Suchergebnisse

Establishing a tonal center -- Music as cultural marker in German film -- History on the soundtrack : the example of Beethoven's Ninth -- A Wagnerian German requiem : Syberberg's Hitler (1977) -- Alexander Kluge's Songs without words : Die Patriotin (1979) -- Fassbinder's compromised request concert : Lili Marleen (1980) -- The great eclecticism of the filmmaker Werner Herzog -- Pivot chords : Austrian music and Visconti's Senso (1954) -- Conclusion : film music and cultural memory

Wolfgang Becker's film Goodbye Lenin (2003) has been popular far beyond Germany. It provokes questions not found in standard debates about film and history. Feature films and documentary representations frequently 'adjust' history, governed by criteria of narrative economy and audience expectations that are quite different from those of historians. A counter-current within the discipline has pleaded for acknowledging the capacity of film to represent different aspects of history, and potentially to explore dimensions which are beyond written history. In Becker's film, an East Berlin mother suffers amnesia at the historical moment of the fall of the Wall, and during the transition process to German unification. Her son's response is to stage-manage a transfigured version of the past, thereby creating a time warp between her consciousness and the post-Wall 'reality' beyond her walls. The historical reflection that emerges relates to history as it might have been, but wasn't: history, in short, in the subjunctive mood. Set in an East German context, the issues raised by this film look very different from contemporary debates about Germany's right/ability to mourn her own dead, the meaning today of Dresden, etc. Approaching history in the subjunctive mood might well open out the discipline of history itself. The film's treatment emerges as not just defensible, but as signally apt for subject matter as surreal as the demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Wolfgang Becker's film Goodbye Lenin (2003) has been popular far beyond Germany. It provokes questions not found in standard debates about film and history. Feature films and documentary representations frequently 'adjust' history, governed by criteria of narrative economy and audience expectations that are quite different from those of historians. A counter-current within the discipline has pleaded for acknowledging the capacity of film to represent different aspects of history, and potentially to explore dimensions which are beyond written history. In Becker's film, an East Berlin mother suffers amnesia at the historical moment of the fall of the Wall, and during the transition process to German unification. Her son's response is to stage-manage a transfigured version of the past, thereby creating a time warp between her consciousness and the post-Wall 'reality' beyond her walls. The historical reflection that emerges relates to history as it might have been, but wasn't: history, in short, in the subjunctive mood. Set in an East German context, the issues raised by this film look very different from contemporary debates about Germany's right/ability to mourn her own dead, the meaning today of Dresden, etc. Approaching history in the subjunctive mood might well open out the discipline of history itself. The film's treatment emerges as not just defensible, but as signally apt for subject matter as surreal as the demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

This article addresses issues of cultural memory arising from the use of classical music on film soundtracks. The phenomenon is considered in three forms: (1) historical layering, as in Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady and Kieslowski's Three Colours: Blue ; (2) memory and nostalgia, especially in Benigni's Life is Beautiful , and in the possibilities available to classical music in European compared with US films; (3) musical memory in a given culture, from It Happened Here (Brownlow/ Mollo) through to various directors of the New German Cinema. The reception histories of the 'Deutschlandlied' and of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are enriched by consideration of their frequent use in West German films of the 1970s, as part of a quest for national identity. Alongside the established critical tool of scopic regimes, the article pleads for attention to acoustic regimes as a neglected aspect of cultural studies.