Michelle Langford,
Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter.
Bristol: Intellect Books, 2006.
ISBN 1-84150-138-7
US$40.00 (pb)
215pp
(Review copy supplied by UniReps)

Werner Schroeter is a marginal and itinerant (though prolific) figure in the history of New German Cinema, making fleeting but elusive appearances on the festival circuit, for instance, winning the Golden Bear at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival for Palermo oder Wolfsburg (Switzerland/West Germany 1980) while pursuing parallel careers in theatre and opera. In this overdue, English-language study of Schroeter’s ‘allegorical images’, Michelle Langford describes him as “a straggler’ who ‘seems to work against time” (p. 18). Her task as a critic and film theorist is to develop a conceptual framework which might do justice to the ‘somatic address’ of Schroeter’s films which ‘generate a cacophony of affects’, best described as “a mixture of pathos, pleasure, disgust, pain or laughter” (p. 8). Langford fulfils her task by drawing on Benjamin’s theory of allegory, Deleuze’s concept of the time-image and Brechtian ideas about gesture and tableau. Her project revises a now neglected body of theoretical, critical and politicised writing which, in the 1970s-80s, championed an intellectual cinema of political modernism (exemplified by Godard and Kluge, among others), in opposition to the voyeuristic pleasures of classical narrative or entertainment cinema. The book brings this lost modernist paradigm into a new context, making a significant contribution to the still-emerging field of Deleuzian film thinking. The ambitious achievement of Langford’s book is its revitalisation of interest in a particular kind of film aesthetic and the conceptual work that might illuminate it.

Langford begins with an account of the three main stages of Schroeter’s filmmaking. His earliest experimental 8mm films (1967-8) were dedicated to Maria Callas and established his trademark interest in opera, performance and gesture. His first 16mm feature film, Eika Katappa (West Germany 1969), established his preoccupation with narrative fragments marked by sehnsucht, “an intense longing or desire for something or someone that remains unattainable or intangible” (p. 21). In this second stage, Schroeter established himself not only as a deconstructive disciple of German Romanticism but as an allegorist, “one who shapes new meaning out of existing material” (p. 21). This material is drawn from high art as much as popular culture and is noted for its ambiguity, arising from a mixture of celebration and parody. The third phase of Schroeter’s film career began in 1978 with his first 35mm feature film, Regno di Napoli (Italy/West Germany 1978), a less episodic, more widely distributed, family chronicle set in Naples from 1943-72. After a series of feature films in the 1980s, Schroeter made only two films between 1990-2001, in the form of poetic collages, before makin Deux (France/Germany/Portugal), his third film with Isabelle Huppert, in 2002. After summarising Schoeter’s career, Langford gives ample space to pinpointing his place within the film subsidy system that generated not only the key films and major filmmakers of New German Cinema, but also the well-known contradictions of depending on state funds to produce independent, critical counter-cinemas. Langford concludes that if New German Cinema aimed “to push the boundaries of cinema to its limits” then Schroeter produced a “counter counter-cinema” (p. 43). However, the difficulties that New German Cinema faced in finding audiences outside the arts pages of newspapers, film festivals and the film journal Filmkritik, were exacerbated in the case of Schroeter whose films demanded an intellectual audience and a new kind of public sphere.

Langford’s approach to cinema in general is made clear in an exemplary chapter in which she develops a provisional theory of cinematic allegory. Paying close attention to common ground between Benjamin’s allegorical thinking and Deleuze’s theory of postwar European cinema, Langford identifies the allegorical-image as “a specific kind of time-image” (p. 55). Here, she skilfully weaves together a number of tropes (notably, the fragment and the child) which characterise not only Benjamin and Deleuze’s thinking but also Adorno’s desire for an alternative to the standardised films of the culture industry. For Langford, cinema’s allegorical potential, identified in Benjamin’s famous ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ essay, was not fully realised until the advent of the postwar, new wave cinemas, ranging from Italian neo-realism to post-colonialism. Schroeter, in good company with Ulrike Ottinger and Alexander Kluge, is identified as the most radical of cine-allegorists in New German Cinema. But the shift towards allegorical cinema goes beyond Germany and even Europe, emerging ‘in times of social and political upheaval’ in Iran, Chile, China, Franco’s Spain and Thatcher’s Britain, as well as in queer cinema. Specifying precisely how the allegorical-image constitutes one of the many forms taken by the time-image, Langford aligns Deleuze’s concept of ‘pure affect’ with Benjamin’s well-known cast of melancholic figures. In this light, Deleuze’s seers and Benjamin’s melancholics are similarly afflicted by the inability to act. This affliction defines the time-image cinema in which action is severely impeded. Langford concludes that Deleuze’s ‘crystal-image’ of time has much in common with Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’ of historical time as ‘petrified unrest’ (p. 79)

In the three chapters that follow, Langford conducts a subtle and probing investigation into the non-classical narrativity of Schroeter’s films, excavating the interaction of tableau, montage and gesture in order to make a persuasive case for Schroeter’s status as a radical allegorist. Langford’s express purpose in these chapters is to break with British and US film theory of the 1970s and to distance cinema studies from the more recent dominance of the cultural studies paradigm – which, she suggests, leaves no space in which to write about and theorise the cinematic specificities of “movement, light, colour, gesture, sound and time” (p. 14). Yet to achieve this goal, to re-open this space, Langford goes back to a constellation of texts (Barthes and Kristeva, Brecht and Butoh, Bausch and Kluge) which circulated through a network of film and cultural theory ‘events’ in Sydney (and perhaps elsewhere) in the early 1980s. To witness the exhumation of this network of texts in Langford’s eloquently measured writing (arising from her ‘haptic fascination’ with Schroeter’s films) is to submit to a melancholic experience of past time and its unexpected and unsettling return in this highly reminiscent book. The experience of revisiting these texts (and the cultural moment in which they first formed a constellation, at least for this reader) through Langford’s loving evocation of Schroeter’s films is brought to a fitting conclusion in the final chapter. Here, Langford attempts to move forward from 1970s Brechtian theory, taking as her point of departure the gestural temporality of Schroeter’s 1980 film, La Repetition Generale(West Germany) where the theatricalised body itself becomes “a stratified image of time, time collected in layers of gesture-memories” (p. 185). By excavating the ruined margins of New German Cinema together with the remnants of a marginalised film theory project, Langford herself becomes an allegorist, shattering our settled ideas about both, and yet conserving elements of each for reconsideration in light of the current Deleuzian moment in cinema studies. Langford is an original thinker whose keen scholarly insights restore not only Schroeter’s lost films but a lost moment in film culture.

Felicity Collins,
La Trobe University, Australia.

Created on: Thursday, 17 July 2008