A Woman Beside Herself: Art and Its Other in Nazi Movies

Abstract

I want to recall two moments from two Nazi films two years apart, in which a woman stands literally beside herself. Venus Before the Court (Venus vor Gericht, 1941) places a woman in a courtroom next to a nude statue, which she identifies as a representation of her own body. In Freed Hands (Befreite Hände, 1939), a young woman sculpts her own stone bust. If the first woman experiences a horror we have all endured in our dreams—standing, for all intents and purposes, naked in public—the second woman is effectively bodiless, since her art rendition has no body and her human body is covered by a clinician’s white coat. The statue in the first case is in every sense complete (vollkommen—with all its Nazi implications), the bust is in progress. Such differences notwithstanding, it is striking how both movies are obsessed with a kind of doubling, whereby the real, flesh-and-blood woman is diminished by her larger-than-life other, yet arguably enhanced in her very diminution, in her subordination of self to art. And in both, the flesh-and-blood and aesthetic reproduction are the effect of cinema, are not there. At a point when National Socialism had clearly consolidated its power, why was it “hammering in” (literally and metaphorically) this preoccupation with art and women in the movies?