Alexander Kluge, Cinema and the Public Sphere: The Construction Site of Counter-History

Abstract

Contemporary German Cinema is making its way into Film Studies as an instance of deviationa deviation from dominant classical narrative, but, in the same move, also a deviation from modernist, deconstructive modes of cinema and the theoretical apparatus supporting them. Thomas Elsaesser considers recent German films represent... a confirmation of Baudry's and Metz's arguments [concerning the mirroring effect, the specularization of subject/object relations, the construction of a transcendental subject], and at the same time [to oifer] a textual practice which might make apparent a dimension elided or repressed in The Imaginary Signifier Z'1 In his analysis of voyeurism and fascination in the films of Fassbinder, Elsaesser suggests that we read strategies of spectator-positioning in historical terms, recognizing a particular subjectivity at stake in the specular organization of the subject. The specularization of all social relations, which Fassbinder foregrounds in his films, is undeniably linked to the problematic constitution of social identity under German fascism, a system thatfor purposes of its ownpromoted a massive specularization of public and private life. By implicating the spectator in analogous constellations, Fassbinder both mobilizes and critically dissects a specific social imaginary as it sustained the Third Reich and continued to haunt political and social relations under its legal successor, the Federal Republic of Germany.

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