Unsettling Scores by Roger Hillman
Author:Roger Hillman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253028365
Publisher: Indiana University Press
In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978)
In a Year of Thirteen Moons begins with such a low lighting level that it is hard to see exactly what is going on until dawn breaks and pale light picks out the city that is the secret hero of the film. It is a film about passion across conventional sexual boundaries, and its soundtrack opens with the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. So far, this description could apply to Visconti’s Morte a Venezia [Death in Venice, 1971]. In Fassbinder’s film, the story involves the transsexual Erwin/Elvira, who years before has undergone a sex-change operation in Casablanca [!]. This was in response to her bisexual lover, who claimed he might have been able to love Erwin, were Erwin a woman. In the opening sequence Elvira, who had once been Erwin, is beaten up after an abortive sexual encounter with three youths by the river Main in Frankfurt. Fassbinder’s use of Mahler, which as a film opening simply has to evoke Visconti’s film, is supremely ironic; the process of inversion we shall see operating in Lili Marleen indicates bitter disillusionment. Visconti’s film, with the decadent beauty of Venice as its ever present backdrop, told of the love of an elevated artist for a beautiful boy. The Mahler, repeated throughout the film, functioned very much as highbrow mood music. One acerbic critic even claimed, “The Adagietto is used like the thick sludge of string tone composed in imitation of Mahler by the various Central European refugees who worked in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s.”3 Fassbinder signals from the outset that he is constructing his own drastic counterexample to Visconti, in a film that could well have been called Death in Frankfurt. The seedy underbelly of life in the singularly ugly German city—at least as Fassbinder depicts it—breeds the desperate attempt of the main figure to find a love that is anything but Romantic.
In all these cross-references, the quotation of the music in this parallel yet totally different setting raises complex issues. It both evokes the earlier film and strips it bare of all pretence. It shows the reality—the vulnerability of the sexually different—behind the lofty intellectualizations of Thomas Mann and Visconti. It shows the impossibility, in any narrow sense, of reclaiming Austrian music from the “German” symphonic tradition for a German film, when another European director has made it so indelibly his own.
In Visconti the visuals, the narrative theme, and the use of the music all complement each other in the direction of an unfulfillable Romantic longing. The music as used never actually cadences, so the enormous musical tension generated is never released. Fassbinder at the outset seems to duplicate the music, while constructing his own variations on the visuals and theme. But this combination is at odds with the acquired overtones of the music—he shows how it doesn’t have to accompany ravishing images of Venice. In Visconti, the Mahler operates as conventional film music, complementary to the mood, whereas in Fassbinder it functions as
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