Lola, there is avoidance of tragedy through the prostitute’s bourgeois marriage but, as my reading has shown, the film highlights residual silence, exclusion and inequalities. Shirins Hochzeit ends in tragedy and silence but figures Shirin as the excluded other who is brought out of the margins to narrate her own story.
The symbolism surrounding Lola mutates constantly, figuring her as a revolutionary force outside dialectics, then as the ‘irony of the community’, as outside but inside, as repressed individuality which also as such maintains the community. She is associated with the dialectical relations between public and private, particularity and the universal, and exposes the workings of the dialectic itself. By making dialectics become visible as the site of constant tensions, she has a yet further function of alluding to the dysfunction of the dialectic because of the domination of the public or universal and also to the position of woman in the dialectic when irreconcilable tensions threaten to destroy the self. Shirin, on the other hand, is positioned more straightforwardly as marginal but oppositional voice, but the circular device of the resuscitated speaking tragic heroine creates a central tension between the desire for a different speaking position and acknowledgement of the danger of repeating the same stories.
While Fassbinder’s Lola has much more agency than Shirin, his film appears more pessimistic about the possibility of change. The potential for a politics of difference fizzles out as rebellious forces get incorporated within the whole, revolution is evoked and taken back and feminism mocked. The murkiness of Fassbinder’s film refuses any character the moral high ground (with the exception of the marginal mother) and precludes unambiguous discourse or politics. On the other hand, Sanders’ film reveals the need for, and a possibility of, a different feminist politics, but her heroine is constructed more simplistically as an innocent victim, creating a space of moral purity in which feminist criticism installs itself. If feminism speaks from the site of the victim’s dead body, this suggests both the ability to speak differently without being incorporated into the system but also the exploitation of the impossible outside position, returning us to the resonance of Antigone for both these films.
Notes
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1.
Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-werk, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), p. 55.
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2.
Claire Thora Solomon, Fictions of the Bad Life (Ohio State University Press, 2014).
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3.
Christiane Schönfeld, ed., Commodities of Desire. The Prostitute in Modern German Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), p. 24.
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4.
G.F.W Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: OUP, 1977), p. 288, n.475.
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5.
Kelly Oliver, ‘Antigone’s Ghost: Undoing Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, Hypatia, 11:1 (1996), 67–90 (73).
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6.
Kelly Oliver, ‘Antigone’s Ghost’, 72.
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7.
See Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, ‘Hegel’s Antigone’ in The Phenomenology of Spirit Reader. Critical and Interpretative Essays, edited by Jon Stewart, (New York: SUNY, 1998), pp. 250–253.
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8.
Mills, ‘Hegel’s Antigone’, 1998, p. 250.
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9.
Hegel, Phenomenology, n.475, p. 288.
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10.
Dennis King Keenan, ed., Hegel and Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 124.
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11.
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Cornell University Press, 1993).
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12.
Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: Identity, History, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), p. 124.
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13.
This is a new reading of the central character who has hitherto been interpreted as tragic, passive victim. See Russell Campbell, Marked Women. Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Annette Brauerhoch ‘Die Heimat des Geschlechts–oder mit der fremden Geschichte die eigene erzählen. Zu Shirins Hochzeit von Helma Sanders-Brahms’ in: “Getürkte Bilder”. Zur Inszenierung von Fremden im Film, Arnoldshainer Filmgespräche, Bd. 12, Marburg, 1995, 109–115, and Daniela Berghahn, Far-Flung Families in Film. The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
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14.
Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, p. 119.
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15.
See Love is Colder than Death, 1969 and Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1980, Garbage, the City and Death, 1975. The homoeroticism is also present in Lola but rather than the pimp-client dyad, we have a trio of men in various relations to the singer-prostitute which results in the double dyads of Schuckert-Esslin and Esslin-von Bohm.
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16.
Schönfeld, Commodities of Desire, p. 173.
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17.
Sabine Pott, Film als Geschichtsschreibung bei Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), p. 103.
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18.
John Sandford, The New German Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 1981) and Ronald Hayman Fassbinder. Filmmaker (Olympic Marketing Corps, 1984).
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19.
There was a distinction between hetarae and pornai in Greek culture—hetaira (courtesans) were paid for company over a period of time rather than for each individual sex act.
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20.
See Russell Campbell, Marked Women and Simon Richter, Women Pleasure Film. What Lolas Want (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
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21.
Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, p. 123.
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22.
Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, p. 125.
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23.
Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 276.
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24.
Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans James H Nichols (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 61.
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25.
Fassbinder would have been indirectly influenced by Hegel via Brecht’s Marxist-influenced dialectical theories and practices.
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26.
This reading is based on Zizek’s concept of suture in cinema in The Fright of Real Tears: Krzyztof Kieslowski between Theory and Posttheory (London: BFI, 2001).
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27.
Tim Bergfelder, ‘Popular genres and cultural legitimacy: Fassbinder’s Lola and the legacy of 1950s West German Cinema’, Screen, 45/1 (2004), 21–39 (33).
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28.
Theodor W Adorno, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’ in Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter, edited by Petra Kiedaisch (Stuttgart, 1995), pp. 27–49.
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29.
Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (London: Verso, 1992).
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30.
Compare Daniela Berghahn, Far-flung Families in Film, pp. 71–72.
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31.
Re-counting a life-story as re-telling from a different perspective suggests here an alternative function of narrative to Paul de Man’s view of autobiography as defacement. See Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN, 94:5 Comparative Literature (1976), 919–930.
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32.
Joachim Neubauer, Wider den Kulturenzwang: Migration, Kulturalisierung und Weltliteratur, edited by Özkan Ezli, Dorothee Kimmich, Annette Werberger (Bielefeld, transcript Verlag, 2009).
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33.
Brauerhoch, ‘Die Heimat des Geschlechts’, pp. 109–115.
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34.
Amber Jacobs, ‘On the Maternal ‘Creaturely’ Cinema of Andrea Arnold’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 13:1 (2016), 160–176 (161).
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35.
Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film (Duke University Press, 2000); Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
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37.
Bill Nichols, ed., Maya Deren and the American Avant Garde (University of California Press, 2001), p. 65. A vertical exploration in film is one that investigates a situation by probing the moment’s qualities and depth, concerned with what it feels like or what it means for the character.
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38.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981); André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).
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Ludden, T. (2017). Distorted Antigones: Dialectics and Prostitution in Lola and Shirins Hochzeit . In: Hipkins, D., Taylor-Jones, K. (eds) Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Cinema. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64608-4_8
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