Michael Hammond and Michael Williams open their survey of British Silent Cinema and the Great War by introducing a basic tension that has informed visual media’s relationship to the Great War since the close of hostilities in 1918. “The issue during the war was how to represent it, following the war it was how to remember it”.[i] Faithful representation does not always serve the purposes of venerable remembrance: each is an entanglement of political and ideological concerns that do not necessarily complement one another. Take for example the poetry of Wilfred Owen and its description of gassed men, mass slaughter and the general futility of war. Initially, this work was considered too anti-war to serve as commemoration. It was not fully enshrined into the canon and curriculum of remembrance until late in the twentieth century. When it comes to moving image depictions of the war, the knotty problematic of remembrance and representation intensifies, not least because of the assumptions of authenticity and veridicality baked into the medium of film. Jefferson Woods, the manager of the Broadway Cinema in Hammersmith, refused to screen the film The Battle of the Somme, produced by the War Office in 1916, projecting instead a slide reading: “WE ARE NOT SHOWING THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME. THIS A PLACE OF AMUSEMENT, NOT A CHAMBER OF HORRORS”.[ii]

In the years immediately following the war, the rituals of remembrance were established by institutions such as the British Legion (who began the sale of poppies in November 1921) and along with them many of the acceptable parameters of how to represent the conflict. Cinema participated in this unspoken legislation of modes of remembrance and representation in a number of ways. Initially, Jefferson Woods’ proclamation proved overwhelmingly true: the cinema was a place of amusement and tales of derring-do and magnificent men in their flying machines dominated the screens of the inter-war years. In the second half of the century, however, as discourses surrounding the war shifted, so did the depictions of it on big and small screen alike, eventually culminating in the familiar ‘lions led by donkeys’ narrative still popularly held today. However, acute condemnation of the futility of trench warfare did not dim any of the pre-established imperatives of remembrance – i.e. memorialisation over and above explication – that informed the moving image depictions. Instead, Emma Hanna notes that

television documentaries about the first world War became central sites of national memory and mourning which utilised images and ideas about the conflict which resonated with the accepted story of 1914-1918. By using modes of remembrance that were established in the inter-war years, these programmes were designed to be self-generating. Many programmes sought to place the war and its aftermath beyond critical discussion, and where more recent programmes challenged accepted ideas about the war they were roundly condemned in the press.[iii]

Hanna was writing in 2009, before multiple events that potentially augured the reconfiguration of these “sites of national memory and mourning.” The first is the official passing of the war from living memory. In 2011, Claude Stanley Choules, “the Last Survivor of World War One,” died at the age of 110. A year later, Florence Green, considered the last living person to serve in the war in any capacity, died at the age of 111. With the passing of living memory, the moral authority of the first hand witness moved from the individuals who had experienced the war to the archives where those experiences and memories were enshrined. Eliah Bures, discussing the weight that “living memory” placed on our collective conception of the First World War, anticipated that “the loss of living memory can also bring with it a liberation from entanglement in the past, and from the distortions to which all memory – individual and collective – is inevitably prone.”[iv] This was an optimistic forecasting. The centenary provoked an intensification of rituals of remembrance and whilst the events of the war are continually undergoing re-consideration, the distortions of memory that gave rise to popular myths of the stalwart British Tommy were reinforced, a spate of referendums providing plenty of opportunity for revamped notions of national character.

Another cultural trajectory significant to the memorialisation of the war is the large-scale digitisation of film archives that is currently underway. I’ll return to the impact of digital technology on memory later in this essay. For the time being, it is enough to note, in passing, the coincidence of the deaths of Claude Chouled and Florence Green and pioneering programmes of digitisation such as the BFI’s Unlocking Film Heritage project (2012-2017) which aimed to digitise 10,000 films from the BFI National Archive, in turn re-building the architecture of the database and transforming access to the films themselves.[v] This relation is not entirely facetious: with the passing of living memory, film footage became the principal connection to the events of World War One at precisely the moment when the nature of that connection was undergoing radical change. Film emerged as the material record of the war with the greatest ‘authenticity’ at roughly the same moment that the position and function of archive images within the landscape of visual media was re-written.

As the events of the war recede further and further away, the competing imperatives of politically inflected modes of remembrance and the representational affordances of digital technologies overlap one another in increasingly complex ways. Where cinematic representation was hitherto legislated by the propriety of memorialisation, the screen is now the principle medium of remembrance and its rituals. What I aim to do in the following discussion is query the degree to which these previously institutionally discrete modes are now co-determinant, and ask whether or not our current techno-cultural context requires a re-thinking of how traditions of remembrance, and their concomitant myths, are sustained, re-produced or thoroughly re-constituted in the context of pervasive digital visual media and new forms of digital representation.

It is within this context that I’d like to examine Peter Jackson’s World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). On the surface, it fits the mould outlined by Emma Hanna. Arriving as part of the centenary celebrations of the war it is “self-generating” and avoids any “critical discussion” of the war and its aftermath. Indeed, it was designed as a classroom tool and is available as a set of KS3 teaching resources.[vi] What makes the film stand out from its predecessors is its treatment of archive footage, which it presents in digitally applied colour and – in some screenings – 3D. Whilst it is not the first film to digitally colourise footage from World War One, it is the first to claim the superiority of the colourised images over their originals, and, crucially, for that claim to be met with mainstream critical consensus. Whereas Philip Nugus and Jonathan Martin’s World War One in Colour (2003) was largely derided for being a historically uninteresting one-trick pony, Jackson’s handling of the archive is being signalled as the beginning of a new practice in non-fiction film-making (as evidenced by a new documentary project delving into the extensive Beatles’ archive).[vii] Crucially, the digitisation and colourisation processes are not positioned as new modes of representation, but rather strategies of restoration that enable a more venerable remembrance. For Jackson, restoration is an ethical project “important if we want people […] to think of these men as human beings… Restoration is a humanising process.”[viii] The critical reception of the film ratified this: Jackson’s film was celebrated not so much for re-iterating the contemporary relevance of archive footage but of making the archive footage feel contemporary.[ix]

Not everyone would agree with this opinion of colourisation. Indeed, many perceive the ethical dimensions of colourisation in opposite terms from Jackson. The FIAF Code of Ethics itself states that:

When restoring material, archives will endeavour only to complete what is incomplete and to remove the accretions of time, wear, and misinformation. They will not seek to change or distort the nature of the original material or the intensions of its creators.[x]

Luke McKernan, in anticipation of the Jackson’s film, argued “colourising… threatens to make the WW1 film archive we have inherited meaningless, because we can no longer look at it sympathetically.”[xi] Lawrence Napper, upon seeing the film, bemoaned that “so sacred is the cow of the Great War in its centenary moment that nobody seems to have noticed how horribly distorted and ludicrous Jackson’s tarted-up images look.”[xii] Elsewhere, Pamela Hutchinson argued that Jackson’s treatment showed a “contempt for archive footage.”[xiii]

Like it or loathe it, colourisation is never invisible. Either it is ludicrous, or it brings the images to life. But how does the consistent visibility of the digital manipulation of archive footage effect the film’s status as a “site of national memory and mourning”? It is the first and principle task of this essay to outline colourisation as an object of aesthetic analysis. Understanding what exactly colourisation does will provide insight into how it might be operating on its spectators. In turn, this will give some impression of the effects of digital colourisation upon our collective conception of the past.

Outlining the aesthetics of colourisation and its impact on perception of the archive is not solely relevant to Jackson’s film, nor the World War One archives in general. Colourisation is an increasingly standard practice in non-fiction film-making. Principally, as with Jackson’s film or the Smithsonian Channel’s America in Colour series (2017-ongoing), colourisation stands as the chief feature of the text. Elsewhere, however, colourisation has been used without much acknowledgement in a variety of recent documentaries including Ron Howards’ The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years (2017) and Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2017). Colourisation’s increasing prevalence is an aesthetic expression of a much broader shift, one with ramifications of epistemological proportions. My analysis of colourisation, then, feeds into the broader stakes of the digital architectonics of memory. I will return to these issues later, in my discussion of Vilém Flusser and Wolfgang Ernst. Gesturing to them now, I aim to sharpen my focus on the problematic of representation and remembrance. The mythopoeic conception of World War One has been influenced by a century’s worth of screen media: now the digitization of that media entails a reconstitution not just of how the events of the war are represented but how collective memory emerges as a function of those representations. In what follows I aim to posit Jackson’s documentary as a crystallization of our techno-cultural context and its ingestion of history and the film archive. Whilst I’ll primarily be talking about how digital colour on archive footage strikes the eye and operates on how we engage with archive material, an always-proximate question will be how digital remediation strikes the viewing subject and intercedes in our relationship with capital-H History.

Turning now to an account of the peculiar aesthetics of colourisation. The aesthetic effects of the process have received very little critical attention, and what work has been done on them has been pre-emptively charged by one side or the other of the argument whether or not it is appropriate. That said, arguments against colourisation are also the place where one finds the best accounts of their appearance. Simply put, purists go furthest in explaining the technical challenges of colourisation, suggesting why the addition of colour is anything but a neutral process. Whilst not a purist myself, my argument will inevitably stray into similar territory. At the outset I’d stress that I aim to describe features of colourisation that appear relatively consistently and can be assumed to be apparent to a substantial portion of the audience. I will gesture towards technical accounts of these effects both to better explain their appearance and also to begin sketching out the underlying operativity of digitisation. The aesthetic features I’ll be examining can be loosely listed as follows: the redness of red, the pinkness of (largely Caucasian) skin and the monotone of deep backgrounds. Each is particular to colourisation; the specific result of the difficulty of overlaying digital colour information on a grey-scale image derived from 100 year old film footage. As such, each is also an articulation of the priorities of our current techno-cultural context. On the basis that colourisation is geared towards a greater degree of photorealism or naturalism than the monochromatic image provides, these priorities are principally aesthetic. However, in each of the sections that follow, I’ll endeavour to describe what these aesthetic features disclose about the colourisation process, its modes of signification and symbolisation, as well as its effect on the significatory modes of photochemical media. From this standpoint, I’ll decode what impact this might have on the collective perception of World War One.

‘Redness of red’
They Shall Not Grow Old (Warner Brothers DVD, 2019)

Luke McKernan’s impassioned assault on colourisation is grounded in the fact that film stocks of the early twentieth century were orthochromatic rather than panchromatic, and do not represent an accurate capturing of real colour in the first place.[xiv] Orthochromatic stocks, in general, registered reds as deep blacks and blues as lighter greys (a chemical quirk that Méliès famously accounted for by painting his sets blue in order brighten up the final image). What this means for the colourisation process is that the orthochromatic record of the colours will be translated into a misleading grey-scale and when colour information is interpolated into the grey-scale several shading issues will present themselves: what could be perceived as something receding into darkness was, in front of the camera, a bright red object.

Mistakes such as this are for the most part prevented by editorial oversight, but nevertheless this dynamic with regards to reds effects the image in two ways. Firstly, most specifically, the misregistration of red in the orthochromatic record means that red areas of the frame – those areas of uniforms, munitions, or blood, for example, are overcompensated for given that the colour information must be overlaid on a dark grey. Secondly, more abstractly, given that red objects present such problems for colourisation, their generalised absence means that the presence of red can potentially strike the viewer in an overly significant key. Indeed, the infrequency of colourisation’s handling of reds means that when reds do occur they appear anomalous. Red is already a highly symbolic colour, and this dynamic can freight the red with excessive symbolic meaning. It snags the eye and tempts a meaning that over-rides the neutrality of the documentary presentation. Jacksons’ film features red in its most vivid registers: as blood and as poppies. Looking at these two details and the way in which they are presented helps us glimpse the way in which colourisation both attempts to shore up its claim on authenticity even as it slips into a rhetorical register that exceeds the parameters of neutrality and veridicality.

Firstly, the redness of blood. Under the conditions of colourisation the documentation of injury must overcome the technical difficulties of blood red and its misregistration on orthochromatic film stock. A creative intervention is inevitable as is the potential for the blood to appear stylized. Jackson’s display of injury and death is in line with his ethics of restoration: it is an attempt to express the human, physical cost of combat. Accordingly, the film is peppered with frequent, often visceral, images featuring dead and wounded soldiers. One image of a gangrenous foot stands out as being positively gory. Another sequence, shows the walking wounded being treated in a field hospital. Here, the reds of bloodied gauzes and open wounds pull the eye in a way that verges on the over-accentuation of the presence of blood. This over-accentuation bifurcates the meaning of red in the image: it denotes blood but simultaneously the livid reds connote the process of colourisation itself and its re-signification of the contents of the black and white image. The way in which red draws the eye and accentuates the injury detail serves as a reminder of its interpolation into the monochrome image; in turn this generates an awareness of the manipulation taking place on a semiotic level. No matter the photorealistic achievements of the colourised image, any signal of the process itself potentially hampers the perception of the image as an authentic document of injury. For this reason, blood in Jackson’s film always has an edge of the lurid showman about it.

The red of the poppies in the film has a similar effect on the way in which the image is interpreted. In a variety of flat green shots, dots of red stand out in a manner that organises the way in which we perceive the images. Appearing in the foreground of wider landscapes, red in and amongst the green of the grass helps segment the image and contribute to the sense of perspective. Popping up at the side of the road, bright dots of cheery red offset the uniforms of marching men. Significantly, there is never any question as to what flowers this red is supposed to represent. The connotation of this use of red is overwhelmingly symbolic, so much so that it imposes upon the basic veridicality of the colourised image. The appearance of red dots resonates symbolically before it persuades photographically. Poppies are ubiquitous in Jackson’s film and not, one suspects, because they were ubiquitous on the ground in 1916. Here the rituals of remembrance reveal themselves to supersede photographic realism. The symbolic lineage that runs from John McCrae’s “In Flanders Field,” via the British Legion to every lapel on television in early November consistently pushes its way into Jackson’s frames.  Moreover, the presence of the poppies is often open to interrogation. Whilst nit-picking about whether or not there were actually poppies in every frame that is dotted with red is not necessarily helpful, their repeated presence contributes to a growing awareness of the retroactive processes of colourisation, that has the potential to re-signify the most basic landscape. Each repeated inflection of a green landscape by a random scatter of symbolically over-loaded red opens the question of whether or not those flowers were really there. Thus integrated into our basic perception of reds in the colourised image is an intuition that the red is motivated less by the presence of actually existing flowers, and more by the power of the colour itself.

‘Pinkness of Skin’
They Shall Not Grow Old (Warner Brothers DVD, 2019)

The colourisation of skin-tone, like the presence of reds, can prove a distracting feature in the frame. However, where the reds compromised the veridicality of the colourised image by creating a tension between the overtly symbolic use of red and its actual presence in the profilmic scene, colourisation’s presentation of largely Caucasian skin-tone must deal directly with issues of naturalism and the correspondence between digital colour space and natural colour. If, as Jackson says, the task of restoration is a humanising one, returning humanity to the figures trapped in a black and white “Charlie Chaplin” world,[xv] it is worth taking a closer look at those humans and interrogating the degree to which the application of digital colour is successful in making the faces appear more human. Again, the process is inhibited by the nuances of colour registration in monochromatic stock and again, this problem of translation and registration accounts for the characteristic aesthetic of colourised skin tones.

On first glance, colourised faces appear strange, they have a monotonous wash and can appear either overly luminous, almost acidic, or chalky and sallow. There are various ways to explain this issue, but in essence the reason for this chromatic monotony is that colourisation deploys too few colours in its rendering of flesh tone. Painters have been including surprising hues in their representation of skin for centuries, in deference to the nuances of shade, tone and reflection. In more recent years, researchers into digital effects, most notably Barbara Fleuckiger,[xvi] have outlined the challenges of digitally modelling and photorealistically rendering convincing skin. The solutions that have been pioneered in the VFX industry – most notably the rendering protocols loosely described as Subsurface Scattering (SSS) – rely on multi-layered models with an abundance of sub-cutaneous architecture and enormous amounts of computing power.

By contrast, colourisation is only dealing with a grey-scale image and there are no sub-visual determinants to inflect the way light bounces off faces. Likewise, colourisation is not a rendering process. The colours are determined not according to the behaviour of light, but according to a set of assumptions established and articulated externally to the processes of visual media. This is most markedly the case in the colours of uniforms, which cannot be captured spontaneously or automatically by black and white film. To compensate, the colours are imported from various other realms of knowledge: military history and regimental portraiture being foremost. In the example of uniforms the use of colour isn’t particularly intrusive given that the average viewer does not have direct experience of World War One livery. The same can’t be said of the representation of skin, which is so vivid and particular as to make manifest the process by which colour values are assigned in colourisation; each image of a pink faced Tommy attesting to the colour arriving from beyond the significatory processes of photography. This is doubly consequential. Firstly, the consistently problematic representation of skin tone in the colourised images troubles our intuitive perception of the photographic image as a transparent picture of reality and goes some way towards guaranteeing the visibility of colourisation within the frame. Secondly, this persistent visibility transforms the way in which the image is understood. That is to say, once the evidentiary status of the image has been undermined, what becomes visible is what Vilém Flusser describes as “the entire complex of apparatus and their criteria… that lie between a photograph and its meaning”.[xvii]

Jackson’s film dedicates a significant amount of attention to the personal hygiene of the troops. It is reported that on the front-line the men are expected to shave. Likewise, on returning from a four-day spell at the front, the men are expected to be spick and span the next day. Accordingly, the film features several group portraits of pink-faced Tommies smiling at the camera. However, even justified by the images of vigorous scrubbing there is a monotony and unnaturalness in the pinkness of the faces. This non-correspondence between real flesh tones and those of colourisation discloses the fact that the colour information is not drawn from the scene photographically, but instead selected from a palette, wherein Caucasian skin tone can be expressed as an RGB value. These are the criteria – the description of ethnicity in mathematical parameters, R225, G224, B189 according to Colour-Hex.com[xviii] – by which, Flusser argues, the meaning of the image is set in place. What they disclose through being visible in the frame is the basic incommensurability of photographic media and digital colour space. This splits the ontology of the image: the spatial information is derived from the play of light in front of the lens, the colour values quite legibly have no relation to the profilmic scene.

Pink faces are not the only problem with colourisation’s treatment of skin tone. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a notable group portrait within the film (taken from The Battle of the Somme) where the men’s faces appear grey instead of pink. This greyness is contextually motivated and appropriate to the scene, the men are in a sunken road in the middle of no-man’s land, anxiously waiting to go into battle (famously, the caption from the original film specified that they went into action 30 minutes after the film was shot). Nevertheless, despite its appropriateness to the moment being depicted, the grey-ish colour of the skin still suffers from a strained correspondence to actual flesh-tones. What is more, the saturated greens of the foliage in the background off set the washed out appearance of the men’s faces and alert our eyes to a contradiction internal to the chromatics in the image. Whether the faces are grey or pink (or another colour entirely), the problematic correspondence between actual skin tones and those in colourised images routinely foregrounds the process of colourisation. As with the overly symbolic accents of red in the representation of blood or poppies, this foregrounding of the process interferes with our perception of the ‘authenticity’ of the image.

It is not just that the monochrome image has undergone a process of re-signification. Prolonged exposure to colourised representation of skin tone amounts to an encounter with the determinants of digital colour space. The monotony of the skin tones is an artefact of the parameters that express Caucasian skin tone in digital colour. What is being brought to the fore in this particular aesthetic of colourisation is a set of representative tendencies that are potentially in conflict with the politics of remembrance. There is a paradox at work. In humanising the individuals caught on film, Jackson’s process is quite legibly homogenising them. What is at stake here is not the success or failure of Jackson’s film but instead the effect of a representative medium on the processes of “national memory and mourning.” I’ll return to this problematic in more detail towards the end of this essay, but signal here that the aesthetics of colourised skin tone do not enable a greater realism in the image, but instead seem to conform skin tones to the available palette. As such, in the tension between representation and remembrance, digital colour’s drive to more realistically represent the events of World War One instead actively distort them according to a set of descriptive standards, fulfilling the dynamic that Sean Cubitt identifies of “conforming perception to the technical standards,” and which he describes as the “normative core” of digital media.[xix]

‘Monochrome Deep Backgrounds’
They Shall Not Grow Old (Warner Brothers DVD, 2019)

Adding colour to a black and white image has an effect not just on the semiotic conditions of the image and its significatory processes, but also on its expression of space. As Christine Brinkmann points out in her essay “The Tensions of Colour in Colourized Films,” which focuses on hand painted early film but contains many points that are relevant to the digital iteration of colourisation,

colour can alter the impression of space, as warm colours seem to lie close up and cooler ones appear to be more distant… It can override the three-dimensional modelling of shadows on objects as well as the illusion of depth resulting from central perspective and other indicators in the image.[xx]

This disruption of photographic space has a two-fold effect on the viewing experience of colourised films. The first occurs image by image, with warm colours effecting the depth of the image and making distant perspectives appear shallow. The second effect results from the concatenation of these effects, as the intensity of the impact of colour upon photographic space oscillates from shot to shot. Across the duration of a given sequence, the viewer negotiates not just the effects of montage – with its construction of spatial continuity – but the varying effects of colour on spatial perception as well.

To deal with the first of these interconnected effects: there are several instances throughout Jackson’s film in which distant backgrounds more closely resemble matte paintings than receding space recorded photographically. This is particularly acute when the middle and foreground of the image are clearly demarcated, either through the movement of figures across the screen, or by a clear line receding in perspective, such as a road or a trench. In these instances, it is often the case that deep spaces aren’t fully integrated into the composition and the application of colour to the deep background can make the image appear planar, especially when that colour is warm and, as Brinkmann describes, pushes itself forward in the composition. In one example, wounded soldiers returning from the front trudge past the camera, having climbed what appears to be a relatively steep hill. The middle ground of the image is taken up by the road and the detritus on the verge, scrubby trees dominating the right hand side of the image. On the left, however, the landscape opens out. There is no movement to help discern the perspective or distances at play, instead the area of the frame appears in a pale and static green. It does not fully integrate with the perspectival information laid out in other portions of the frame; as a result the composition appears unbalanced. The single plane of green in the deep background looms over the middle-ground of the frame instead of receding behind it. A similar effect occurs in colourisation’s integration into aerial shots, where the colour appears unnatural and schematic rather than isomorphic or phenomenally persuasive.

What can be drawn from this treatment of perspectivally flattened space and deep backgrounds is that successful colourisation depends upon images that offer a clear distinction between figure and ground. This should come as no surprise, given the process by which colourisation is achieved and its similarity with the process by which 2D images are rendered in 3D. In both instances, objects within the grey scale image are isolated and differentiated from the background, usually via an edge detection algorithm. In the 3D rendering, this differentiation is the first step in stereo conversion and is used to create the parallax effect. In colourisation the object is then assigned a colour and tracked as it moves. It follows that in images where the differences between figure and ground are unclear not only will 3D rendering be unpersuasive, but the application of colour will obfuscate what little depth information is contained within grey scale.

This varying effectiveness of colourisation’s integration within spatial compositions is felt not just in individual frames but also across the duration of a colourised sequence. For example, when spatially distinct compositions are edited together, the eye constantly re-adjusts to compensate for the effect of the colour on the expression of space in the frame. The juxtaposition of a group portrait, for example, with aerial views of the trenches, requires a re-adjustment between the unobtrusive colours applied in the former instance, and the more abstract use of colour in the latter. Jackson’s film uses a number of strategies to make the flow of images as smooth as possible, nevertheless, there are enough awkward juxtapositions to disclose the fact that colourisation is not equally effective across every type of image. In short, because colourisation is most effectively applied to images where there is a strong differentiation between figure and ground, and where objects can be easily mapped and tracked, a film that relies on colourisation for its aesthetic impact will show a formal tendency precisely towards those images where colourisation is most effective. In Jackson’s case, that tendency is towards the group portrait. Whilst this is not entirely the result of the use of colourisation, the use of colourisation certainly enables and justifies this formal structuring of the film, thus impacting its representational strategy at a structural level.

As with colourisation’s treatment of flesh tones, which exposes the criteria of digital colour space, this bias towards compositions with a strong differentiation between figure and ground affords a glimpse at another set of criteria informing digital colourisation and its processes of construing meaning from the monochrome archive. The implementation of these criteria, through an emphasis on particular compositions, has a homogenising effect on the film as a whole and exerts a normative force on which images and which archives are eligible for colourisation. This is not the venue to denounce Jackson’s film for its editorialisation – conscious and unconscious – of the archives it employs, merely an opportunity to show how Jackson’s film exemplifies an automatic tendency within the processes of colourisation. This tendency places restrictions on what can be represented within the strictures of colourisation and potentially excludes entire subsets of images from representability. Those images that cannot be represented in colourised form cannot enter the canon of remembrance as it is being re-shaped by digital technologies and processes such as colourisation.

CONCLUSION

The three effects discussed above stand as examples of digital colourisation’s failure to disappear within the image and the tangibility of its remediation, despite its claims to, and plaudits for, greater photorealism. In conclusion I’d like to ask, what does this emergent aesthetic reveal about the epistemological framing of the past in the current techno-cultural context?

In order to frame this question appropriately, I’d like to first look at the relationship between media forms and historical consciousness as outlined in the work of Vilém Flusser. This media-epistemology can then serve as a springboard from which to examine the impact of digitization on the dynamics of national memory and mourning set off by films such as They Shall Not Grow Old. Finally, from this vantage, I’ll be able to speculate about what colourisation’s aesthetic characteristics imply about historical consciousness in the digital era.

For Vilém Flusser, historical consciousness is tied to the media form that enables it. He perceives history as emerging with the alphabet (“with the invention of writing, history begins”[xxi]) and beginning to disappear in the middle of the 19^th century with the invention of photography. Writing in the mid to late 20^th century, he discerned that “history, and the mode of thought that produces history, is over.”[xxii] We are in an era of “post-history” Flusser argues, wherein photographic media, rather than writing, have become the basis for all consensus about reality and “all of history, politics, art, science and technique are thus motivated by the apparatus, in order to be transcoded into their opposite: a televised program.”[xxiii] Crucial to Flusser’s argument is that technical images such as photography, in appearing to be neutral windows onto reality, in fact disguise or obscure the workings of the photographic apparatus that are operative upon the observer. That is to say, in viewing an image as if it were a neutral depiction of reality, the observer complies with photography’s ontological displacement of reality. Flusser died in 1991, and therefore his work cannot be said to fully engage with the digital technical revolution, specifically its ability to construct images that are perceptually realistic without being ontologically plausible. Nevertheless, the premise that media generate modes of thought that in turn construct epistemological relations to history (or post-history) is one that can be productively applied to digital media (and several philosophers such as Jonathan Beller are engaged in the work of applying Flusser’s thought to contemporary media-epistemological constellations).[xxiv] For my purposes, Flusser’s thinking is useful when looking at colourisation, where the aesthetic features of the process consistently betray the neutrality of the image’s representation of reality. The question arises, when the aesthetics of colourisation interfere with the supposed ‘realism’ of archive footage what effect does that have on our perception of the historical events the archive testifies to? Or, does colourisation produce a historical consciousness distinct from that generated by analogue media?

Wolfgang Ernst’s work in Digital Memory and the Archive, complements Flusser’s imbrication of media and consciousness, and goes some way towards bridging the gap between Flusser’s work and the contemporary moment. Discussing processes of digitization, Ernst describes the process of “digital retroaction.”

By digitizing analogue material in the archives and bringing it into a technomathematicized present, [digital retroaction] translat[es] an analogous world into a digital matrix. The microtemporality in the operativity of dataprocessing (synchronization) replaces the traditional macro time of the historical archive (governed by the semantics of historical discourse) – a literal quantization. Our relation not only to the past but to the present becomes truly archival.[xxv]

Again the implication is that the media-structural conditions of the digital archive re-construct our experience of reality, the past and the present. With regards to Ernst, the questions that arise are as follows: what characterises an experience of the “technomathematized present”? Is there a phenomenological dimension to “digital retroaction” and its “microtemporalities”? Does colourisation, where the aesthetics of the process testify to the residual presence of historical discourses and non-photographic semantics, provide just such an expression of these emergent modes of experience?

I will now return to They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and its negotiation of the politics of representation and remembrance. Ultimately, the film was commissioned as part of a festival of remembrance, and despite mobilising a set of highly contested technologies in order to re-present the experience of the war, it fits comfortably within the criteria described by Emma Hanna. It is a “site of national memory and mourning,” fitting neatly into the evolving consensus concerned with the events and legacy of World War One and the contemporary duty to remember. Even so, its chief aesthetic characteristic is a self-disclosing process of digital manipulation: the intermittently successful process of colourisation. Whatever the justifications for the process, my analysis above has aimed to demonstrate how the overt manipulations of colourisation are never absent from the image. Nevertheless digital manipulation does not alienate the audience from the events of World War One. Even if one doesn’t agree that colourisation ‘brings the images to life’ one can’t claim that the evidentiary status of the archive footage is erased or totally obscured. Instead, the manipulation of the archive as a strategy of restoration is present in every frame. Going further, digital manipulation is actively celebrated in the use of colourisation and ascribed an epistemological function – making the images more real – that is not reflected in its unusual aesthetics.

The conclusion that I’d like to draw from this is that colourisation updates the archive, but not to the technical standards of photorealism. Rather, colourisation updates the archive to the epistemological context discerned via Flusser and Ernst, wherein a media-contingent historical consciousness is undergoing a process of digital retroaction. As a crystallization of this epistemological context the unique aesthetics of They Shall Not Grow Old allows us to highlight some of the dynamics of this formation. They Shall Not Grow Old’s legible re-configuration of black and white film demonstrates how an awareness of the micromanipulations of digital visual media, and a tolerance of open manipulation, is embedded in contemporary acts of spectatorship, and need not interfere with the evidentiary status of a given image. As evidenced by the film’s reception, ‘the colourised archive,’ provokes little anxiety with regards to the truth content of the archive, despite the normative thrust and re-significatory impact of colourisation. The epistemic formation modelled by the film is one in which photorealism and digital manipulations have a symbiotic relationship in almost every image we see.

In this context, I argue that colourisation represents the most recent – but potentially the most decisive – reconfiguration of the mythopoeic presentation of the events of World War One since the enshrinement of Remembrance in the years following the war. Colourisation embodies an entirely digital mode of representation and in doing so, models and necessitates a mode of remembrance that accommodates an epistemology formed around digital media’s propensity to manipulation. They Shall Not Grow Old endeavours to present the lived experience of the trenches in a colourful, phenomenologically accessible present tense: a re-coding of the past in digital colour that attests, not to the decaying state of the film archive, but to the contemporary epistemology of digital visual media that acknowledges the construction and operativity of image technologies even as it depends on it them for access to the past. It is not that the mythopoesis of World War One is re-written by colourisation; rather colourisation demonstrates the way in which contemporary mythopoeic framings of past events are underwritten by digital media, whose processes and parameters become visible thanks to the aesthetics of colourisation.

FILMOGRAPHY

The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years (Ron Howard, 2017)

I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2017)

They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson, 2018)

World War One in Colour (Philip Nugus and Jonathan Martin, 2003)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aridi, Sara “Peter Jackson to Direct Beatles Film” New York Times, January 30 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/movies/peter-jackson-beatles-film.html

Hammond, Michael & Williams, Michael (eds.) British Silent Cinema and the Great War (London; Palgrave, 2011)

Beller, Jonathan “The Programmable Image” July 15 2017, fotomuseum.ch, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/authors/30560_jonathan_beller

Brinkmann, Christine “The Tensions of Colour in Colourized Films” in Colour and Empathy (Amsterdam; AUP 2014)

British Film Institute, “Unlocking Film Heritage” accessed April 11, 2019, https://www.bfi.org.uk/britain-on-film/unlocking-film-heritage

Bures, Eliah “Rest in Peace: World War One and Living Memory” LA Review of Books, February 4, 2014, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/rest-peace-world-war-living-memory/

Cubitt, Sean The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (London; MIT Press, 2014)

Ernst, Wolfgang Digital and the Archive (London, Minnesota University Press, 2012)

Fleuckiger, Barbara “Digital Bodies” trans. Mark Kyburz extract from Visual Effects (Marburg; Schuren 2008).

Flusser, Vilém  Does Writing Have a Future trans. Nancy Ann Roth (London; Minnesota University Press, 2011)

Flusser, Vilém Into the Universe of Technical Images trans Nancy Ann Roth (London, University of Minnesota Press)

Flusser, Vilém Post History trans., Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis, Univocal Publishing, 2013)

Hanna Emma, The Great War and the Small Screen (Edinburgh; EUP, 2009)

Hutchinson, Pamela “LFF Review” Silent London, October 16 2018, https://silentlondon.co.uk/2018/10/16/lff-review-they-shall-not-grow-old-honours-veterans-but-not-the-archive/

International Federation of Film Archives, “FIAF Code Of Ethics” accessed April 11, 2019

https://www.fiafnet.org/pages/community/code-of-ethics.html

Macnab, Geoffrey “Peter Jackson’s WW1 Documentary is Like No Other” The Independent, November 11, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/they-shall-not-grow-old-peter-jackson-review-first-world-war-ww1-lord-of-the-rings-hobbit-a8586401.html

McKernan, Luke “Colouring the Past” last accessed April 11, 2019, http://lukemckernan.com/2018/01/25/colouring-the-past/

McKernan, Luke “The Colours of War,” Sight and Sound, Vol. 28 Issue 4, April 2018,

Napper, Lawrence, “They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and the Elephant In the Room,” International Association For Media and History, October 23, 2018, http://iamhist.net/2018/10/they_shall_not_grow_old/

[i] Michael Hammond and Michael Williams (eds.) British Silent Cinema and the Great War (London; Palgrave, 2011) p. 1

[ii] cited in ibid., p. 26

[iii] Emma Hanna, The Great War and the Small Screen (Edinburgh; EUP, 2009) p. 29

[iv] Eliah Bures “Rest in Peace: World War One and Living Memory” LA Review of Books, February 4, 2014, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/rest-peace-world-war-living-memory/

[v] “Unlocking Film Heritage” British Film Institute, last accessed April 11, 2019, https://www.bfi.org.uk/britain-on-film/unlocking-film-heritage

[vi] “They Shall Not Grow Old,” Learning Engagement, 14-18 NOW, last accessed April 11, 2019, https://www.1418now.org.uk/learning-engagement/peter-jackson-film/

[vii] Sara Aridi “Peter Jackson to Direct Beatles Film” New York Times, January 30 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/movies/peter-jackson-beatles-film.html

[viii] Peter Jackson interview by Mark Kermode from BFI London Film Festival, DVD Special Feature They Shall Not Grow Old (Warner Brothers, 2019)

[ix] For example, the following glowing review, released on Remembrance Day: Geoffrey Macnab “Peter Jackson’s WW1 Documentary is Like No Other” The Independent November 11, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/they-shall-not-grow-old-peter-jackson-review-first-world-war-ww1-lord-of-the-rings-hobbit-a8586401.html

[x] “FIAF Code Of Ethics,” International Federation of Film Archives, last accessed April 11, 2019 https://www.fiafnet.org/pages/community/code-of-ethics.html

[xi] Luke McKernan “The Colours of War,” Sight and Sound, Vol. 28 Issue 4, April 2018, p. 15

[xii] Lawrence Napper, “They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and the Elephant In the Room,” International Association For Media and History, October 23, 2018, http://iamhist.net/2018/10/they_shall_not_grow_old/

[xiii] Pamela Hutchinson “LFF Review” Silent London, October 16 2018, https://silentlondon.co.uk/2018/10/16/lff-review-they-shall-not-grow-old-honours-veterans-but-not-the-archive/

[xiv] Luke McKernan “Colouring the Past” last accessed April 11, 2019, http://lukemckernan.com/2018/01/25/colouring-the-past/

[xv] Jackson interviewed by Kermode.

[xvi] Barbara Fleuckiger “Digital Bodies” trans. Mark Kyburz extract from Visual Effects (Marburg; Schuren 2008). Available: http://zauberklang.ch/BodiesFlueckiger.pdf

[xvii] Vilém Flusser Into the Universe of Technical Images trans Nancy Ann Roth (London, University of Minnesota Press) p. 42

[xviii] “Caucasian Skin Tone Colour Palette” last accessed April 11, 2019 https://www.color-hex.com/color-palette/737

[xix] Sean Cubitt The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (London; MIT Press, 2014) p.148

[xx] Christine Brinkmann “The Tensions of Colour in Colourized Films” in Colour and Empathy (Amsterdam; AUP 2014) p. 66

[xxi] Vilém Flusser Post History trans., Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis, Univocal Publishing, 2013) p. 93

[xxii] Vilém Flusser Does Writing Have a Future trans. Nancy Ann Roth (London; Minnesota University Press, 2011) p. 59

[xxiii] Vilém Flusser, Post History, p. 97

[xxiv] cf. Jonathan Beller “The Programmable Image” July 15 2017, fotomuseum.ch, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/authors/30560_jonathan_beller

[xxv] Wolfgang Ernst Digital and the Archive (London, Minnesota University Press, 2012) p. 70

Notes on Contributor

Tom Livingstone is a CHASE-funded PhD Researcher at the University of Kent, working on hybridised visual media. The current article stems from his interest in the aesthetics of digital colour and the epistemological effects of digitization on archive footage.

Political myths most often refer to caesuras, may they be turning points or beginning and end of something meaningful to a given society. They mostly deal with exemplary behaviour up to heroic deeds. If, however, the rule is based on its exceptions, the question arises as to how an ill-omened caesura of political history is dealt with. How does a society communicate about events having deeply shaken its self-image? What strategies are used when a myth can only make offers for identification with difficulty because the protagonist is morally unsuitable as role model?

These are the questions I will be exploring in the following. In order to do so, firstly, I will explain film’s mythopoeic contribution to the political culture of a society; secondly, I will develop a dramaturgical typology of negative myths in film. Building on this, I will specify different dramaturgies of the negative based on selected instances of German history. In particular, I will discuss the films Downfall (2004. Oliver Hirschbiegel. Der Untergang) and The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008. Uli Edel. Der Baader Meinhof Komplex).

Beyond questions of quality, truth, cultural-historic differences or media form, narration appears as a universal communicative opportunity to communicate about the world. Societies also have narrations of their own, by means of which they negotiate conflicts, assure themselves of their identity and pass on generally relevant knowledge to future generations. If one of these collective narratives is about something exemplary and shows how certain things are or should be fundamentally constituted, it becomes a political myth.[1]

In terms of their narrative patterns, stereotypes and definite antagonistic constellations of conflict, political myths are similarly structured like religious myths; unlike those, however, they do not focus on transcendence but on the symbolic basis of political systems. Myths frame and arrange knowledge; they legitimise and comment or criticise social and political practices by giving meaning to events, places, persons and symbolisms.[2] Political myths thus draw a line between the Self and the Other – including the first, excluding the latter – so a we-identity necessary for the inner cohesion of a group can be formed. Therefore, they are often more present within public discourse in times of (crisis-like) upheaval or identity and legitimation deficiencies.

According to the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the myth is defined less by the content of the narrative than by its form. For Cassirer, the myth, like language or science, belongs to those symbolic forms that fulfil certain social needs. While language objectifies sense perception, for Cassirer, the myth has the function of an “objectification of feelings”.[3] So, inasmuch as myths are endowed with emotional meaning, the myth as collective narration is predestined to initiate that, which according to sociologist Max Weber is “a communal relationship”.[4] As symbolic form, the political myth aims at an affective appropriation of the history of a political association by keeping the past present, in order to generate orientation for the future.[5] To quote the cultural scientist Aleida Assmann, political myths “largely detach historical experience from the concrete circumstances of its coming into existence and remodel it into stories suspended in time being passed on from generation to generation”.[6]

For the functionality of myths, their ontological status – does the story correspond with the truth? – is less important than their narrative utility value: what significance does a narrative have for a society and its self-image? The more relevant a myth is, the more intense its passing on becomes. Not surprisingly, feature films belong to the media of lore. With its strategies of personalisation, moralisation and the creation of emotion, film has proven to be especially suitable for transmitting myths, as it is capable of addressing a large audience. The historian Frank Becker pointed out that the task of political myths is to mediate between highbrow and lowbrow culture, i.e. to offer an endowment of meaning being variously compatible.[7] Unlike other forms of knowledge transfer and meaning generation (like theoretical models, programmatic writings or chronologies of events) myths can occur in a variety of sophisticated ways. The Devil’s Pact, for example, can be told as a simple fairy tale, as a complex novel – see Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann – or in a fictional film, such as István Szabó’s film adaptation of the novel by Klaus Mann, Mephisto (1981).

Film’s mythopoeic contribution to political culture

In general, narrations can be regarded as being constitutive for the formation of a political culture. However, especially the so-called ‘narrative cinema’ is part of a discoursive construction of social and political reality. By its mimetic qualities, feature film provides information on the respective prevailing political culture(s) in aesthetic condensation. Feature films – but also series – operate as media of the political imaginary as they are able to depict those notions of what politics is or should be. Thus, films enable a reflection of reality within the fiction – in the words of Siegfried Kracauer: “Films are the mirror of the prevailing society.”[8] Furthermore he writes: “Stupid and unreal film fantasies are the daydreams of society, in which its actual reality comes to the fore and its otherwise repressed wishes take on form” (author’s emphasis).[9]

On the one hand, given notions of normality, values and constructs of meaning are confirmed and stabilised by fictional and story-formed repetitions whereby popular film in particular tends towards affirmation. On the other hand, potentials for societal and political change are supported by film – may it be by critique and the sketching of alternatives, or by political instrumentalisation up to propaganda.

Political stories follow a specific narrational logic. As political structures cannot be narrated without further ado, the performance of characters is essential. In order to get the recipients emotionally engaged, the characters must have a clear moral alignment. Mostly these orientations are fed by political mythology, since these, as collective narrations, are common knowledge. Political myths can effortlessly be integrated into other narrations or media texts, as it is not compulsory to tell the respective myth in its entirety: in order to recall a myth, often it is sufficient to detach set pieces – comparable to quotations – from the original context and insert them into a feature film. Nevertheless, however, in a film, a myth is often told in total. Therefore two procedures are essentially available: either the events, on which the plot is based, are illustratively staged, or the myth is read against the grain of prevailing schemes of interpretation and subjected to reinterpretation. This opposition can also be expressed with the terms congruence and contrast. If congruent adaption serves as opportunity of legitimising claims to power in the field of interpretive culture then a contrasting myth interpretation may be observed rather in the case of symbolic devaluation and thus resulting in an interpretation of delegitimation of power. Films of contrasting myth interpretation seize the myth in order to unmask and to assign a new meaning to it. This process is not necessarily linked to a demythologisation, a shift in the interpretation of the political event brought by the myth is also conceivable. In his BRD trilogy Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for example, looks back on the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany: in the films The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978. Die Ehe der Maria Braun), followed by Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982. Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss), he interprets the West German founding myth – the so-called economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) – as a missed opportunity for a new beginning. In Fassbinder’s reading, the economic miracle seems as an upswing paid for with emotional coldness, the repression mechanisms of which inevitably led to the caesura of 1968 and 1977.[10]

It can be stated that political myths always refer to a political culture in two ways. They do not only offer (political) meaning but are themselves subject of – political – disputes when it comes to questions of interpretive sovereignty. As processes of negotiation and interpretation find their ideal medium in feature films, fictional film is essentially involved in processes the philosopher Hans Blumenberg catchily summarised as Work on Myth. Blumenberg’s concept of the myth refers to Cassirer and can be transferred to the political myth:

Myths are stories that are distinguished by a high degree of constancy in their narrative core and by an equally pronounced capacity for marginal variation. These two characteristics make myth transmissible by tradition: Their constancy produces the attraction of recognizing them in artistic or ritual representation as well [as in recital], and their variability produces the attraction of trying out new and personal means of presenting them.[11]

Work is being done on the (political) myth insofar as, on the one hand, the myth exists in contours and is passed on accordingly but, on the other hand, it can be only narrated and understood from the respective present. Blumenberg sketches the myth’s functionality as a reaction to the “absolutism of reality”[12], as a possibility for human kind to overcome its fear of the unknown and to build “trust in the world”. [13] In another passage he speaks of the myth as a “way of processing the terrors of the unknown and of overwhelming power”[14]. Since a myth, however, has to be told again and again, this means that, by depicting it again and again, it passes on not only the exemplary and heroic but also the antipodal terror overcome by the hero. In this sense, the myth is reproducing what it actually seeks to overcome. Pushing this further, the question arises as to how collective narratives are structured that lack the heroic, since they function not as exemplary models but as deterrent.

Negative myths in film from a dramaturgical perspective

Following Cassirer, the myth, as a symbolic form for the ‘objectification of feelings’, aims to link emotions and meaning in order to make events, actions and experiences comprehensible. At first, there is no evaluation connected with this, but in order to make political meaning collectively accessible via emotions, the experience of emotions has to undergo a moral coding. Social conventions and political framework conditions determine both the desirability and the appropriateness of public sentiments. Thus the value of emotions is socially reshaped, entailing the consequence that myth as form is open to both positive and negative experiences. In order to distinguish one from another, narrativisations of the political depend on moralisation. Within a culturally and historically varying system of coordinates the politically “good” and “right” is normatively distinguished from the “wrong” and “evil”. The normative antagonisms and each of their evaluations become perceptible by the conflicts of the acting characters. Hubris and greed of power, for example, have always reliably driven the plot forward. Furthermore, the – negatively coded – emotions of guilt and shame are strong motives for political narrations. Mourning and compassion for victims of violence may also become the dramaturgical motor for collective narrations.

At this point, the term dramaturgy refers to the planned construction of an interaction between the formal aesthetic composition of a cinematic narration and its audience.[15] In feature film, dramaturgical structures can be found on three levels: firstly, they organise the course of action; secondly, they guide the audience’s attention, empathy and knowledge; and thirdly, they establish meaningfulness. As conventionalised organising principle dramaturgy manifests itself in building form. So the negative myths in question here preferably appear in the form of the tragedy, the melodrama and the farce. If one now examines the topics of negative myths as they are represented in popular film, four categories emerge – being not always quite distinct from one another.

A first type of the negative myth refers to a certain place and tells of a scenery in which people were violated and killed on a massive scale. Aleida Assmann terms these places “traumatic places”^[16]; they include Auschwitz, Verdun and also Ground Zero. Two narratives can be distinguished for the cinematic narration about these places: on the one hand, the narrative that orientates itself on events having occurred during the infliction of the trauma – so: tells the story how the place in the past has become the place in the present. On the other hand, there is a narratively mediated confrontation of the past being validated by the place with the present of diegesis. This conflict-triggering juxtaposition most often serves to negotiate questions of political or national identity, e.g. when in the feature film And Along Came Tourists (2007. Robert Thalheim. Am Ende kommen Touristen) a young German man – called Sven – is doing civilian service in Oświęcim and has to deal with the Polish everyday of a concentration camp memorial. Sven has to take care of the Shoah survivor Krzeminski. In the encounters between Germans and Poles, Sven, as a member of a post WWII generation, is challenged by issues of responsibility, guilt and taboo.

A further category of the political myth refers to a certain period of time that is considered constitutive for the respective society. By the positive exaltation of a “golden age”, an epoch is interpreted as role model for the present. In the negative case of shame, for example about the crimes committed in a phase of history, historical continuities are ignored and the period in question is regarded as singular event. Respective narrations favour working with omissions and planned concealments. Many feature films that are set in the 1950s telling of the economic miracle function accordingly. Thus Sönke Wortmann’s film The Miracle of Bern (2003. Das Wunder von Bern) parallels the victory of the German national team at the 1954 FIFA World Cup with the reconciliation of a war returnee with his son. Questions about (individual) guilt and the overcoming of fascist ideology disappear in favour of the joy about an athletic triumph.[17]

Since the end of the 20^th century, a more recent collective narrative theme refers to terrorism. When talking about the “myth of terrorism” it is usually not a matter of mystifying crimes. The myth here rather aims at a compensation of deficits, at events that represent or have represented a threat to society from within, and that are not overcome yet. Using the example of the left-wing terrorist Red Army Fraction (RAF) I would like to point out that the path of the RAF was accompanied from its very beginning by narratives, which, at their core, served to explain the radicalisation of a bourgeois youth. [18] The fictional film history of the RAF is, with a few exceptions, perpetrator-centred. This clearly distinguishes the narrativisation of left-wing terrorism in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s from the cinematic treatment of the acts of other terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda. While films about 9/11 are most often told from the perspectives of victims or first responders, in the case of the RAF the attention usually lies on the RAF characters who appear as protagonists. A contemporary example is Marianne and Juliane (1981. Margarethe von Trotta. Die bleierne Zeit) – also called The German Sisters in the United Kingdom –: a fictionalisation of the lives of the two sisters Christiane and Gudrun Ensslin. The Legend of Rita (2000.Volker Schlöndorf Die Stille nach dem Schuss), a story about the life and exposure of RAF terrorists in the GDR, also focuses on former perpetrators. If Not Us, Who? (2011. Andres Veiel: Wer wenn nicht wir) presents a prehistory of the RAF on the basis of the biographies of the couple Gudrun Ensslin and Bernward Vesper.

By focussing on the perpetrator, another type of myth is brought up, which can be used to make the negative narratable: the person as myth. These narrations basically personalise history and focus on historical events as the achievements of a single man (rarely women). When a mythically elevated personality “writes history”, s/he becomes the leading figure of a society. On the other side of the scale, there are political players guilty of monstrous crimes. Myth-compatible, they are often moved into the sphere of the metaphysical and stylised into an incarnation of the evil. The personality cult around Adolf Hitler during his lifetime and after the end of his reign exemplarily shows how a leader cult is turned into its opposite: a messianic hope bearer after the lost First World War becomes the evil par excellence. In the following, dramaturgical strategies of film used to narrate perpetrator-centred myth will be examined in more detail.

Dramaturgies of the negative

The narrative necessity of a personalisation of the political in the case of a cinematic depiction of politics usually leads to clear constellations with morally unambiguous attributions. Therefore, the protagonist is most often – than vice versa – a positive hero while the antagonist accordingly takes on the role of the villain. If, however, the story is to be told in a perpetrator-centred manner – i.e. if negative protagonists are to determine the plot – it is a tried and tested dramaturgical strategy to work with frameworks. In Downfall this happens when Hitler’s last secretary, Traudl Junge, appears as a contemporary witness. At the beginning and end of the film, excerpts of an interview are shown in which Traudl Junge – shortly before her death in 2002 – reflects on guilt and responsibility.[19] By this framing, the story about the last days of the Nazi regime is staged in a way comparable with a flashback so that, on the one hand, contemporary witness is deployed as dramaturgical structuring and, on the other hand, as proof for the truthfulness of the narration. At the same time the audience is to identify with Traudl Junge and follow her during her learning process. In general, such framework suggests an inner necessity of the course of action and thus frees it from contingency: The acting out of conflicts finally leads the protagonist onto the right path.

Since a positive identification potential is absolutely necessary for reasons of coherence formations in political narrations, the narrative economic condensation of actual historical events offers a further approach for balancing the values: in the screenplay, characters are normatively recoded – if necessary against source materials. In other words: ambivalent personalities are reduced to their positive deeds or qualities for the sake of clarity. In films on National Socialism this is not uncommon. In Schindler’s List (1993. Steven Spielberg) there was Oscar Schindler, an ambivalent protagonist who was recoded into a “good Nazi” and thus became an unburdening figure of identification.

Further, the dramaturgy of figures requires a corresponding supporting figure being even more evil than the protagonist him- or herself. In any case, the anticipated, normative rejection by the spectators is directed to a narratively insignificant figure by comparison. Negative protagonists are usually confronted with sanctions; most often they have to die. This also applies to satire, which offers the possibility of both presenting a negative protagonist and being able to criticise him or her at the same time. Alternatively, negative protagonists are integrated into the structure of the genre and thus, so to say, narratively re-socialised, e.g. in mafia movies or in film noir.

A final strategy to be mentioned here is the employment of established narrative patterns about the evil, be it the devil himself, the pact with the devil or the fallen angel. This dramaturgy of demonisation can be observed, in particular, when it comes to the Hitler filmography. It is one of three dominating categories of the representation of Adolf Hitler in fictional film, which in turn generates again certain forms of narration itself. While the demonisation (Hitler as incarnation of the evil) leads to tragedy, we can find Hitler as laughing stock in the comic constellations of parody, satire, caricature or the grotesque. Last but not least, the melodrama works with a privatisation: the dictator as Everyman. What all modes of representation have in common is the notorious question of their legitimacy, since Hitler is the only person of German history whose artistic representation is frowned upon and perceived as tasteless.^[20] Nevertheless, or maybe precisely because of this, the narrative interest in his biography is of an enormous permanence.^[21] The film Downfall also provoked extensive debates when it first was published in 2004 about whether and if so: how human Adolf Hitler may be portrayed.

Downfall

Produced by Bernd Eichinger, who also wrote the screenplay, and directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, Downfall reconstructs the last days of Adolf Hitler and his closest entourage in the Führerbunker in April 1945. The hermetically sealed-off world of the Führerbunker is contrasted to the outside world of fiercely embattled Berlin. The continuous change of narrative perspectives inside and outside the bunker as well as alternating representations of war business and the private sphere organise the dramatic arc of the film. The audience is asked to compare the different perspectives with one another and to assemble them into a complete picture of the protagonist’s character. As I am going to show, a double strategy of dramaturgy is being pursued here: by emphasising “the evil”, on the one hand, and by a privatisation of politics, on the other hand.

Eichinger’s and Hirschbiegel’s staging of Hitler’s last days present a person-centred perspective on National Socialism defining politics as a series of decisions by “great men”. By the cinematic juxtaposition of the Führer and the seduced people, however, a perspective on National Socialism is opened up which ignores the fact that the politics of the so-called Third Reich had the approval and consent of large parts of the population.

Eichinger’s screenplay is based on the memories of Hitler’s last secretary Traudl Junge and Joachim Fest’s account of the final phase of the Second World War as he depicted it in his bestseller Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich.[22] While Eichinger adapts Fest’s descriptions for the military actions, he often literally adapts the direct speech as delivered in Junge’s memoirs for those dialogues that refer to the everyday in the bunker. In other words: the female perspective represents the private sphere while war is a male narrative. This gender-specific, personalised and ostensibly validated perspective on the events in the bunker can be termed with Aleida Assmann as “feminisation of the gaze”[23] which privatises the dictator Hitler.

The feminisation of the events also extends to a side storyline, which deals, having a dramatic arc of its own, with the infanticide of the six defenceless children of Joseph and Magda Goebbels. The murder of the boy and the five girls is not only the negative point of culmination of this storyline but also – in emotional terms – of the whole film. All in all, this sequence lasts six minutes and 54 seconds. It begins with the mixing of a soporific by SS doctor Dr Stumpfegger and ends with Magda Goebbels playing solitaire. In between there is the killing of the children by their mother. First the boy and the girls are sedated, then Magda Goebbels slides – each time performing the same movements – ampoules of prussic acid between the teeth of the sleeping children and presses their jaws together so the capsules break. The sixfold infanticide is shown six times, the narrative time takes two minutes and 28 seconds. The fact that the murder of the children is shown without time lapses makes it even more emotionally loaded than the act itself already is.[24]

There is no historical evidence, though, that Magda Goebbels killed her children herself. It is more probable that Dr Stumpfegger performed the killing at the behest of the parents or at the request of the mother. Insofar as the plot of Downfall defines Magda Goebbels as the performing perpetrator, the dramaturgy cites the Medea myth abundantly clearly and thus characterises the figure as undoubtedly evil. The culturally established Medea myth expresses not only the (multiple) murder of children but also the motif of revenge on the husband and unconditional devotion to an idea: Magda Goebbels embodies the ideology of National Socialism and exemplifies the longing for death as component of the Führer cult. As a logical consequence, Magda Goebbels is employed within the figure dramaturgy as an evil complementary figure to the “humanised” Hitler. In Magda Goebbels’ embodiment of the Medea myth Hitler’s crimes are to be mirrored synecdochally.

After the documentary prologue, see above, the plot sets in in November 1942, and Alexandra Maria Lara in the role of young Traudl Junge enters the service of the Führer. During the job interview Hitler is depicted as a friendly boss and dog lover. The perspective of an apolitical secretary made it possible to pick up – in historical garb – on tendencies of privatisation and personalisation of current political mediation. With the help of these strategies known to the public through journalistic mass media coverage and through a detailed re-enactment, authenticity was to be suggested but – according to the hypothesis to be substantiated – the drawing on narratively established patterns of the evil rather serves a form of decay of a political myth.

Another side storyline uses the example of a fictitious family to tell the story of survival in the destroyed city of Berlin. The son, Peter Kranz, is introduced as a fanatical Hitler boy who experiences a transformation through the events of the street war. After his parents’ death he crosses Traudl Junge’s path. The plot of Downfall ends with the two of them setting off  – on a bright summer’s day they cycle into the future. This final picture – in which, by the way, the sun shines for the first time – evokes a conservative myth of West-Germany: the Stunde Null, at which a democratic future begins. After the catastrophe a new life begins for those who had belonged to Hitler’s followers just a short while ago, but now, being purified, embark on a new path. In a second original tone, closing the political framework of remembrance, Traudl Junge mentions Sophie Scholl so the association of resistance is called upon in this incident.

While Downfall was generally received in such a way as to offer that a Hitler-centred perspective on National Socialism, acquitting especially bystanders of guilt, Eichinger and Hirschbiegel strongly negated that they were interested in relieving Germans of their responsibility.[25] However, the documentary gesture of the film is indisputable. The suggestion of a true story is reinforced by an external resemblance of the actor Bruno Ganz with the historical person Hitler when performatively embodying him. In order to prepare for the role, Bruno Ganz studied a number of texts and sources in advance: but as there are (almost) no images or sounds of the historical Hitler outside the Nazi propaganda, the acting approach can only be an approach to Hitler’s media imago, i.e. the Führer myth of National Socialism. The Hitler figure embodied by Bruno Ganz thus proves to be a conglomerate of various narratives and media depictions; contemporary photographs and films, historical studies as well as filmmakers’ imaginations add up to assertions of a he-could-have-been-like-that. These are presented in a masterly manner entailing, however, a special form of depoliticisation: perpetration is presented in artistic refinement at its best that can only be respected (“So great how well he can imitate him.”). This critique can be applied to the entire film. To the extent that the majority of the leading actors were already involved in other cinematic re-narrations of German history, according to Sabine Hake, these acted visual sketches of National Socialism add up to a “physiognomy of the Third Reich based on stars” contributing to a normalisation and the historicising of the German past.[26] To be precise, the star-based physiognomy of historical epochs may be even regarded as a general feature of the historical film of recent times. Four years after Downfall, the Swiss Bruno Ganz appeared again in front of a camera of a further Eichinger production – The Baader Meinhof Complex – impersonating Horst Herold, the president of the Federal Criminal Police Office of the 1970s and supreme opponent of the Red Army Fraction. Herold is characterised by a rational, understanding, almost paternal attitude towards the RAF. It is not absurd to discern here an illustration of the interpretation of the RAF as “Hitler’s children”. Whether this was meant ironcially or not is open to question.[27]

The Baader Meinhof Complex

Being based on the same-named popular non-fiction bestseller[28] by Stefan Aust, The Baader Meinhof Complex belongs to the docufictional formats within the RAF’s filmography.[29] Book and film portray genesis, activity and the end of the first generation of the RAF. Founded in 1970 with the liberation of Andreas Baader from prison, the terror of the self-appointed urban guerrilla socio-politically challenged the Federal Republic of Germany for several years in many ways. The terrorists came from within, from the educated middle-class and the youth cultural milieu of the universities. If nothing else, they attacked the founding myths of West- Germany coined by economic prosperity and the narratives of a new democratic beginning at Stunde Null. At the end of the 1960s, parts of the New Left had become so radical in the course of the disapproval of the Vietnam war that they embarked on an “armed fight” against the “system”.[30] Resistance against the state seemed to them, the children of war, like a belated resistance against National Socialism. The protest of 1968, out of which the RAF emerged, was to draw a moral line between the generation having experienced the NS regime as adults and the one of its children. The stand taken on the question of whether the employment of violence against the Vietnam war was legitimate or not soon became the difference criterion between the Außerparlamentarische Opposition as such and the newly constituted revolutionary groups. Their proclamation of a “propaganda of the deed” first manifested itself in arsons of department stores, and later, after the founding of the RAF, in kidnappings, shootings and assassinations. For the purpose of logistical organisation and financing of the “war” conducted from the underground, ordinary criminal offences like car theft and robberies were also committed. Until the official dissolution of the RAF in 1998, the RAF’s acts of violence and the reactions of the challenged state to it killed 60 persons.

The film The Baader Meinhof Complex interweaves the biographical and ideological paths of the foundation generation – and here especially those of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof – creating a group-dynamic portrait. It was deliberately restrained from portraying one figure of identification: instead Eichinger and his director Uli Edel worked with a “drama of fragments” and confronted the audience with rapid scene changes with “puzzle pieces” the audience had to put together itself.[31] Only because the puzzle draws on a collective memory of images offering a high potential for affection, it does not become completely confusing and superficial. The most-detailed re-enactments of known visual icons – e.g. the deaths of Benno Ohnesorg and Holger Meins – enable an engagement in the plot and create an emotional intimacy. The Christ like staged death portrait of Holger Meins in repose, after having died in prison in 1974 as a result of hunger strike, was published in the weekly magazine stern for the first time and became to play a great part in the public discourse. Meins became a symbolic figure; hardly any action had such a mobilising effect for supporters and sympathisers like the help of the hunger strike’s scandalised conditions of imprisonment. The film dedicates a powerful sequence to the slow starvation and funeral of Holger Meins without, however, conveying any information about how and why Meins joined the RAF.

As it already was the case with Downfall Eichinger – who once more appeared as scriptwriter and producer – was concerned with an aethetics of authenticity. Featuring genre attributes of an action thriller, The Baader Meinhof Complex became an opulent feature film tending towards spectacle: car races, explosions and gun-fights are more likely to serve the show values of cinema than to explain left-wing terrorist practices. At the same time, the staging and self-staging of the RAF are strongly intertwined in the film – the group always worked on its own image and even more on its afterimage. As the RAF derived its identity from the concept of an obligation to resist (Ensslin), the self-staging strategies culminated in auratically charged figures of the rebel and the martyr. The film updates this self-mythologisation as it has already been illustrated using Holger Meins as example. The established narrative of Andreas Baader as charismatic rebel, bandit and outlaw is also upheld in the film.[32] The interpretation of the couple Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader as Bonnie and Clyde, which, by the way, already took place during their lifetimes, is also updated. The feature film Bonnie and Clyde (1967. Arthur Penn) not only varies the narrative scheme of lovers allying themselves against the rest of the world, but also romanticises a bank robbery as adventure, on the one hand, and as emancipatory action, on the other. By transferring the Bonnie and Clyde narrative to the RAF, an emotionalisation takes place going hand in hand with a depoliticisation in favour of a criminalisation of terror in the guise of sex and crime.

At the same time, however, one can also observe a narrative anchoring in bourgeois traditional narration motives that are intended to lend additional meaning and moral depth to the characters’ actions. So, for example, Ulrike Meinhof is drawn as a left-wing radical Antigone figure. Sophocles’ Antigone and its adaptions by, e.g., Anouilh and Brecht epitomise individual resistance against a political regime. As the incarnation of the civil obedience of an individual against society, Antigone – according to Thomas Elsaesser – has the potential of a “key mythology of 1977”.[33]

In summary, three narratives based on mythology can be found in The Baader Meinhof Complex being – above that – a typical narration about the first generation of the RAF. Firstly, a connection between eroticism and deviance is sought; secondly, a quasi-religious unconditionality of morality is exhibited; and, thirdly, by the willingness to die for one’s convictions, the political is transcendentally elevated. Ideological concepts, political theory and further abstract notions are reduced to the necessary catchwords. Eichinger’s The Baader Meinhof Complex combines person myths with genre attributes of action films and thus classifies the aestheticised RAF as part of pop culture as he did before with Adolf Hitler as a depoliticised embodiment of the evil. By adaption, both films contribute to the respective ‘works on myth’. In conclusion, it became clear that cinematic representations of perpetrator-centred myths draw on culturally traditional narrative patterns, uphold and update them in order to reduce complexity and interpret crime. Emotionalising, metaphysical elevation and depoliticisation – may it be by employing genre conventions, may it be by privatising political action practices – ensure that films with negatively-connoted protagonists are nevertheless consumable and commercially successful. When they were first published, Eichinger’s updates on traumatising political events of German history offered a framework for interpreting the past that in both examples were subject of extremely controversial discussion. These debates, however, are stories of their own to be told at a different time and place.

Notes

[1] See Frank Becker: “Begriff und Bedeutung des politischen Mythos,“ in Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen? Zeitschrift für historische Forschung. Beiheft 35, ed. Barbara Rilinger-Stollberg (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 2005), 132.

[2] As a research topic, myths are dealt with in different disciplines and with different approaches. Known authors are Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Mircea Eliade or Joseph Campbell. For my considerations, I refer to the myth theories of Ernst Cassirer and Hans Blumenberg, which are embedded in cultural history. The latter describes myth as literary narrative. Like me, the political scientist Herfried Münkler also refers to Blumenberg; Münkler defines myths as the “narrative basis of the symbolic order of a community“ (“narrative Grundlage der symbolischen Ordnung eines Gemeinwesens“). Herfried Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2009), 15.

[3] Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), 45.

[4] According to Weber a “relationship will be called “communal“ (Vergemeinschaftung) if and in so far as the orientation of social action – whether in the individual case, on the average, or in the pure type – is based on a subjective feeling of the parties, whether affectual or traditional, that they belong together“ (author’s emphasis). Max Weber, Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretative Sociology. Edited by Guenter Roth and Claus Wittich (University of California Press, 1978), 40.

[5]See Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (München: C.H. Beck, 2006), 40.

[6] “ (…) die historische Erfahrung von den konkreten Bedingungen ihres Entstehens weitgehend ab und formen sie zu zeitenthobenen Geschichten um, die von Generation zu Generation weitergegeben werden.“ Ibid.

[7] See Becker, “Begriff und Bedeutung des politischen Mythos,“ 136.

[8] Siegfried Kracauer, “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies“ in idem, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1994), 291.

[9] Ibid., 292.

[10] 1977 stands as a cipher for the terror of the 1970s: in autumn 1977 Hanns Martin Schleyer was first kidnapped, then murdered; the Lufthansa plane Landshut was hijacked and the suicides of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe took place in the high-security sector of Stuttgart-Stammheim prison.

[11] Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth (translated by Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 1985), 34.

[12] Ibid., 3.

[13] Ibid., 35.

[14] Ibid., 388.

[15] Connecting theory with practice, dramaturgy per se originates from the theatre context. In my elaborations on the dramaturgy of film, I mainly follow Jens Eder, Dramaturgie des populären Films. Drehbuchpraxis und Filmtheorie (Hamburg: Lit 2007). For more on political dramaturgy see: Sandra Nuy, “Antagonismen und Affekte. Zur politischen Dramaturgie des Spielfilms“, in: Medialisierungen der Macht. Filmische Inszenierungen politischer Praxis, ed. Irina Gradinari, Nikolas Immer, Johannes Pause (Paderborn: Wilhem Fink 2018), 33-46.

[16] “traumatische Orte“, Assmann, Schatten der Vergangenheit, 221

[17] I would like to mention that success in football is regarded as a guarantor of German self-confidence. Especially the surprising victory at the 1954 FIFA World Cup, the so-called Miracle of Bern, is considered by many to be the actual founding act of the Federal Republic of Germany. More about the film and its political relevance see: Roland Binz, “Wenn sogar der Kanzler weint. Die Berliner Republik und ihr Wunder von Bern“, in Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Edition, 1 (2004), H. 2, accessed May 10, 2019, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/2-2004/id=4414

[18] For more on RAF as a myth see: Cordia Baumann, Mythos RAF: literarische und filmische Mythentradierung von Bölls “Katharina Blum“ bis zum “Baader Meinhof Komplex“ (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012).

[19] Each is an excerpt from “Im toten Winkel – Hitlers Sekretärin”, a documentary film from 2002 by André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer.

[20] See Margit Frölich, “Tot oder lebendig. Hitler als Figur im Spielfilm,“ in Hitler darstellen. Zur Entwicklung und Bedeutung einer filmischen Figur, ed. Rainer Rother, Karin Herbst-Meßlinger (München: Edition Text + Kritik 2008), 14.

[21] In the fictional field, international Hitler filmography has long exceeded the number of 100 productions. For the time until 2000 see: Charles P. Mitchell, The Hitler Filmography: Worldwide Feature Film and Television Mini Series Portrayals. 1940 through 2000 (Jefferson: McFarland & Co Inc., 2009) .

[22] See Joachim Fest, Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004). In 2002 the original German version was published under the title “Der Untergang: Hitler und das Ende des Dritten Reiches. Eine historische Skizze.“ The film titel “Der Untergang / Downfall“ derives from this titel. See also: Traudl Junge, Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last Secretary (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2004).

[23] “Feminisierung des Blicks“, Aleida Assmann, “Lichtstrahlen in die Black Box. Bernd Eichingers Der Untergang“ in, Das Böse im Blick: Die Gegenwart des Nationalsozialismus im Film, eds. Margit Frölich, Christian Schneider, Karsten Visarius (München: Edition Text + Kritik, 2007), 46.

[24] The murder of the children has been connoted with the Holocaust on several occasions, especially since the letters GASS can be read on a wall of the corridor leading to the children’s room in the bunker. The continuation of the word to “Gasschleuse” (gas seal) remains hidden from the viewer due to the camera perspective. Eichinger’s intention, however, to remind the audience of the killing of the European Jews on an emotional level by depicting the murder of the children in detail is, at best, well-intentioned.

[25] For a summary of the producers’ intentions see: John Bendix, “Facing Hitler: German Responses to Downfall”, German Politics and Society 25, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 70-89.

[26] Sabine Hake, “Entombing the Nazi Past: On Downfall and Historicism” in Hitler-films from Germany. History, cinema and politics since 1945, ed. Karolin Machtans (Basingstoke [et al]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 118.

[27] See Bernd Zywietz, Terrorismus im Spielfilm: Eine filmwissenschaftliche Untersuchung über Konflikte, Genres und Figuren (Wiesbaden: Springer Verlag, 2016), 214. – The speech about the RAF as “Hitler’s children” was first introduced by a publication of the same name by Jillian Becker. See: Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children. The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (New York: Lippincott, 1977).

[28] See Stefan Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (München: Wilhelm Goldmann, 2008, 3^rd extended edition).

[29] The annotated filmography of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung lists 29 fictional productions on the RAF between the years 1967 and 2007; plus 49 documentary productions for cinema and TV. In the meantime, the number has even incrased. See Anna Pfitzenmaier, “RAF, Linksterrorismus und ’Deutscher Herbst’ im Film. Eine kommentierte Bibliographie (1967–2007)“  in Zeitgeschichte-online, topic: Die RAF als Geschichte und Gegenwart, Jan-Holger Kirsch and Annette Vowinckel eds., 2007, accessed April 1, 2019, http://www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/thema/einfuehrung-raf-linksterrorismus-und-deutscher-herbst-im-film

[30] For phrasing in the jargon of the RAF see Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex.

[31] “Fetzendramaturgie”, “Puzzleteilen”, Eichinger, quoted according to: Zywietz, Terrorismus im Spielfilm, 215.

[32] RAF historiography agrees on the assumption that the passionate moviegoer Andreas Baader borrowed his virile and rebellious habitus from the 1960s’ film and staged himself as screen gangster and moviestar.

[33] See Thomas Elsaesser, Terror und Trauma: Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007), 61.

Bibliography

Aust, Stefan. Der Baader Meinhof Komplex. München: Wilhelm Goldmann, 2008; 3^rd extended edition.

Assmann, Aleida. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: C.H. Beck, 2006.

–. “Lichtstrahlen in die Black Box: Bernd Eichingers Der Untergang.“ in Das Böse im Blick. Die Gegenwart des Nationalsozialismus im Film, edited by Margit Frölich, Christian Schneider, Karsten Visarius, 45–55. München: Ed. Text + Kritik, 2007.

Baumann, Cordia. Mythos RAF: literarische und filmische Mythentradierung von Bölls “Katharina Blum” bis zum “Baader-Meinhof-Komplex”. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012.

Becker, Jillian. Hitler’s Children. The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang. New York: Lippincott, 1977.

Becker, Frank. “Begriff und Bedeutung des politischen Mythos,“ in Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen? Zeitschrift für historische Forschung. Beiheft 35, edited by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. 129–148. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005.

Bendix, John. “Facing Hitler: German Responses to Downfall.“ German Politics and Society 25, No. 1. (Spring 2007): 70–89.

Binz, Roland. “Wenn sogar der Kanzler weint. Die Berliner Republik und ihr Wunder von Bern “, in Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Edition, 1 (2004), H. 2, accessed May 10, 2019, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/2-2004/id=4414

Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 1985.

Cassirer, Ernst. The Myth of the State. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973.

Eder, Jens. Dramaturgie des populären Films. Drehbuchpraxis und Filmtheorie. Hamburg: Lit, 2007.

Elsaesser, Thomas. Terror und Trauma. Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007.

Fest, Joachim. Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich. Translated by Margot Dembo. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.

Frölich, Margit: “Tot oder lebendig. Hitler als Figur im Spielfilm“. in Hitler darstellen. Zur Entwicklung und Bedeutung einer filmischen Figur, edited by Rainer Rother, Karin Herbst-Meßlinger, 13–33. München: 2008.

Hake, Sabine. “Entombing the Nazi Past: On Downfall and Historicism“. In Hitler-films from Germany. History, cinema and politics since 1945, edited by Karolin Machtans. 99–132. Basingstoke [et al.]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Junge, Traudl. Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last Secretary, edited by Melissa Müller. Translated by Anthea Bell. Arcade Publishing, 2004.

Kracauer, Siegfried. “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies“ in idem, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by Thomas Y. Levin, 291–304. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Mitchell, Charles P.. The Hitler Filmography. Worldwide Feature Film and Television Mini Series Portrayals. 1940 through 2000. Jefferson: McFarland & Co Inc, 2009.

Münkler, Herfried. Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen. Berlin: Rowohlt, 2009.

Nuy, Sandra. “Antagonismen und Affekte. Zur politischen Dramaturgie des Spielfilms“, in Medialisierungen der Macht. Filmische Inszenierungen politischer Praxis, ed. Irina Gradinari, Nikolas Immer, Johannes Pause, 33–46. Paderborn: Wilhem Fink, 2018.

Pfitzenmaier, Anna. “RAF, Linksterrorismus und „Deutscher Herbst“ im Film. Eine kommentierte Bibliographie (1967–2007)“ in Zeitgeschichte-online, Thema: Die RAF als Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Jan-Holger Kirsch and Annette Vowinckel, 2007, accessed April 1, 2019, http://www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/thema/einfuehrung-raf-linksterrorismus-und-deutscher-herbst-im-film

Weber, Max. Economy and Society. An Outline of interpretative Sociolocy, edited by Guenter Roth and Claus Wittich, University of California Press,1978.

Zywietz, Bernd. Terrorismus im Spielfilm: Eine filmwissenschaftliche Untersuchung über Konflikte, Genres und Figuren. Wiesbaden: Springer Verlag, 2016.

Filmography

And Along Come Tourists. 2007. Robert Thalheim. (Und am Ende kommen Touristen)

Bonnie and Clyde. 1967. Arthur Penn.

Downfall. 2004. Oliver Hirschbiegel. (Der Untergang)

If Not Us, Who? 2011. Andres Veiel. (Wer wenn nicht wir?)

Im toten Winkel – Hitlers Sekretärin. 2002. André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer.

Lola. 1981. Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Marianne and Juliane. 1981. Margarethe von Trotta. (Die bleierne Zeit)

Mephisto. 1981. István Szabó.

The Baader Meinhof Complex. 2008. Uli Edel. (Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex)

The Legend of Rita. 2000.Volker Schlöndorf. (Die Stille nach dem Schuss)

The Marriage of Maria Braun. 1978. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. (Die Ehe der Maria Braun)

The Miracle of Bern. 2003. Sönke Wortmann. (Das Wunder von Bern)

Veronika Voss. 1982. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss)

Notes on Contributor

Sandra Nuy is Associate Professor for Media Studies at the University of Siegen, Faculty I: School of Arts and Humanities. She studied German Literature, Sociology and Political Science. Her research fields include the relationship between Film and Politics, Memory Cultures, Holocaust and National Socialism in the Media.

1. The politician as actor

At the core of the democratic order is, as once described by Claude Lefort, an empty space. The state belongs to nobody, being a product of constant (re-)negotiation, meaning that the place in which the body of the monarch once represented the unity of political system and people,[1]will forever remain vacant. This empty space at the core of democratic power is, says Lefort, the root of a fundamental problem of representation:

“The locus of power is an empty place, it cannot be occupied – it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it – and it cannot be represented. Only the mechanisms of the exercise of power are visible, or only the men, the mere mortals, who hold political authority.”[2]

For all this, however, political representation is nonetheless exercised. The body of the monarch is, as explicated by German political scientist Philip Manow, supplanted in democracy by more complex forms and arenas of representation, which include, for example, ritualised occurrences inside the architectural space of parliament, which, by virtue of its very seating order alone, ay be read as a form of political representation[3] In both its French and American variant – a semicircle facing a rostrum – and the English form, which resembles a stadium with tiered stands and blocks of benches facing each other, this architectural representation is predicated upon the basic idea underlying the theatre: political action takes the form of performances by politicians who take the rostrum to speak and – right in keeping with Thomas Hobbes[4]– consequently mutate into actors, into interpreters of the opinions they expound. The other politicians, for their part, thus automatically become an audience to this temporarily limited performance, to which they may, or may not, respond with applause. In doing so, they themselves turn into a representation of the non-present people. This performance is therefore attended by three relevant parties, each of which has to be set in relation to the others if representation is to take place: people, deputies, and those speaking, i.e. performing.

As such, democracy’s model of representation seems to be theatrical in nature, and hence defined not only in corporeal but also in temporal terms. For this reason alone, it is not surprise to hear that the cinema, as a medium which makes visible the movement of bodies, has, since its very inception, been interested in questions of political representation. For some film theorists, the medium derives its political potential chiefly from the fact that it subverts established aesthetic modes of representation;[5]for advocates of the social problem film, by contrast, the power of filmic representation lies in its ability to build empathy with those who do not form part of the political order of visibility.[6]In the essay that follows, a different type of argumentation is to be expounded, albeit not one that contradicts but complements these approaches, and one that focuses less on the political than on the analytical possibilities of film. When stories narrated in features films concern the institutionalised sphere of democratic politics, the focus is, after all, not on political representation alone but, in all instances, on how this actually comes about: what makes politicians interesting is the fact that they have a history, together with the circumstance that it is only as a result of these histories that they have become – either better or worse – representatives of the populace; the fact that they act differently towards their fellow party members and staff than they do during their performances; and that they can be the victims of blackmail or conspiracy, which make them act in a different way to that which the populace expects. As will be shown in the following chapters, Hollywood movies whose subject is the day-to-day world of politics are thus often characterised by a strangely dual character: on the one hand, they replicate the mythical original narrative of democracy as theatre,[7]according to which representation is brought about as a result of a spontaneous gathering of persons around an individual who, at that moment of time, is a particularly representative person. This primal scene can be repeated over and over again and, most notably, can – especially at moments in which the political order is hit by crisis – help to restore this order. On the other hand, however, the films articulate a deep distrust of the performative nature of the political per se, which they seek to deconstruct by confronting it with events on the backstage of politics.

This essay seeks to explore the manifold transformations that this mythical ‘primal scene’ has undergone in the history of American cinema, taking as its examples selected pictures that can be seen as particularly influential with regard to the filmic representation of the political sphere. The diachronic comparison employed follows a particular scene type or ‘frame’:[8]The focus is on works in which a speech by a fictional politician features especially prominently. The significance of each such performance can be appreciated only in the sense that it be viewed as a frontstage form of behaviour that is at odds with events on the backstage. To illustrate this, the essay traces the historical shift in such relationships that has occurred, principally on account of the emergence of audio-visual media onto the political stage and the way in which these media impinge on the democratic procedures and their representation. While it is the case that, in many classic Hollywood films, political backstage is surveyed by the respective picture in investigative fashion with a view to assessing the honesty of the politicians, more recent films have, instead, turned the spotlight onto the political consequences of such investigative methods themselves. In depicting political representatives and the political stages on which they perform, they thus at the same time themselves develop an awareness of the power and impact wielded by filmic media, an influence that is able to manufacture, multiply, or disrupt the different types of political stages.

2. The emergence of front-stage

The term ‘backstage’ derives from the sociology of Erving Goffman, who analysed social life as a sequence of more or less closely defined situations that each contain a series of rules and roles. In such situations, actions occur that are directed at the audience, and others that take place ‘backstage’ and serve as a rehearsal for, or discourse on, the actual performance. The theatre metaphor used by Goffman suggests an image of front- and backstage, a familiar example given by Goffman being the service staff of a hotel or restaurant, who behave very differently out on the frontstage of the guest area than when in the backstage kitchen.[9]As a medium capable of investigating and documenting reality[10], the Hollywood feature film is not content with presenting to its audience wait staff, singers, sportspersons, detectives, politicians, queens, or superheroes in their social function alone. Rather, it shows how concrete individuals don and discard these roles, how they doubt their ability to perform them, or which type of clandestine agendas they pursue while rehearsing them. This is precisely what happens in the most successful genre of recent decades, the superhero movie, which gives centre stage – both visually and in terms of storyline – to the mask as a metaphor for the social role: Spiderman as a figure is interesting on account of the fact that he is at once both an object of public admiration and an unnoticed, shy and retiring adolescent schoolboy – who, due to particular circumstances, has developed a spectacular front-of-stage behaviour.

Media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz transferred the notions of front- and backstage to the political sphere, a world which – most especially in the media society – can be described as the complex interplay of different stages.[11]In the cinema, too, questions of representation take on a quite particular relevance when films show moments of disruption to political order,[12]which are frequently triggered by precisely the media-induced emergence of new stages. In classic Hollywood motion pictures in particular, such crises generally conclude with a renegotiation of legitimate modes of representation. The yardstick used to measure the legitimacy of forms of political representation is the question as to whether these are capable, at the structural level, of referencing the ideological core of the respective political system. Paula Diehl speaks in this connection of the ‘primary reference’ of representation: in democracy, this is no longer, as was the case in the Middle Ages, divine authority but the sovereign people, which is why the attending audience is meant to see itself reflected in the respective representative as the real political subject.[13]A now iconic scene from the 1935 Paramount comedy directed by Leo McCarey, Ruggles of Red Gap, is a picture-perfect illustration of this mechanism of democratic representation. The movie features Charles Laughton in the role of an English butler who is forfeited to a nouveau riche American millionaire by his former aristocratic master following a game of poker. After arriving in the New World, the ‘servant’ is consistently treated by the millionaire as his equal, which would initially appear to be at odds with Ruggles’ own work ethos. Only after a debate in the local saloon does it become apparent that Ruggles has actually been deeply impressed by the American philosophy of egalitarianism. None of those present is in a position to give a summary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; Ruggles, however, is able to recite the key passages flawlessly by heart. The others, all Americans by birth, listen with great admiration to the erstwhile butler, who has at this moment become their natural representative.

“Of the People, By the People, For the People”: The words of the Gettysburg Address encapsulate the ‘primary reference’ of the US democratic system.[14]In an involuntary act of theatricality, the people attending are divided into one person speaking on behalf of all and an audience listening to that self-same person. Democracy is thus conceived of as political theatre, in which the audience spontaneously comes to an awareness of itself through beholding its representatives.[15]In the process, the representative is recruited from a group of represented persons already presumed to exist. This group is dimly aware that Lincoln’s words concern them, yet it does not visibly and assertively form itself into this group until the act of representation has occurred.

Yet Ruggles merely cites what Lincoln, the absent ‘dead father’ of the nation, has already laid down as the fundamental principle of society. As such, representation thus proves to be the performative actualisation of an order that, latently, has already long been binding. The spontaneous political act creating an embodiment of the body politic requires a spokesperson who, for a brief moment, assumes the role of the dead father, thus filling the empty space at the centre of democratic order. No political power extending above and beyond this can, however, be derived therefrom: Ruggles shall not go on to be appointed to any political office; the scene doesnotlift him out of the crowd in any sustained manner but, rather, thematises his own recognition that he has become an equally entitled part of the American people. The representative is a reflection of the body politic, and this function can, as the film seeks to demonstrate, be assumed by absolutely anyone who is a member of this body politic – even, in fact, by somebody whose behaviour unmistakably reveals him to be an English butler and, as if that alone were not enough, one who is actually played by a British actor.[16]

3. The emergence of backstage

The example reveals that it was, at the very latest, in the 1930s – the period that raised the curtain on the major era and world-wide influence of classic Hollywood cinema – that the US feature film first began to develop a particular interest in the democratic order, its origins, and its representatives.[17]Yet the main focus of this interest is not on the actual forms of representation themselves but the mechanisms and processes by which representation is engendered, which are matters generally discussed on the backstage of power – a backstage which, in Ruggles, does not yet exist, political representation here being depicted in its pre–institutionalised stage. Quite on the contrary, in fact, Ruggles not discarding his butler’s mask until he gives expression to his true convictions. American democracy, in its primal scene, is thus mask-free, functioning at the precise moment when audience and events on stage find themselves in a perfectly self-mirroring relationship.

Yet the people – another fact made clear by the scene from Ruggles– tends to forget. “You see, you see,” will be the words spoken in movie theatres four years later by another fictional representative of the USA in a further scene that has gone on to achieve iconic status,

“Boys forget what their country means by just reading The Land of the Free in history books. … Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books. … Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say: ‘I’m free to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn’t. I can. And my children will.’”

In Frank Capra’s paradigmatic, and hence frequently analysed, classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), the eponymous Boy Rangers leader Jefferson Smith, who utters these words, is appointed senator of a provincial US state. In Washington, he is initially ridiculed for his bumpkin-like naïveté when, in a shaky voice, he reads out details of a plan to set up a national boys’ camp. Quite by chance, this is to be established in the very same location in which big-time capitalist Taylor is to build an uneconomic dam – a corrupt project which, however, has long had majority support in the Senate. The camp thus becomes a hopeless venture, yet Smith is not one to give up easily: “Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for,” is one of the best-known quotes from the film, voicing words that in an age of Brexit were recently put on the lips of Winston Churchill – in the key scene of Darkest Hour (2017, Joe Wright), which reprises the democratic ur-myth articulated inMr. Smith and Ruggles, yet is unable to reproduce the egalitarian impulse of its role models.

To box through his ‘lost cause,’ Smith resorts to the most radical tool in the armoury of US democracy, the so-called filibuster – an unbroken speech that may not be interrupted. This performance ultimately enables Smith to force the film’s adversary, Senator Paine, to publicly admit to the crooked wheeling and dealing by reminding him of Smith’s late father, an old friend of Paine and an upstanding politician. Once again, therefore, democracy is founded anew in the name of an absent father. The motif of the man of the people who, in exemplarily mimetic fashion[18], formulates the interests of a people conceived of as unified by having to wage a battle against a bureaucratised, corrupt power elite in the process, has led to the film having occasionally been accused of populism.[19]Notwithstanding this, Capra displays a high degree of sensitivity towards questions of political representation in democracy. The virtually exact replica of the Senate chamber, for example, acts as an ideal showcase for the three bodies politic: the people itself, which takes its place on the public benches above, the representation of the unity of the people through the semicircle of the Senate, and the temporary individual representative, who, as the person speaking, addresses the senators.

Adding a further dimension and place of action to the film’s choice of settings is the ‘backstage’ of power, in, say, the shape of the backroom in which business leaders and politicians think up ‘post-factual’ reasons to justify the construction project. For Capra, the sincerity of a politician is arguably measured  in terms of the degree to which front- and backstage behaviour are in alignment: Naïve Smith, for example, is to be found at moments of crisis in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where he professes his belief in American democracy and reels off more or less the same patriotic speeches as when front of stage in the Senate chamber.

As Robin Celikates and Simon Rothöhler have shown in a precise analysis of the film, he stands for an ideal form of representation, one in which staging and stratagem correspond to one another in the same way as people and representative.[20]Smith is basically a Ruggles but unfortunate in the sense that he has been cast in an institutionalised stage-play in which he constantly has to mediate between front- and backstage while at the same time seeking to comprehend that his friends and enemies behave differently depending on which of the two chambers they find themselves in.

The key filibuster scene reveals that the ideal model of a direct connection between people and representation may, in the realm of institutionalised politics, be hard to establish yet is nonetheless still possible to establish – and is one that in fact has to be established. It is by virtue of the fact that the film not only upholds the general possibility of this performative re-authentication of politics but does so in objection mode, resisting the false consensus, that Richard Rushton confers on this motion picture a time-transcending political value and significance.[21]As Smith continues to talk at them for hours on end, the other senators soon turn their backs, demonstratively reading the newspaper in order to discourage him. When he begins to read out the Constitution of the United States, indignant grumbling is to be heard – indicating that the ‘primary reference’ is thus no longer sufficient when the institution of politics is dominated by the dictates of realpolitik-inspired power stratagems. Only by an act of complete physical exhaustion, speaking until he faints, which serves as proof of the authentic unity between the man and the politician Smith, is he ultimately able to persuade those present to desist from engaging in backstage skulduggery. In Capra’s movie, in other words, the constitutive non-identity between the institutionalised and ideal level of politics has to be surmounted by means of a kind of de-sublimation of representative power in order to reunite the people and its spokesperson. Yet this reunifying process once again remains temporary: the ‘Taylor machine,’ inside which a fateful politico-industrial power complex is exposed, has been defeated only for this moment, not on a wider, more general scale.[22]This fleetingness of ‘true’ democracy is, however, not a shortcoming but what constitutes its actual mythical core. In Mr. Smith, democracy, and hence also democratic representation, is not to be had in any other form than that currently realised, than that now being lived and defended. And this, for its part, needs to be protected from the overwhelming force of backstage, which constantly threatens to functionalise and exploit democracy to its own ends.

4. The illegitimate side-stage

The profound belief in the primary reference of democracy, which is the defining feature of the two 1930s motion pictures cited here as exemplars, has, since the 1960s at the very latest, been shaken to the core. Set in the same reconstructed Senate building as that featuring in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is, for example, Otto Preminger’s film-of-the-book Advise and Consent (1962), a story of the appointment by the Senate of a Secretary of State proposed by a terminally ill president. A controversial figure, the candidate has as many enemies among the Senate members as he has friends, with opposition to him crossing party lines. Right at the beginning of the film, a lady visitor to the Senate remarks to the women accompanying her that it is not evident from the seating order which senators are conservative, liberal, or ‘left’ – the Senate thus, here too, representing the unity of the people, not the plurality of the parties.

The movie charts the efforts of the leading senators – one of them, once again, played by Charles Laughton – to come up with reasons for and against the appointment of the candidate, with the majority of the action shown occurring backstage. This is a no-holds-barred struggle, yet the fact that the speeches delivered front of stage are of a fundamentally tactical nature, i.e. are not a direct reflection of the respective speaker’s principal tenets and character, is at all times apparent. In Preminger’s film, there is thus an awareness of the incongruence between the pragmatic and representational level of politics, between front- and backstage as the premise of institutionalised democracy. At the same time, however, there is a red line of legality that may not be crossed. It is marked out by a young liberal Senate member who seeks to gain support for the new Secretary of State – for whom the film evokes strong sympathies – by blackmailing another senator. To this end, he makes use of photos serving as evidence of the married colleague’s homosexual transgressions – and it is for this reason that the film has become especially well-known for its treatment of the issue of homosexuality.[23]Driven to desperation, the blackmailed senator ultimately takes his own life; whereupon the other senators summon up – in a direct reversal of the filibuster scene in Capra’s picture – all legal means available in the Senate’s rulebook to prevent the conspirator from being able to speak again.

The scene shows how, at the moment of crisis, opposition between the different party groups represented in the Senate is suspended: with a view to defending the underlying mechanisms, the primary reference of democracy, it proves necessary – in sharp contrast to the situation in Capra’s film – to abandon attempts to achieve a political goal. It is precisely through the suppression of an authentic speech by bureaucratic procedures controlled from backstage that democracy is salvaged. And Preminger also shows how communication in the Senate chamber itself constantly keeps fragmenting into front- and backstage: these are not linked to any one concrete location but are determined by the behaviour of the participating persons, who are forever switching between public speeches and covert agreements with party cohorts. Unlike in the case of Capra’s film, the backstage in Preminger thus becomes a key political showcase, one in which democratic order has to be not only jeopardised but also defended.

More problematic, however, is another type of stage, which in Preminger’s film is created chiefly by the mass media, which threaten to disclose details of the covertly homosexual senator’s past. Right in keeping with Meyrowitz’ theories, the appearance on the scene of the mass media clouds the distinction between front- and backstage. Meyrowitz illustrates this by taking the television interview situation as example: in this new type of event occurring on the media stage, a president is neither any longer able to simply deliver a speech, although he is now speaking to the whole nation, nor can he behave as if engaging in private conversation, although the very nature of an interview – which television, in its own preferred take on the format, likes to conduct in the interviewee’s private study – is designed to suggest precisely that. “In this sense, we have not only a different situation, but also a different President, and – in the long run – a different presidency.”[24]When the membrane between back- and frontstage becomes permeable, says Meyrowitz, so-called side-stages are created. What were once backstage elements, such as the private apartment, take on public significance by, for example, appearing in a televised election commercial. The blackmailing act in Advise and Consent serves to open up such a side-stage, one which, however, here exposes the violation of democratic principles. If democracy is to function, it must at all times be certain where the border between front- and backstage is drawn, for only on this basis can the performative order of representation, upon which democracy is founded, be upheld.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington had already displayed a certain degree of media scepticism, albeit with the mass media here figuring less as actors in their own right than as instruments in Taylor’s hands. And in Advise and Consent, too, the media tend to be more reactive in nature, although politics is now being threatened by publication of the truth – and no longer, as was the case with Capra, by the publication of astutely formulated untruths. This difference is by no means trivial: a member of the Senate must be given the possibility to represent the people also, and most especially, in instances in which – due, say, to a divergent sexuality – he is not identical in the manner which still applied in the case of Mr. Smith. His private life, to the extent that this is of no relevance to his role as representative, must not be allowed to become a political tool by being diverted through the side-stage. In this process, the rules of backstage are articulated not as legally binding but as nonetheless mandatory: they are the rules of the game rather than laws, and the general acceptance of the red line between permitted and disallowed means is not determined by the purpose. The exclusion of the blackmailing senator from the circle of august politicians, an act that here proves necessary in order to salvage democracy, ultimately leads to the president’s candidate not attaining office: unlike in Capra’s film, the principle of democracy has to be realised by allowing a hopeless venture to actually fail. Here, therefore, the myth of the founding scene of democratic society implies entirely different types of sacrifice than was the case in Capra’s film. It is not until the death of their fellow colleague that the individuals are fused together to form a collective, the price of which, once again, is the abandonment of the good cause.

The film concludes with a surprising twist. Shortly before voting is over, a public announcement reveals that the ailing president has passed away. The vice president, now automatically elevated to supreme office, does not himself vote for his predecessor’s candidate, reserving himself the right to name a candidate of his own. This situation, which causes the standoff between the politicians to escalate to a degree that threatens the very agonistic arena of democracy itself,[25]proves to be linked to a concrete historical situation which, by making just a minor change to the power constellation, can bring about direct and radical change. In democracy, as so clearly demonstrated by Preminger’s film, political representation is not the endless repetiton of the dead father’s will, it is subject to a process of constant change. The inconsequential nature of the conflict, however, does not in any way serve to underscore its futility, the founding act of representational democracy being re-enacted in every political dispute. In Preminger’s movie, this is no longer about the good cause prevailing but about defending, or re-founding, the conditions under which political order can be upheld.

5. The front-stage of television

The threat to democracy posed by political manoeuvring and deception, most especially, however, by new media – which already featured in Preminger’s film, yet without being at the centre of the storyline – advances to become an ever-greater certainty in 1960s cinema. Considered to be a blueprint for the American political thriller is the second film in the so-called paranoia trilogy by John Frankenheimer, Seven Days in May (1964).^[26]At the height of the cold war, the US president is here pursuing the objective of signing a disarmament treaty with the USSR, against which charismatic General Scott stages a conspiracy in order to himself seize power, causing the cold war to escalate. Of key importance for the staging of the putsch is special unit ECOMCON (Emergency Communicators Control), whose job is to gain control over the country’s entire mass media. This is in fact a reference to a real media emergency system intended to relegate television – at the time a still fairly new medium – to the role of a political frontstage. As early as in 1951, the so-called CONELRAD system was installed in the USA as an emergency program and, in 1963, was replaced by the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS). This system enabled the major national television networks ABC, CBS and NBC to be corralled into a single broadcasting entity under the control of the White House.

Frankenheimer thus fictionalises a media technology that had already been legally implemented in the year in which the film was made, presenting this as the possible result of a right-wing conspiracy. The inner-diegetic president is thus still able to claim that, as in 1970, the year in which the film is set, he has never heard of the existence of any such emergency broadcaster. At the structural level, emergency medium television is seen by Frankenheimer as unmistakably privileging fascism, its asymmetrical sender-receiver constellation creating a hierarchical order in which political discourse is overlaid by the speaker’s imaginary power to beguile. Whenever Scott is shown in a low-angle shot, he is being cheered by the masses, for which television itself provides the visual commands by giving prominence to precisely those cheering masses.

The mythical founding act of democracy, the spontaneous constitution of people and transient representative in a theatrical situation, is thus recast as a situation characterised by media alienation: banished to the screen, the primal scene of democracy degenerates into a manipulative instruction on how to act, issued at the behest of an authoritarian state power. Even the upstanding president himself, speaking at a major press conference towards the end of the picture, is forced to defend the many voices of democracy using the same means as those employed by the dissident general. He assumes the mantle of a charismatic leader who, while appearing to be a “decent, resolutely honest man,”^[27]speaks words that are nonetheless carried out into the world by that very same medium which came close to appointing a fascist to high office. Even the journalists, seen jotting down the president’s political homily like good little schoolboys, thus become compliant media propagating the message disseminated by the symbolic father who, at least temporarily, has once again regained his place at the seat of power.

As such, the film articulates the problem politics now faces on account of the mere existence of the new mass media. The latter develop, due to their power to act as a stage, an ability to structure public opinion which in itself already appears to constitute a threat to democracy. As if custom-made for the purpose of visual representation, television subverts, on account of its own internal logic alone, the forms of negotiation inherent in democratic politics. The room in which the film’s final press conference takes place is an exact replica of the layout of the State Department Building in which John F. Kennedy gave his press briefings. It is characterised by an order based on the principle of separation in which events are monitored and directed from control rooms, thus acting as a perfect showcase designed to highlight the dual structure of front- and backstage. The question posed by Frankenheimer, in thus thematising the medialisation of stages, is that as to which form of political order is harnessing to its own ends the dangerous imaginary potential of image-based media. The verbal duel between the fascist general and the president, from which the film’s plot takes its cue, thus also becomes a duel between differently structured backstages. On the one hand is Scott’s hi-tech command headquarters, in which both the outside world and other spaces within the political sphere are available solely in the form of medial representation – through the conduit of closed circuit TV, say, or cinematographic installations.

The danger emanating from the new media technology is thus equated with the threat posed by a political conspiracy. On the other hand, the representatives of the old order continue to favour face-to-face conversations and paper-based communication, dispensing their appearances in the public mass media in sparse, highly circumspect fashion. Their backstage areas are the offices and meeting rooms already familiar to us from the movies of Capra and Preminger, and which here themselves now become representations of democratic exchange.

Democratic order thus needs to remain autonomous vis-à-vis the new media; yet the latter, for its part, has to allow itself to be instrumentalised by the legitimate political order. More generally, however, the spatial separation of speaker and audience, as brought about by television, and the new type of technical ‘submedial’[28]backstage created by the medium, make the mechanism of representation take on a seemingly dangerous character: Its dynamic has now been irreversibly linked to forces which, freed from the presence of parliament, are no longer subject to any clear controls. The backstage of the television presidency turns into a secretive object of suspicion, one which, from this point on, also proves to be increasingly appealing to the film industry.

6. Proliferation of backstages

In the wake of the assassination of Kennedy and the Watergate affair, the 1970s witness the emergence of so-called paranoia cinema,[29]which considers the hostile takeover of US politics to already be a fait accompli. Political representation is now portrayed as a mere façade, which, enacted by unknown forces pursuing opaque objectives, serves to conceal a huge conspiracy that is ultimately directed against both the people and the state. What is described as a “crack between the front- and backstage of politics that has become systemic” by Celikates and Rothöhler – themselves here employing Goffman’s terms – has now become evident, as most clearly exposed in Alan J. Pakula’s film The Parallax View (1974),[30]in which reporter Joe Frady attempts to shed light on the murder of a senator. While conducting his investigations, Frady hits upon the machinations of an anonymous firm by the name of ‘Parallax Corporation,’ which has been carrying out a series of political assassinations on behalf of unknown political actors. The hitmen it employs are loners who, in the course of so-called psychological tests and assassin training programs, are brainwashed and quite literally re-educated to become ‘lone killers.’

In the film’s final scene, Frady follows one of these suspected assassins into an election arena in which a candidate is rehearsing his campaign appearance that evening. A taped recording of the candidate’s speech is playing, which underscores the non-identity of enactment and actual person.[31]And the scene can also be interpreted as the interlinking of different stage logics. While the candidate and his team are rehearsing – a classic backstage activity – Frady and the perpetrator are high above the event hall in the catwalks: this is the place in which the spotlights are hung, and from which the political order of visibility appears to be orchestrated. At this point, the audience, too, imagine themselves to have arrived in the clandestine ‘rearmost’ backstage of power. In a place from which the events on the actual backstage – where the rehearsal is taking place – are being controlled and monitored. Yet when a shot suddenly rings out and the candidate in the arena below is killed instantly, it is Frady himself upon whom gazes alight: Right in front of him is a rifle, and a guard identifies him as the man who fired it.[32]

Frady is shot while trying to escape, the commission of enquiry making him out to be a misguided lone gunman. Yet it is precisely his attempt to expose the conspiracy that caused him to be its victim: “In a kind of Hegelian ruse of reason, it is precisely the will to revolt and to destroy the conspiracy which allows this last to write him into their scenario and to destroy him in the process.”[33]And this plot twist, too, follows a theatrical logic: what the investigative reporter considered to be the backstage of political representation was actually only a further frontstage put in place especially for him. The true backstage, which now appears to be the all-powerful seat of the conspiracy, remains unattainable for both the film’s hero and those watching the movie. Political representation is no longer – as was the case in the era of Ruggles – something spontaneously generated from within the people, but one artificially constructed from this alien, hostile, and abstract place of conspiracy with a view to controlling this very people itself. Representation is thus transformed into its exact opposite: manipulation.

Evidence of a progression occurring in the transition from classic Hollywood to New Hollywood is thus apparent, one that extends from the spontaneously generated authentic bond between representative and the represented through to systemically engineered, sustained alienation. From the very beginning, the films are dominated by a distrust of institutionalised, merely formal modes of representation, which use the aesthetic of representation to manipulate the people rather than extracting therefrom the elements that benefit the latter’s actual interests and concerns. By using technical media – in Pakula’s film, for example, the notorious cinema machine, in which Frady undergoes a psychological test – to create the imaginations of the collective, they thus thwart its actual establishment. In the real field of institutionalised politics, the assailants’ bullets hit in precisely that place in which society might potentially discover its real self. Even more strongly than paranoid constellations, therefore, pictures such as The Parallax View address the traumatic character of modern politics, which is now found to be powerless in the face of an incurable alienation of society.[34]

7. Capturing backstage

Fast-forward to present-day Hollywood pictures and one sees signs of a continuation of 1960s cinema on the one hand, yet on the other a more extended, hugely multilayered field of filmic depictions of forms of political representation. Paranoid narratives, for example, continue to exist and, increasingly in fact, quite independently of political cinema,[35]such storylines having become a more general vehicle of popular culture. Here, as also in most other fictional treatments of the political system, the media continue to operate in the role of epistemic disturbers. Popular series such as House of Cards (2013-) cleverly exploit the incongruences between front- and backstage behaviour,[36]now obeying new, multifaceted stratagems which also lend themselves to be affirmatively appropriated by those acting in the political space. Of growing significance is, additionally, Hollywood’s interest in forms of particular representation in which the voices of minorities intervene in the institutionalised business of politics. What we find here is a vacillation between representatives who once again mimetically express the interests of those they represent, and modes of ‘speaking-on-behalf-of-others,’ as in, for example, Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (2005) – the very title of which suggests the impossibility of loss- or friction-free representation – in which a blonde interpreter played by Nicole Kidman can become ambassador to the black population of an African nation.

Most obviously in the tradition of the films considered in this essay, all of which feature white males, is arguably George Clooney’s The Ides of March (2011), which marks a further shift in the filmic discourse of representation.

When the film begins, the audience believes it is listening to an address being made by a politician, yet then realises that this is merely a rehearsal-cum-soundcheck, with the real action taking place on the backstage of institutionalised politics. In the further course of the story, however, this backstage mutates into a dangerous side-stage when it emerges that the idealistic media man Stephen, who is running the election campaign for a progressive candidate, has had an unauthorised clandestine meeting with the opposing candidate’s campaign manager. It is, in other words, no longer the politicians themselves who take centre stage here but spin doctors and consultants, and even they cannot afford to make a single misstep without exposing themselves to the risk that this might become public. Yet Stephen blackmails his way back onto the side of the venerated candidate, shifting pressure onto the latter by falsely asserting that he can prove the politician’s complicity in the suicide of a female member of the campaign team. Smear tactics and dirty tricks are, it might be inferred, what now dominate the business, causing the real political element to be quite veritably neutralised by institutionalised politics.

It is precisely therein, however, that the difference between Clooney’s political thriller and the earlier works lies. Backstage, as that seat of power from which the political system is established and controlled, has now been usurped by a kind of frontstage totalitarianism. The protected private space or backroom is no longer – as was the case with Preminger – jeopardised by unscrupulous individuals but has been almost completely superseded by a new medial regime of visibility that basically enables every single space to become a stage. Even if the film does not specifically address the issue of the influence now wielded by social media in the political arena, the significance of such media in this regard can be clearly sensed. For all this, however, the eroticism of backstage persists, with both reporters and the population at large in Ides of March constantly seeking to dredge up backgrounds, scandals, and conspiracies, while politicians learn how to leverage the impact of every possible revelation to their own ends. In order, however, to simultaneously immunise themselves against any form of leaks or disclosures, they develop forms of behaviour designed to make them unassailable. Thus, representation is increasingly replaced by simulation. At the same time, the either authentic or inauthentic, honest or crooked politician gives way to the figure of the media manager who has to eliminate everything that is not performance. Speaking straight to the face of the woman who wants to take her own life since she is pregnant by the candidate for whom she is working, Stephen says that she no longer has any right to exist.

As in the case of Preminger’s picture, the secret that must not be allowed to come to light is of a sexual nature and, once again, a victim is needed to salvage democracy, although this time – and in that the film displays, on the one hand, an awareness of current problematics while at the same time perpetuating old misogynistic traditions[37]– the victim is a woman. Yet the situation is here salvaged not by the mythical constitution of the democratic body politic but precisely through the tool of immunising the representative against the inquisition of backstage. In the process, everyone who has anything at all to do with the political sphere is automatically transformed into a frontstage actor, the attention economy of the television medium having incorporated – and hence replaced – the spontaneous mechanism of theatrical representation. Towards the end of the film, in a closing sequence that exactly reprises the opening scene, the former idealist Stephen is now a man bereft of any private life, friends, or convictions, is nothing but a mask, a performance, a front-of-stage. In the television interview that he gives, the subject is only purportedly the background to political events; in actual fact, however, the backstage on which he is standing has long since become the actual, now institutionalised frontstage.

In quite extraordinary manner, the political objectives of the media – as also consistently pursued by Hollywood – to make visible the backstage of politics, to expose the true game going on behind the scenes, have thus ultimately been turned upon themselves as target. The relationship between back- and frontstage in the media democracy has imploded, now existing in mere performative form only. The traditional hermeneutics of depth and suspicion have run up against their limits and are now – in highly postmodern fashion – being replaced by a game of superficialities. It is for this reason that the charismatic ‘old-school’ representative played by George Clooney[38]has now been replaced by a savvy media man whose ‘flat, inexpressive stare’[39]is very reminiscent of the ‘simulacrum-in-chief’ George W. Bush.[40]The mask-like face of Ryan Gosling, for its part, stands for a mode of presentist, tautological representation, for a type of façade behind which no further conspiracy or stratagem is concealed. The look on the face of the slick media maven, who appears to be seeking to communicate the complete absence of any secrets or backgrounds, reflects nothing but the dead eye of the camera, thus failing to draw his audience’s attention back to the sovereign people, to democracy’s primary reference.

Bibliography

Ankersmit, Frank. Political Representation. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002.

Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.

Celikates, Robin, and Simon Rothöhler. “Die Körper der Stellvertreter. Politische Repräsentation zwischen Identität, Simulation und Institution: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Parallax View, The West Wing.” In Inszenierungen der Politik. Der Körper als Medium, edited by Paula Diehl and Gertrud Koch, 57–76. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2007.

Cilento, Fabrizio. An Investigative Cinema. Politics and Modernization in Italian, French, and American film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Coyne, Michael. Hollywood Goes to Washington. American Politics on Screen.London: Reaction Books, 2008.

DeGeorge, Richard T. “Democracy as Social Myth.” In Philosophical Perspectives on Democracy in the 21st Century, edited by Ann E. Cudd and Sally J. Scholz, 43–54. Cham, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2014.

Diehl, Paula. Das Symbolische, das Imaginäre und die Demokratie. Eine Theorie politischer Repräsentation. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2015.

Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984.

Giglio, Ernest D. Here’s Looking at You. Hollywood, Film & Politics. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956.

Groys, Boris. Under Suspicion. A Phenomenology of Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Hamilton, Carol V. “Being Nothing. George W. Bush as Presidential Simulacrum,” CTheory, 13 July 2004, http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/being-nothing-george-w-bush-as-presidential-simulacrum/#_edn10.

Hirsch, Foster. Otto Preminger. The Man who Would be King. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Jameson, Fredric.Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.

Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Cinema and Space in the World System. London: BFI, 1996.

Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Koch, Lars, Tobias Nanz, and Johannes Pause. “Imagined Scenarios of Disruption. A Concept.” In Disruptions in the Arts, edited by Lars Koch, Tobias Nanz, and Johannes Pause, 63–81. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2018.

Kozloff, Sarah. “Empathy and the Cinema of Engagement. Reevaluating the Politics of Film,” Projections7, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 1–40.

Kracauer, Siegfried. “National Types as Hollywood Presents Them,” The Public Opinion Quarterly13, no. 1 (Spring 1949): 53–72.

Lefort, Claude. Democracy and Political Theory. Translated by David Macey. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.

Maltby, Richard. Harmless Entertainment. Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus.Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1983.

Manow, Philip. Im Schatten des Königs. Die politische Anatomie demokratischer Repräsentation.Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place. The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. London, New York: Verso, 2000.

O’Shaughnessy, Martin. The New Face of Political Cinema. Commitment in French Film since 1995. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.

Pause, Johannes. “Zeuge einer Verschwörung.“ In Filmgenres: Thriller, edited by Thomas Koebner and Hans-Jürgen Wulff, 195–198. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2013.

Pratt, Ray. Projecting Paranoia. Conspiratorial Visions in American Film. Lawrence, Kansas: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2001.

Richards, Jeffrey. “Frank Capra and the Cinema of Populism,” Film Society Review 7 (February 1972), 39–46.

Rushton, Richard. The Politics of Hollywood Cinema. Popular Film and Contemporary Political Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Scott, Ian. American Politics in Hollywood Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Sorlin, Sandrine. Language and Manipulation in House of Cards. A Pragma-Stylistic Perspective. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Sterritt, David. “Murdered Souls, Conspiratorial Cabals: Frankenheimer’s Paranoia Films.” In A Little Solitaire. John Frankenheimer and American Film, edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer, 12–28. New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Suskind, Ron. The Price of Loyalty. New York: Simon and Shuster, 2004.

Talyor, Henry. Conspiracy! Theorie und Geschichte des Paranoiafilms. Marburg: Schüren, 2017.

Notes

[1]Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2016).

[2]Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, transl. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 17.

[3]Philip Manow, Im Schatten des Königs. Die politische Anatomie demokratischer Repräsentation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008).

[4]Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), chapter XVI.

[5]E.g., with reference to Jacques Rancière: Martin O’Shaughnessy, The New Face of Political Cinema. Commitment in French Film since 1995 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 33.

[6]Sarah Kozloff, “Empathy and the Cinema of Engagement. Reevaluating the Politics of Film,” Projections7, no. 2 (Winter 2013), 1–40.

[7]On the cultural and political significance of the mythic narratives of democracy cf. Richard T. DeGeorge, “Democracy as Social Myth,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Democracy in the 21st Century, ed. Ann E. Cudd, Sally J. Scholz (Cham, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2014), 43–54.

[8]Cf. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader. Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), 20–22.

[9]Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956), 72.

[10]Fabrizio Cilento, An Investigative Cinema. Politics and Modernization in Italian, French, and American film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

[11]Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place. The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[12]On the possible productivity of disruption within the context of cultural processes cf. Lars Koch, Tobias Nanz, Johannes Pause, “Imagined Scenarios of Disruption. A Concept,” in Disruptions in the Arts, ed. Lars Koch, Tobias Nanz, Johannes Pause (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 63–81.

[13]Paula Diehl, Das Symbolische, das Imaginäre und die Demokratie. Eine Theorie politischer Repräsentation (Baden-Baden: Nomos 2015), 121–131.

[14]Richard T. DeGeorge, “Democracy as Social Myth,” 49.

[15]Manow, Im Schatten des Königs,70.

[16]It was no accident that Siegfried Kracauer saw the film as satirizing American accesses of quasi-British snobbishness. Siegfried Kracauer, “National Types as Hollywood Presents Them,” The Public Opinion Quarterly13, no. 1 (Spring 1949), 53–72.

[17]Ernest D. Giglio, Here’s Looking at You. Hollywood, Film & Politics (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 116.

[18]For a fundamental analysis of the concept of mimetic representation cf. Frank Ankersmit, Political Representation (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002).

[19]Jeffrey Richards, “Frank Capra and the Cinema of Populism,” Film Society Review7 (February 1972), 39–46.

[20]Robin Celikates/Simon Rothöhler, “Die Körper der Stellvertreter. Politische Repräsentation zwischen Identität, Simulation und Institution: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Parallax View, The West Wing,” in Inszenierungen der Politik. Der Körper als Medium, ed. Paula Diehl/Gertrud Koch (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 57–76.

[21]Richard Rushton, The Politics of Hollywood Cinema. Popular Film and Contemporary Political Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 151. Rushton’s argumentation counters the assertion that classic Hollywood cinema is dominated by an ‘ideology of consensus.’ Cf. Richard Maltby, Harmless Entertainment. Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1983).

[22]Ian Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film.Second Edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 65.

[23]Foster Hirsch, Otto Preminger. The Man who Would be King (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 361–63.

[24]Meyrowitz,No Sense of Place, 43.

[25]Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, New York: Verso, 2000).

[26]David Sterritt, “Murdered Souls, Conspiratorial Cabals: Frankenheimer’s Paranoia Films,” in A Little Solitaire. John Frankenheimer and American Film, ed. Murray Pomerance/R. Barton Palmer (New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 12–28, 12.

[27]It is upon these character traits alone, thus the criticism voiced by Michael Coyne, that, in Frankenheimer’s film, the difference between democracy and fascism is founded. Michael Coyne, Hollywood Goes to Washington. American Politics on Screen (London: Reaction Books, 2008), 142.

[28]Boris Groys, Under Suspicion. A Phenomenology of Media (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2012).

[29]Cf. Ray Pratt, Projecting Paranoia. Conspiratorial Visions in American Film (Lawrence, Kansas: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2001).

[30]Celikates/Rothöhler, “Die Körper der Stellvertreter,” 67.

[31]Celikates/Rothöhler, “Die Körper der Stellvertreter,” 68.

[32]Cf. Johannes Pause, “Zeuge einer Verschwörung,“ in Filmgenres: Thriller, ed. Thomas Koebner and Hans-Jürgen Wulff (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2013), 195–198.

[33]Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Cinema and Space in the World System (London: BFI, 1996), 60.

[34]Due to this “suspicion of politics per se,” Rushton therefore considers paranoia cinema to no longer be generally political but, at best, parapolitical. Cf.Rushton, The Politics of Hollywood Cinema, 216.

[35]According to Henry Taylor, the political thriller is merely a cycle within the meta-genre of the paranoia film. Cf. Henry Talyor, Conspiracy! Theorie und Geschichte des Paranoiafilms (Marburg: Schüren, 2017).

[36]Sandrine Sorlin, Language and Manipulation in House of Cards. A Pragma-Stylistic Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 6.

[37]Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).

[38]Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1992), 306.

[39]Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2004), 117.

[40]Cf. Carol V. Hamilton, “Being Nothing. George W. Bush as Presidential Simulacrum,” CTheory, 13^th July 2004, http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/being-nothing-george-w-bush-as-presidential-simulacrum/#_edn10.

Filmography

Advise and Consent, 1962. Otto Preminger.

Darkest Hour, 2017. Joe Wright.

House of Cards, 2013-. Beau Willimon.

The Ides of March, 2011. Georges Clooney.

The Interpreter, 2005. Sydney Pollack.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,1939. Frank Capra.

The Parallax View, 1974. Alan J. Pakula.

Ruggles of Red Gap, 1935. Leo McCarey.

Seven Days in May, 1964. John Frankenheimer.

Notes on Contributor

Dr. Johanne Pause is an academic specialising in literature and film working in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Luxembourg. The principal areas covered in his research include political cinema, the temporality of literature, methods of computer-aided film analysis, and the cultural and imaginational history of isolation.

The year 1989 has long been perceived as Europe’s annus mirabilis. The sudden collapse of communism reunited Eastern Europe with the West and cemented democracy and market capitalism as the region’s political and economic future. Initially, at least, Hungary was touted as the star pupil of Eastern Europe’s neoliberal transformation. Aided in no small part by János Kádár’s market-oriented ‘goulash communism’, the Hungarian economy was in a more advanced state of development at the time of transition and, consequently, seen as a more attractive proposition for foreign investment. Western companies swiftly capitalised upon Hungary’s newly opened market and Hungarian high streets were quickly awash with foreign franchises and products, fulfilling many citizens’ long-held fantasy of consumer abundance.

In Hungary, the consumer item has a long history of mythical connotation. During the communist years, the ideological battle between East and West was, to a large extent, played out within the consumer realm. Many Hungarians had equated the superior quality of Western consumer goods with a better quality of life offered in the West more generally. Consumer items thus contributed significantly to the formation of a mythical, utopian image of the West and following the post-communist transition optimism was high for the prosperity, comfort and choice many associated with Western living.

This article seeks to engage with the political myths surrounding Hungary’s return to the West; more precisely, how the locally-popular comedy, Üvegtigris/Glass Tiger (Iván Kapitány and Péter Rudolf, 2001) engages with the myths surrounding Hungary’s democratic and capitalist assimilation. I argue that the film endeavours to confront both the ideological myths impressed from above and those romantically envisioned from below; that is to say, those disseminated by the global culture industries advocating market capitalism, and those deep-seated fantasies of life in the West cemented under communism. The film challenges the propagandist and ideologically laden myths of the West and engages with the expectations of the Hungarian citizens, expectations built upon a mythopoeic imaginary West as glimpsed from behind the iron curtain.

Glass Tiger was the feature length directorial debuts of Iván Kapitány and Péter Rudolf, who co-wrote the screenplay with Hilda Hársing and debutant screenwriter Gábor Óliver Buss. The film focuses upon café proprietor Lali (Rudolf) and his loyal band of hapless clientele. Through a series of tenuously linked vignettes, we witness the various happenings that occur in and around the Glass Tiger café, an American themed fast food restaurant situated, seemingly, in the middle of nowhere. Made on a modest budget of 150 million Forints – approximately €600,000[1] – Glass Tiger was released in Hungarian cinemas in October 2001. The film would go on to attract a national audience of 95,995 viewers by the end of the year,[2] and over 130,000 viewers by the end of its run.[3] Such was the success of Glass Tiger that a sequel was released in 2006, which itself would achieve a national audience of 304,021 viewers.[4] A third film in the series followed in 2010, attracting 469,984 viewers.[5] Such success has positioned the Glass Tiger series as one of Hungarian cinema’s most popular film franchises.[6]

Aesthetically, one may liken Glass Tiger to the work of Emir Kusturica. While the film lacks the ethereal aura and magical realist elements that have come to define Kusturica’s work, Glass Tiger does share a similar sense of the baroque. Indeed, Glass Tiger mirrors the unstructured narrative, cluttered and excessive mise-en-scène, and spectacularly exuberant characters of films such as Dom za vešanje/Time of the Gypsies (1988), Podzemlje/Underground (1995) and, perhaps most patently, Crna mačka, beli mačor/Black Cat, White Cat (1998). Akin to the films of Kusturica, Glass Tiger also embraces this sense of eclecticism and kitsch. This is no more evident than in the Glass Tiger café itself and its immediate surrounding, as will be demonstrated accordingly, and film’s flamboyantly exaggerated characters. Regular Glass Tiger patron, Róka (Sándor Gáspár), for example, inexplicably wears a bizarre new outfit and sports an outrageous new haircut in every scene he appears in.

Yet, while Glass Tiger embraces a Kusturica-inspired sense of comedic excess, the film also offers subtle insight into Hungary’s post-communist transition. Through central protagonist, Lali, a man unsatisfied with life, and who fantasises about material betterment, Glass Tiger provides a microcosmic snapshot of post-communist society. It is through Lali that the film engages with the Westernisation of Hungarian culture and the failure of neoliberal market capitalism to generate the levels of inclusive growth widely expected following the collapse of communism. Through Lali’s desire to own a Chevrolet Impala, Glass Tiger examines the role of Western material culture in post-communist identity formations. However, given that Lali’s desire ultimately remains unfulfilled, the film highlights a clash between post-communist expectations and realities. I argue that Lali’s failed expectations speak to a wider sense of disillusionment that accompanied Hungary’s return to the West as the realities of life under capitalism failed to meet citizens’ long-held hopes of prosperity and material comfort.

Additionally, this article argues that Glass Tiger highlights the continued legacy of communism, implying that despite the pervasiveness of Western cultural discourse, those deep-seated habits and tendencies ingrained by forty years of communism remain present. I argue that the legacy of communism is visible in the film’s characters, who continue to hold onto 1980s attitudes, now obsolete and out of place in the contemporary post-communist setting, and through the Glass Tiger café itself, which I contend, functions as a metaphorical device through which the film comments on the façade of Hungary’s return to the West. If one looks beyond the café’s American frontage, the socialist footprint remains visible. Through the Glass Tiger café, the film addresses the façade of Westernisation, suggesting that while neoliberal reforms have led many commentators to deem Hungary’s post-communist transformation a success, one must look beyond this semblance of successful Western assimilation to see the underlying realities of life in capitalist Hungary.

The Myth of the West

The myth of the West forms part of the communist legacy, born out of the coercive nature of communist rule, the shortage economy and the state’s inability to fulfil its utopian promises. During the hard dictatorship of Mátyás Rákosi, Hungary’s economic policy strictly adhered to the guiding principles of Stalinism, placing great emphasis on heavy industry.[7] Light industry, conversely, was vastly underfunded resulting in frequent shortages of basic consumer goods. However, in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1956, newly installed General Secretary, János Kádár sought to extinguish the threat of further insurgence and appease the alienated Hungarian populace through a policy of cautious reform. In exchange for citizens’ acquiescence to communist ideology, the socialist government granted Hungarians greater individual liberties and grew more responsive to their material needs. Over the period of Kádár’s governance Hungarians gained access to a comparatively well supplied and variable source of state produced consumer items.

Material culture provided an outlet for individual expression and subjectivity. However, the socialist consumer experience was laden with political ideology. Nationally produced consumer items were loaded with subtext, promoting the virtues of socialist ideology through notions of functionality and efficiency. Consequently, despite increased access to nationally produced consumer items, Hungarians instead attributed elevated cultural capital to their Western equivalents. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, access to Western consumer products was limited, obtainable only via the black market at hugely inflated prices. However, after the Hungarian thaw, their availability steadily increased, with a richer and more varied array of Western products slowly finding their way to the Hungarian high streets.[8] Western consumer products became vehicles of political mythology, shaping what Alexei Yurchak describes as the Imaginary West. As Yurchak asserts, the Imaginary West emerged from

an array of discourses, statements, products, objects, visual images, musical expressions, and linguistic constructions that were linked to the West by theme or by virtue of their origin or reference, and that circulated widely in late socialism, gradually shap[ing] a coherent and shared object of imagination.[9]

Yurchak suggests that the concept of the Imaginary West was archetypal, disconnected from any real sense of place but infused with ideology. The Imaginary West proliferated, in part, because of the intermittent exposure to the West, which was largely limited to Western consumer products, and because of what John Borneman describes as “a recourse to fantasy” that arose from the absence of a fully functioning public sphere.[10] In communist Hungary, the mythical West was primarily conceptualised from the popular perception of Western consumer goods. As Hungarian anthropologist Krisztina Fehérváry maintains, these products “were understood as not just evidence of a better production system, but iconic of a more natural and humane political system, one valuing human dignity”.[11]

The diversity, workmanship and prestige of Western consumer products came to reflect the quality of life offered by the West more generally. Through their immeasurable novelty and variety, Western consumer goods were suggestive of an ideology that placed individual freedoms at the fore. Said products exposed the inferiority of the centralised economic system and imbued resentment towards the functionality of state manufactured consumer goods, and the ideology deeply instilled within their making. These resentments came to reflect the dissatisfaction with the communist system more broadly.

The emotional investment placed in Western consumer products was a collective response to the lived experience of communism. The cachet of Western commodities circulated as a statement of defiance towards communism’s imposed ideology, representing a desire for individual autonomy amidst the paternalism of the state and as a desire for freedom, symbolically manifest in the form of unrestricted consumer choice. Western consumer products also provided a link to the European community to which many Warsaw Pact citizens still believed they belonged.

Following the sudden and unforeseen implosion of communism, the fantasy of consumer abundance, which had fuelled the Imaginary West, became a reality, at least on the Hungarian high streets, which were soon saturated with Western products and franchises. As Henri Vogt states, inevitably following transition many citizens “interpreted freedom of consumption as an inalienable right connected to their newly acquired individual freedom”.[12] Citizens equated material culture with self-worth and status, and many assumed that Hungary’s return to the West would yield greater standards of living and by extension greater contentment and wellbeing.

While serving as an expression of freedom and an articulation of critique against communism’s now moribund ideologies, the Imaginary West also served as a neoliberal Trojan horse used to implant codes of behaviour espousing free market values. However, forty years of communist rule had left Hungarians in need of socialisation in the practices of globalised consumer culture. In order to instil the ideology of consumption, international advertising, marketing and public relations companies purchased majority stakes in Hungarian communications agencies in what Anikó Imre describes as a “colonization of the virtually virgin postcommunist media and information technology markets”.[13] Consequently, during the first decade of post-communism, advertising expenditure in Hungary rose exponentially, soaring from $50 million in 1990 to $1,894.70 million in 2000.[14] Western advertising placed emphasis on the authenticity of these newly available consumer items as Coca Cola’s slogan, “The Real One” (Az Igazi) suggests.[15] Such claims to authenticity served as attempts to legitimise neoliberal capitalism as both genuine and rightful.

Similarly, Hollywood studios acquired major shares in Hungarian film distributors ensuring that Hungarian cinema’s exhibited Hollywood movies.[16] New private television channels RTL Klub and TV2 launched in 1997, and both public service and commercial broadcasters began importing increasing amounts of foreign television. Timothy Havens, Evelyn Bottando and Matthew S. Thatcher observe that between 2001 and 2004 US imports accounted for 57.3 per cent of all imported programming on Hungarian television with European imports reaching just under 25 per cent during the same period (130).[17] Over 92 per cent of these European Imports came from Western countries, principally from Germany (20.1%), UK (18.6%) Italy (17.3%) and France (16.8%).[18]

By 1991, 70 per cent of the Hungarian national daily newspapers were foreign owned and by 1996 so too were 65.8 per cent of women’s weekly magazines.[19] Hungarian versions of popular Western magazines and periodicals began increasingly filling kiosks and newsstands. The first American consumer magazine published in Hungarian being Playboy, released in November 1989.[20] In reference to fashion and lifestyle magazine Cosmopolitan, first published in Hungary in 1997, Hungarian journalist Gusztav Kosztolanyi noted that “[i]n format, content and tenor, it was indistinguishable from its Western counterparts”.[21]

Western media thus became the primary means of disseminating neoliberal ideology and socialising citizens in the values of capitalism. By acquiring significant stakes in Hungarian media industries, foreign media conglomerates procured a platform through which to promote the virtues of the free market, transforming citizens into consumers through the communication of social codes espousing rampant consumerism. To satisfy these newly implanted material desires, new sites of consumption were established. From the mid-1990s, construction began on modern shopping complexes backed principally by American finance. The Duna Plaza, the nation’s first American-style shopping mall, opened its doors in 1996 establishing what urban theorist Judit Bodnár describes as “a novelty in the local culture of shopping”.[22]

The integration of Western-style economics fundamentally transformed the ways in which citizens lived and interacted with one another. The end of communist paternalism fostered an environment of individualism as citizens were now forced to fend for themselves. Consumer culture resulted in a shift towards self-interest and narcissism, and post-communist society became increasingly atomised, leading many citizens to decry the loss of community that had existed under the communists.

These conditions saw anti-Western sentiments rise in ascendency. Support for the market economy declined as capitalism failed to generate the levels of inclusive growth many had dreamed of during the communist years. Indeed, to some, global brands such as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s became what social anthropologist Krista Harper describes “Hungarian folk villains” whose “logos symbolize the incursion of multinational corporations into public space, the media, and the public imagination”.[23] Many Hungarians subsequently began to associate the ubiquitous nature of consumer advertising with the Soviet Union’s equally ubiquitous five-pointed red star and, as such, a threat to Hungarian national autonomy.

Capitalism’s failure to live up to Hungarian expectations also created a deep sense of nostalgia for the communist past, with many citizens concluding that life had been better under the old regime. Indeed, a survey conducted by the Pew Research Group in 2009 revealed that 72 percent of respondents believed they were better off under communism, with only eight per cent claiming the opposite.[24] To a significant degree, nostalgia for the communist past spoke less about a collective desire to return to the past system, but instead spoke of a longing for past longings, a desire to retrieve the fantasy of the West in which the West was seen as utopian.[25]

The Unfulfilled Promises of Neoliberal Capitalism.

How then does Glass Tiger engage with post-communist life and the myths of the Imaginary West? I argue that Glass Tiger provides implicit insight into contemporary attitudes towards material culture while exposing a discrepancy between the Westernisation of Hungarian culture and the standards of living many had assumed of Hungary’s Western integration. Indeed, from the outset, the film emphasises the extent to which Hungarian culture has been westernised. The film opens on the fourth of July with two disc jockeys discussing the rock band, Kiss. We are then introduced to Lali, first seen taking photographs of himself stood next to an American war monument. Lali is an American fanatic; he has a miniature American flag tattooed on his arm, wears a Canadian baseball jersey, and regularly chews a toothpick in the insouciant manner of a Hollywood movie star. Such is his affection for America that has decorated the Glass Tiger café with the stars and stripes of the American flag.

The proceeding scenes introduce the viewer to Lali’s various friends and customers, many of whom, like Lali, share a passion for the West. Csoki (Imre Csuja), for example, is a would-be Hell’s Angel; he dresses in leather, rides a motorcycle with an American flag attached to its seat and carries a gun. However, rather than riding the traditional Harley Davidson, Csoki rides a Babetta, a Czechoslovakian-produced motorised bicycle. He is irresponsible and obstreperous, incessantly shouting, “Easy Rider, brother! Easy Rider!” (“ízi rájder öcsém”), referencing the Dennis Hopper film of 1969. He speaks of a desire to go to America, ride Route 66, see Hollywood, New York, Rodeo Drive and marry Pamela Anderson. Yet, in reality, he is unemployed and lives with his mother.

Later, we are introduced to Gaben (Gabór Reviczky), a car hustler (autónepper) who we first see wearing a Las Vegas baseball cap. He references J.R. Ewing from the American TV show Dallas and drives a succession of luxury American cars including a Lincoln and a Corvette. Gaben convinces Lali to trade his unfashionable UAZ-469 for a 1971 Chevrolet Impala; a vehicle that he believes will better represent Lali’s personality.[26] The Impala is more than simply a vehicle; it is the commodified representation of Lali’s desired persona. The Chevrolet, advertised as ‘The heartbeat of America’, is the United States’ bestselling vehicle manufacturer and has become an icon of Americana. Such is the Chevrolet’s status within American culture that over 700 songs have referenced the emblematic brand.[27] For Lali, the Impala embodies the American dream; representing social mobility, liberation and status. It also confirms upon him a sense of belonging in the global, post-communist world.

Lali’s wait for the Impala spans much of the film and he soon grows impatient, especially after seeing Gaben arrive at the café in a succession of luxury vehicles. The silver-tongued Gaben even attempts to deceive Lali by bringing him a Chevrolet Chavette instead of the Impala, claiming: “You told me to bring a Chevvy. Here it is”. Eventually the Impala arrives and Lali is finally able to attain the social esteem that the vehicle embodies. Unfortunately, before he is even able to fire up the Impala’s engine, an articulated lorry reverses into the car, immediately crushing it.

Through the destruction of the Impala, the film provides a means of examining the realities of post-communism set against Hungarian expectations of the return to the West. The collapse of communism allowed Hungarians to envisage new forms of personal identity constructed from the vast array of newly available Western consumer products. Under communism, Western material culture had long been tied to notions of choice, individual freedom and expressions of self-identity, tenets held in high esteem by those living under a political system that placed collective identity over that of the individual. Indeed, for many citizens, post-communist material culture served as a pronouncement of self-expression, dignity and self-worth and an articulation of belonging, validating Hungary’s reconnection to the West. The normalisation of Western consumerism in Hungary served as a declaration of the nation’s claims to its rightful position in the first world. While the illegitimate communists had temporarily separated Hungary from the West, Hungarians continued to define themselves as Western given the nation’s longstanding historical ties and varied contributions to Western civilisation. Consequently, following transition, many citizens perceived material culture and conspicuous consumption as normal and rightful by virtue of their Western connotations. This sense of rightfulness alludes to Krisztina Fehérváry’s discourse on the normal in which she states:

‘Normal’ was commonly used to describe services, goods or constructions new to Hungary since 1989, things in keeping with socialist era expectations of life under a capitalist, free market system. New telephone systems, automatic teller machines, 24-hour convenience stores and courteous sales clerks were examples of a ‘normal’ world available to most of the population. These were amenities that Hungarians associated with a certain dignity accorded to bourgeois citizens of the ‘first world’.[28]

Material culture in post-communist Hungary thus served as an expression of personal and collective identity, validating the post-communist citizen’s globalised subjectivities. Like Lali, for whom the Chevrolet Impala served as an affirmation of self-respect and status, many post-communist citizens employed Western consumer items as signifiers of social prestige and personal dignity.

However, while consumers gained access to a profusion of Western products and popular culture became awash with Western imagery, the unforeseen hardship of transition drastically impeded many citizen’s access to these resources of cosmopolitan identity. Hungary had endured long-term recession since the 1980s and by the early 1990s, foreign debt stood at such an extreme level that strict austerity measures were necessary in order to balance Hungary’s budget deficit and attract the foreign investment needed to modernise the economy.[29] Such measures came at the cost of the Hungarian citizens as unemployment figures rose and wages, pensions and social welfare all decreased. Thus, the privatisation that facilitated the influx of Western consumer products into the Hungarian marketplace also resulted in wide-scale financial privation that affected a large portion of the Hungarian population. Indeed, Hungarian-born sociologist Paul Hollander maintains that ten years after the post-communist transition, only ten percent of the population were as well off, thirty percent belonged to the middle strata and the remaining sixty percent lived precariously near the poverty line.[30]  Compare these figures to similar statistics taken from America. In the year 2000, the poverty rate in the United States stood at 11.3 percent[31] whereas 48 percent of Americans classified themselves middle class and 15 percent as upper middle class.[32]

Thus, while consumer advertising engulfed the urban landscape and the latest consumer products filled shops and stores, these items continued to be elusive to those who simply could not afford them. As consumerism became the means through which Hungarians shaped new identities and demonstrated that they indeed belonged to the Western world, poverty created a sense of exclusion. Indeed, as Hungarian journalist, Gusztav Kosztolanyi states,

Hungarian society is becoming increasingly polarised between the haves and the have-nots. The losers are the old, the weak, the disabled and the homeless who are pushed even further into the margins due to their relatively small share of wealth… To be included, you must conform to expectations generated by the advertising agencies. The greatest sin of all is poverty.[33]

Kosztolanyi suggests that the freedoms Western consumer culture had represented during the communist era have since been bastardised by neoliberal agenda. The integration of fully-fledged market capitalism has ultimately produced more losers than winners, operating in the interests of the global elite as opposed to those of the Hungarian people. Indeed, in his critique of neoliberalism, David Harvey suggests that

[t]he freedom of the market… proclaim[ed] as the high point of human aspiration turns out to be nothing more than the convenient means to spread corporate monopoly power and Coca Cola everywhere without constraint. With disproportionate influence over the media and the political process this class (with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News in the lead) has both the incentive and the power to persuade us that we are all better off under a neoliberal regime of freedoms.[34]

Indeed, Glass Tiger encapsulates the neoliberal monopolisation of desire through Lali’s longing to own an American car. I argue, however, that the Chevrolet Impala ultimately functions as an embodiment of the myths of the West, an allegorical representation of many citizen’s expectations of post-communism. As journalist Michael J. Jordan states, following the collapse of communism, “Hungarians were told, and many believed, they’d become like neighboring Austrians—a BMW in every driveway”.[35] Communist-era utopian fantasies fuelled post-communist desires for affluence and prosperity, which were only intensified by the overabundance of Western products on the Hungarian high streets and the omnipresence of consumer advertising. The Impala symbolises such affluence. The prestigious and glamourous Impala, a symbol of Americana, embodies the assumptions that accompanied Hungary’s return to the West, fantasies rooted in Hungary’s communist past and sold by Western consumer advertising. The Impala’s destruction, however, speaks to the realities of post-communism. Just as the car’s destruction denies Lali access to the Impala and the social prestige it represents, the hardships of transition and the unanticipated privation of post-communism left many citizens unfulfilled and with feelings of ambivalence towards the new economic system.

The Glass Tiger Café and the Façade of Westernisation. 

However, it is not only through the destruction of the Impala that Glass Tiger seeks to engage with the myths of the West and the realities of post-communist life. I argue that Glass Tiger explores such myths by emphasising the lingering legacy of communism. The film invites its audience to view neoliberal globalisation as a smokescreen masking the realities of transition with the omnipresence of Western cultural artefacts. Behind these superficial manifestations of Westernisation, one may observe the enduring footprint of communism. The notion of dressing the old in the trinkets of the new is explicit in Lali’s place of work, the Glass Tiger café. The Glass Tiger displays in the stars and stripes of the American flag and sells fast food such as hot dogs and hamburgers. Nevertheless, despite its American frontage, the Glass Tiger cannot disguise its communist heritage.

American fast-food restaurants were quick to establish a foothold in Hungary, a process that had begun prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain. McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Hungary in April 1988, the first of such restaurants to be opened within the Warsaw Pact states.[36] Other American fast food chains followed suit. The second Burger King in Eastern Europe opened in Budapest in 1991 and the region’s first KFC and Pizza Hut opened in Budapest in 1992. Initially, at least, American-style fast food restaurants became sites of elevated cultural prestige. Such restaurants were widely perceived to be symbols of Hungary’s Westernisation, and frequenting fast food restaurants exhibited a certain level of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, as anthropologist André P. Czeglédy suggests, the fast food industry was “considered by many Hungarians to be emblematic of the general success of the West as an idealized economic, political and social panacea”.[37]

However, fast food establishments had been present in Hungary long before the late 1980s. The Kádár government sporadically permitted the development of fast food enterprises. Like the workhouse canteen, these establishments served to free the female sector of the workforce from the burdens of meal preparation and housework, in order to better utilise them in the workplace. Czeglédy describes a typical communist fast food establishment as follows:

These food stands are small-scale, often making use of the semi-permanent facilities cobbled together from a bewildering array of materials. They tend to be sparsely furnished and chaotically decorated. If there is a permanent premises, it is often grubby with use of one or two closely situated countertops on which they may consume their loosely packaged food.[38]

If we examine the Glass Tiger café in light of Czeglédy’s description, comparisons are immediately visible. The Glass Tiger itself is a tow caravan with a filthy counter top, a separate free-standing counter set up a few feet away and a couple of white plastic outdoor dining tables with matching chairs. The inside of the café is equally disordered. The cramped interior is cluttered with the paraphernalia of business and the work surfaces covered with old beer cans and left-over food. Other fixtures are heavily stained with grease and other food-related spillages and the walls are covered with posters of featherweight boxer István “Ko-Ko” Kovács and various topless centrefolds. The signage above the counter is crudely painted and time and neglect have worn the lettering to spell “ÜVEGTI RIS”. Moreover, the exterior sign, situated at the end of the road displaying the café’s logo, consists of an assortment of makeshift neon lights. The cobbled together nature of the logo stands in stark contrast to the clear and coherent nature of the banners and logos utilised by global, multinational companies. While the golden arches of the McDonald’s logo are immediately recognisable, the Glass Tiger’s logo is barely legible.

The café has the American flag painted on one corner of the caravan with the text, ‘US NAVY 625’ written on its frontage. This particular military reference signifies the USS Henry Clay (SSBN-625), a ballistic missile submarine.[39] Here, the film ironically likens the Glass Tiger to a form of watercraft notorious for not being seen, thus hinting at the café’s lack of trade. The painted lettering also demonstrates the, at times, arbitrary use of Western references employed by companies seeking to latch onto the cultural capital of the West during the early years of post-communism.

Czeglédy contends that within the communist fast food industry “the division of labour is invariably a flexible or indistinct one that reflects the lack of hierarchical pretension and division of labour in the premises”.[40] Indeed, working practices at the Glass Tiger are similarly unstructured, actual work is kept to a minimum and often it is not clear who is working and who is patronising. Lali is the proprietor of the Glass Tiger and runs the day-to-day business with the help of his half-witted assistant Sanyi (Lajos Ottó Horváth). However, due to the sporadic nature of business, work is flexible and Lali regularly stands in front of the counter rather than behind it, eating and drinking with his friends. Such is the blurring of labour divisions that in one scene Lali even tells friend Cingár (József Szarvas) to make something for himself.

Lali’s approach to customer service is also deeply engrained in communist mannerisms. Katherine Verdery distinguishes the different emphasis placed on customer service by capitalist and communist enterprises, stating:

In our [capitalist] society, the problem is other sellers, and to outcompete them you have to befriend the buyer. Thus our clerks and shop owners smile and give the customer friendly service because they want business; customers can be grouchy, but it will only make the clerk try harder. In socialism, the locus of competition was elsewhere: your competitor was other buyers, other procurers; and to outcompete them you needed to befriend those higher up who supplied you. Thus in socialism it was not the clerk – the provider, or “seller” – who was friendly (they were usually grouchy) but the procurers, the customers, who sought to ingratiate themselves with smiles, bribes, or favours.[41]

Unquestionably, Lali more closely resembles the latter of Verdery’s archetypes, his attitude defying ‘the customer is always right’ ethos that the Glass Tiger’s Westernised exterior insinuates. Lali gives preferential treatment to friends and family – we see, for example, that Lali has a tab system established for his regular patrons – but is disdainful to other customers. Lali swears at customers, threatens them and generally has little regard for service. Instead, he spends his working hours watching television, drinking with his friends and scratching scratch cards.

Perhaps the most notorious example of Lali’s attitude to customer service is in the scene where he takes a customer’s order for a hamburger. The customer approaches the counter and makes his order, startling Lali as he sleeps. Once roused and on his feet, Lali proceeds to prepare the man’s meal. However, the finicky customer constantly nit-picks, refusing the mushrooms because they are Chinese and claiming his hotdog has too much mustard on it, forcing Lali to prepare his food anew. Lali eventually loses his patience when the customer asks for still water and immediately changes his mind to sparkling. In his frustration, Lali, sarcastically asks “How many bubbles? I have one, five or ten bubbles…the one bubble is expensive as I have to get rid of the rest”. He then proceeds to give the man his hotdog with ketchup, as ordered, but drowns the food in the condiment. The customer asks for the complaint book to which Lali replies: “Go home and get your mother to cook for you, you little shit” and returns to his seated position by the fridge, indifferently chewing his toothpick. As this scene suggests, Lali’s approach to customers resembles that of the communist retailer who, as anthropologist Melissa L. Caldwell states, “wielded considerable power, deciding not only whether to serve a particular customer but also which items to sell and of what quantity”.[42]

Both the set-up and organisation of the Glass Tiger café and Lali’s working practices thus suggest a façade of Westernisation. While the Glass Tiger caravan’s exterior may be American in style, the functioning of the café remains inseparably tied to customs and practices developed under communism. The Glass Tiger café thus serves as an analogical device through which the film comments on the post-communist transition and Hungary’s return to the West. Despite the appearance of successful transition, as is evident in the neoliberal expansion and the Westernisation of the Hungarian high streets, the film encourages audiences to look beyond this veneer of successful integration to see the realities of transition that lie beyond it. Indeed, behind the smokescreen of Western integration one may see the difficulties Hungarians have faced in adapting to the, at times, alien conditions post-communism and the burden of disregarding and rejecting a way of life that for forty years had been perceived as fixed and certain.

Ultimately, while Western transitologists declared Hungary’s transition to be a success, chiefly because of Hungary’s compliant integration of neoliberal market practices, Glass Tiger challenges such assumptions by focusing on issues perhaps more negligible to Western economists and transitologists, those being the effect of transition on the Hungarian people. The film ponders who really profited from the introduction of market capitalism, the Hungarian citizens or the multinational companies that capitalised on Hungary’s virginal marketplace. Through the acquisitive Lali and his unfulfilled desire to own a luxury American vehicle, the film explores the role of consumerism culture in post-communist society and widespread disillusionment produced by capitalism’s failure to generate growth across Hungarian society. Yet, it would be reductive to simply view the film as a response to Western cultural imperialism. One must instead look at neoliberal globalisation and consumer culture within a specific post-communist context. Rather than interpreting the post-communist Hungarian as a passive consumer, the issue is complicated by Hungary’s communist heritage and the role materialism subsequently played in the formation of post-communist identities. Indeed, Glass Tiger engages with Hungary’s own expectations of life in the West, expectations built upon a forty-year myth cemented under communism, a myth that invariably positioned the West as a utopia.

Glass Tiger also uses its rural setting to explore as a means of alluding to those left behind by transition. The film concentrates on a group of characters that continue to hold onto now obsolete sensibilities, sensibilities embedded within the political and social culture of the 1980s. Building on established stereotypes of rural backwardness, the film’s rural setting becomes a device through which Rudolf and Kapitány suggest a disparity between the Hungarian populace and the new global world in which they now find themselves. This discrepancy is visualised in the very location of the Glass Tiger café. The caravan is situated on a rural lay-by, a site located on an undetermined stretch of road between destinations. Rudolf and Kapitány set the film in a non-place to use Marc Augé’s term, a location that serves to highlight Hungary’s continued state of cultural in-betweenness[43]. This sense of ongoing cultural transformation is further emphasised in the Glass Tiger café itself with its American frontage and communist-rooted working practices.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London and New York: Verso, 1995.

Bodnár, Judit. Fin de Millénaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of Urban Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Borneman, John. After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Caldwell, Melissa L. Food and Everyday Life in the Post-Socialist World. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2009.

Coulter, Robin A, Linda L. Price, Lawrence Feick, and Camelia Micu. “The Evolution of Consumer Knowledge and Sources of Information: Hungary in Transition.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 33, no. 4 (2005): 604-619.

Cunningham, John. Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004.

Czeglédy, André P. “Manufacturing the New Consumerism: Fast-Food Restaurants in Postsocialist Hungary.” Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism, edited by Ruth Mandel and Caroline Humphrey, 143-166. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002.

Dalaker, Joseph. “Poverty in the United States: 2000.” U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 2001.

Fehérváry, Krisztina. “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary.” Ethnos 67, no. 3 (2002): 369-400.

Fehérváry, Krisztina. “Innocence Lost: Cinematic Representation of 1960s Consumption for 1990s Hungary.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 24 no. 2 (2006): 54-61.

Gulyas, Agnes. “Tabloid Newspapers in Post-Communist Hungary.” Javnost – The Public 5 no. 3 (1998): 65-77.

Harper, Krista. “Citizens or Consumers? Environmentalism and the Public Sphere in Postsocialist Hungary.” Radical History Review, 74 (1999): 96-111.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Hollander, Paul. “Hungary Ten Years Later.” Society 39 no. 6 (2002): 66-72.

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Kosztolanyi, Gusztav. “The Invisible Majority: Cosmopolitan and the Cruel Reality for Hungary’s Women.” Central European Review 1 no. 14 (1999). Accessed 9 May 2014.      http://www.ce-review.org/99/14/csardas14.html

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Nadkarni, Maya. “But it’s Ours: Nostalgia and the Politics of Authenticity in Post-Socialist Hungary.” Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, 190-214. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010.

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[1] Gabor Kovács, personal communication via email, 21 February 2014.

[2] Enikő Löwensohn, Filmévkönyv 2002: A Magyar Film 2001-ben (Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum, 2002) 226.

[3] Fabien Lemercier, “Glass Tiger 3 Aims for Box Office Heights,” Cineuropa, December 17, 2010, accessed September 3, 2016,  http://cineuropa.org/nw.aspx?t=newsdetail&l=en&did=193524.

[4] Enikő Löwensohn, Filmévkönyv 2007: A Magyar Film 2006-ben (Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum, 2007) 250.

[5] Lumiere: Data Base on Admissions of Films Released in Europe, “Film Information: Üvegtigris 3 (HU) [Original title],” accessed June 13, 2014, http://lumiere.obs.coe.int/web/film_info/?id=35956

[6] Such has been the success of Glass Tiger and its sequels that a replica of the Glass Tiger caravan is now permanently situated in the village of Tinnye, Pest County – the location where the film was shot. The site is a popular tourist attraction where fans regularly take photographs of themselves in front of the famous café and even sign its walls. The replica is owned by the Glass Tiger Hotel and Restaurant (Üvegtigris Panzió és Étterem), the hotel where the cast and crew stayed during production. The hotel fully embraces the film’s success, utilising the film’s logo and promotional material for marketing purposes. The hotel’s dining area is decorated with photographs of the cast and crew during their stay and they even sell Glass Tiger themed merchandise. The Glass Tiger Hotel and Restaurant is not alone in utilising the film for business ends. Indeed, a variety of Hungarian eateries, ranging from kiosk stands to cafés, restaurants, bars and pubs have all adopted the name, Üvegtigris. While certain establishments just share the name and do not necessarily have any connection to the Glass Tiger series, many actively embrace the films by incorporating the logo on signage, menus and advertising. These range from professional reproductions to handmade, painted signs and logos. Many also embrace the eclectic and ramshackle style of the Glass Tiger café, one that has its roots in the traditions of Hungarian fast food.

[7] Between 1949 and 1954, 92.1 percent of industrial investment was devoted to heavy industry (Nigel Swain, Hungary: The Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism [London and New York: Verso, 1992], 79).

[8] The range and accessibility of these products noticeably increased following Hungary’s ascension into the World Bank and IMF in 1982.

[9] Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 161.

[10] John Borneman, After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 18.

[11] Krisztina Fehérváry, “Innocence Lost: Cinematic Representation of 1960s Consumption for 1990s Hungary,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 24, no. 2 (2006), 56.

[12] Henri Vogt, Between Utopia and Disillusionment: A Narrative of the Political Transformation in Eastern Europe, (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), 88.

[13] Anikó Imre, Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2009), 3.

[14] Robin A, Coulter, Linda L. Price, Lawrence Feick, and Camelia Micu, “The Evolution of Consumer Knowledge and Sources of Information: Hungary in Transition,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 33, no. 4 (2005), 617.

[15] Jared Salter, “From Karl Marx to Trademarks,” Brand Channel, 2006, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.brandchannel.com/brand_speak.asp?bs_id=140.

[16] See John Cunningham, Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004), 143-144.

[17] Timothy Havens, Evelyn Bottando, and Matthew S. Thatcher, “Intra-European Media Imperialism: Hungarian Program Imports and the Television Without Frontiers Directive” in Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and Since Socialism, eds. Anikó Imre, Timothy Havens and Katalin Lustyik (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 130.

[18] Havens et al., “Intra-European Media Imperialism,” 132.

[19] Agnes Gulyas, “Tabloid Newspapers in Post-Communist Hungary,” Javnost – The Public 5, no. 3 (1998), 69, 75.

[20] Emily S. Rosenberg, “Consumer Capitalism and the End of the Cold War” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Volume III: Endings, eds. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 489.

[21] Gusztav Kosztolanyi, “The Invisible Majority: Cosmopolitan and the Cruel Reality for Hungary’s Women,” Central European Review 1, no. 14 (1999), accessed May 9, 2014, http://www.ce-review.org/99/14/csardas14.html.

[22] Judit Bodnár, Fin de Millénaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of Urban Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 147.

[23] Krista Harper, “Citizens or Consumers? Environmentalism and the Public Sphere in Postsocialist Hungary,” Radical History Review 74 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999), 104.

[24] PEW Global Attitudes Project, “Two Decades After the Wall’s Fall: End of Communism Cheered but Now with More Reservations,” (2009), accessed January 12, 2015, http://www.pewglobal.org/files/pdf/267.pdf.

[25] For further details on post-communist nostalgia see Fehérváry, “Innocence Lost”, Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko, “The Politics of Nostagia: A Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices,” Ab Imperio 2 (2004, 487-519) and Maya Nadkarni, “But it’s Ours: Nostalgia and the Politics of Authenticity in Post-Socialist Hungary,” Post-Communist Nostalgia, eds. Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, 190-214).

[26] The UAZ-469 is a Russian-manufactured utility vehicle originally used by the armed forces and paramilitary units in the Eastern Bloc.

[27] Tom Krisher, “Chevy Brand is Embedded in American Culture like no Other,” The Spokesman-Review, 2011, accessed 1 March 2014, http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2011/nov/03/chevy-rolls-on/.

[28] Krisztina Fehérváry, “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary,” Ethnos 67, no. 3 (2002), 374.

[29] Hungary’s Gross Foreign Debt stood at $20.6 billion, the largest debt of any of the former Comecon states, in 1989 (Anders Åslund, Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001], 49).

[30] Paul Hollander. “Hungary Ten Years Later,” Society 39, no. 6 (2002), 70.

[31] Joseph Dalaker, “Poverty in the United States: 2000,” U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 2001), 1.

[32] Jeff Jones and Lydia Saad, “Gallup Poll Social Series: Economy and Personal Finance,” Gallup News Service (2015), accessed June 20, 2017, http://www.gallup.com/file/poll/182933/Social_Class_150428%20.pdf.

[33] Gusztav Kosztolanyi, “Consumerism: Shop ‘Til You Drop,” Central European Review 1, no. 8 (1999), accessed June 22, 2012, http://www.ce-review.org/99/8/consume_csardas8.html.

[34] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 38.

[35] Michael J. Jordan, “The Roots of Hate.” World Policy Journal 27, no. 3 (2010).

[36] Now over 100 McDonald’s exist throughout Hungary.

[37] André P. Czeglédy, “Manufacturing the New Consumerism: Fast-Food Restaurants in Postsocialist Hungary,” in Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism, eds. Ruth Mandel and Caroline Humphrey (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002), 159.

[38] Czeglédy, “Manufacturing the New Consumerism,” 146.

[39] Gerarld A. Pollack, USS Henry Clay SSBN-625 Home Page, last modified 2016, accessed March 10, 2014, http://boomer.user-services.com/Welcome.html.

[40] Czeglédy, “Manufacturing the New Consumerism,” 146.

[41] Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1996), 22.

[42] Melissa L. Caldwell, Food and Everyday Life in the Post-Socialist World (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2009), 10.

[43]Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 1995).

Notes on Contributor

Phil Mann recently completed his PhD at the University of St Andrews. His thesis, entitled ‘Challenging Political Mythology: Representations of the Rural in Post-Communist Hungarian Cinema’, explores the ways in which post-communist Hungarian filmmakers utilise the rural as site through which to challenge and critique the multifarious political mythologies that have risen in the ideological wake of communism. Phil’s research interests lie in Hungarian cinema, in particular, the post-communist generation’s continued preoccupation with issues of social and historical concern, and Phil has published articles on Béla Tarr’s A turinió ló/The Turin Horse, György Pálfi’s Hukkle and Bence Fliegauf’s Csak a szél/Just the Wind.

Contact: pm85@st-andrews.ac.uk