Fascinatingly Disturbing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Michael Haneke's Cinema by Alexander D Ornella

Author:Alexander D Ornella [Ornella, Alexander D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-30T09:03:41+00:00

Framing and Re-framing

As in Scream, where characters are watching a classic horror-film on TV, the direct quotes in Maria Braun and Fraulein are framed by an intradiegetic source, in the former a radio, in the latter the screens of cinema and television. While all three films, Maria Braun, Fraulein and Scream, use clearly marked references to and quote formal aspects of other films and media, there is an important difference in the way intertextuality functions in each one of them. Scream, by parodying the rules of the genre while simultaneously following them, evokes a nostalgic feeling for a more innocent past when teenagers could still be scared by a low-budget film. It could be said that it is not simply an innocent mythical past that is created, but a look onto “the good old days” that obviously never existed. None of the reactionary gender roles or the psychosexual implications of the horror-genre are subverted.¹³ On the contrary, the more references are recognized, the more imaginary mastery over the filmic text is gained by the spectator without eliciting a critical distance, causing instead a fetishistic denial of difference. Scream can thus not only spawn Scream II and III (Wes Craven, 1997 and 2000), in which the plot of Scream is now adapted for television, but also the parody of the parody, Scary Movie I (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2000) through IV (2006).

As Julia Kristeva explains in her groundbreaking article “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” parody still results in a “strengthening of the law” because the structures that carry the power-relations not only stay intact, but even appear natural.¹⁴ How, then, can The Marriage of Maria Braun and Fraulein—a German Melodrama, films that deal with some of post-war Germany’s most cherished memories, avoid the ideology of a blockbuster like Scream? Unlike a parody, the true subversive power of a “carnivalesque” text, as Kristeva calls it, stems from the ambivalence of a quote which “gives a new meaning while retaining the meaning it already had.”¹⁵ As was mentioned above, a quote is a deliberate recourse to something pre-existing that is made present and whose actualizing movement disturbs the order of time. A carnivalesque text introduces, or better, inserts, a mode of questioning which is directly addressed to the spectator, opening up a dialogue: What is the relationship of old and new meaning? What happens with the new meaning when it is actualized?

From the first scene on, The Marriage of Maria Braun stresses that this interstitial zone has to be created by the spectator in the uncanny gap between original and quotation. The peculiar way in which the first image of the film is framed and reframed shows Fassbinder’s strategy for opening a dialogue between filmmaker and spectator: What at first looks like an inserted picture of Adolf Hitler in medium-close up turns out to be a painting that has been blown-away in a bombardment. In the space of a second, the seemingly extradiegetic insert is revealed to be intradiegetic. We, as spectators, must deduce that

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