“I’m obsessed with Germany. For Denmark, it’s a very big neighbor. Germany is a symbol. It is Europe.”1 With this formulation, or perhaps we should call it a confession, director Lars von Trier describes his film Zentropa in terms of an individual and a perceived national relationship to the spaces of Denmark, Germany, and Europe. What is striking about this avowedly personal commentary is how unself-consciously it lays bare the tensions involved in the “European film.” That there are national positions to be taken up can be seen from the response of the French critic who quotes this interview: he takes immediate issue with what he calls von Trier’s “provincial timidity” and points out that Germany is not, after all, coextensive with Europe. At one level, this exchange provides a humorous microcosm of European stereotypes, pitting the Dane, whose independent stance toward Europe belies a fear of German domination, against the French sense of national preeminence. More seriously, though, the series of elisions that structure von Trier’s remark illustrate the difficulty of reading Zentropa in terms of nation. For while Underground described an impossible national space, and while it worked on the difficult connection of that national space to the larger space of Europe, the concept of nation was nonetheless a central point of reference. In Zentropa, by contrast, there is no simple relationship to nation. As von Trier’s words suggest in their uneasy movement from discours to histoire and from Germany through Denmark to Europe, the meanings of national and supranational spaces can become slippery.
Zentropa was released internationally in 1991, a year after the reunification of Germany, and a year before the Maastricht Treaty was signed by the nations of the European Union. At first sight, the film seems distant from these contemporary concerns: its story is set in 1945, and its art-cinematic emphasis on style and form deny any obvious social engagement. The story, moreover, is not overtly about Europe but about Germany specifically. Leopold Kessler is a young German-American who comes to Germany in 1945 in a naïve attempt to help the country rebuild. Through family connections, he gets a civilian job working on the railways, where he meets and falls in love with Katharina Hartmann, the daughter of the owner of the rail company Zentropa. But Kate turns out to be a Nazi sympathizer, a former member of the Werewolf terrorist group, and through her, Leo becomes unwillingly embroiled in a terrorist plot. He ends up trapped on a train he has helped to blow up, and the film ends as he drowns, swallowed by the dangerous space of postwar Germany. However, the murky spaces of Germany in 1945 are not unconnected to the concerns of the “new Europe,” and we can read Zentropa’s historical image in terms of European space. This chapter examines how the film stages European-ness as a textual problem, constructing a relationship between the spectacular and the geopolitical. This relationship, I argue, works to overlay 1945 with 1991 and to map cinematographic space onto or into the psychic space of Europe.
The European Film
As I argued in chapter 3, the coproduction centers an inherent tension between the discourses of national art cinemas and those of international cooperation. Most coproduced films resolve this dilemma both textually and extratextually in much the same way—by associating both the subject of the film and its makers with one country. Usually, this involves an auteur-based claim on nationality, although sometimes it may be the star actor, location, or literary source that bases the film’s claim on a national culture.2 Zentropa, though, makes none of these claims, or at least not with any clarity. Lars von Trier is Danish, but the film is set in Germany and does not pay any obvious attention to Danish national culture. Dialogue is in English and German. The actors are variously Canadian, Swedish, and German, and the producers are just as diverse. In his industrial analysis of the film, Terry Illot characterizes its potential audience as “European art-house” and concludes that “Zentropa is that rare thing, a genuinely European film. Although Danish in origin, the film was made by Swedish, Danish, German, and French partners, filmed in English and German and shot partly in Poland.”3
Leaving aside the popular connotations of the Europudding, this international production history suggests problems of both enunciation and address: Whose stories can a European film tell, and to whom should it speak? An apparently simple answer to the second question is offered by the film’s producers, who claim that “the film was meant to appeal to the European audience: the Scandinavians, the Germans and the French.”4 Here we find precisely the kind of definition of Europe that the film in fact works to problematize, but has become politically and culturally dominant in the years since 1945. Europe in this rhetoric is northern and western Europe, just as, for von Trier, Germany is Europe. The broad notion of a “European audience” telescopes before our eyes. As this ideologically loaded example shows, the location of “Europe” is not simply an economic problem for a film with no clearly defined domestic market. I shall return to the implications of this western view of the continent, but for the moment the slippages we can already trace between Europe and western Europe, and between Germany and Europe, are most important. This telescoping effect—precisely the one by which von Trier is able to come to the conclusion that Germany is Europe—leads us to the second question raised by the film’s internationality: How does it textualize national and international space?
Pierre Sorlin has argued that while there was an upsurge in historical films in Europe in the 1980s, very few of those films treat the history of a country other than their own.5 (And this argument need not be limited to the 1980s, for historical films as a genre have at all periods tended to stick with nationally constituted histories.)6 Thus, for example, French films such as Une affaire de femmes (Chabrol, 1988) and Chocolat deal with French wartime and colonial history, and the Yugoslav partisan films endlessly retread stories of the emergent nation. This logic presents a problem for a “genuinely European film.” The question becomes: Which country’s history should an international film recount? Zentropa does not base its narrative on the Danish history that an auteurist approach would suggest, nor does it construct a transnational European object.7 Instead, in Sorlin’s terms, it takes place in a foreign country and structures its narrative around that country’s specific history. It is a film about a nation, but not a national film. This structure already suggests questions about ownership: Whose history is this? But this historical and geographical location is not merely a foreign one (as far as the coproduced film goes) but is a space as overdetermined in international film history as in European politics: Germany, 1945. Year Zero.
This choice of location immediately complicates any claim on nationality: although postwar occupied Germany is a unique and complex case, its influence refracts across much of the postwar European order. World War II and the battle against Nazism provided the foundation for the many ideological struggles of the second half of the twentieth century, and issues from the defeats of the West European Left to the beginnings of the Cold War and the movement for European union can be traced back to the immediate postwar German question. The fate of Germany’s occupied space formed the nascent order’s most pressing challenge, and the political debate over how to punish the Nazi past was rapidly overtaken by the fresh problem of the country’s de facto partition. The crucial period from 1945 to 1948—which in Italy covers the time from the end of the war to the decisive victory of the Christian Democrats and which in Yugoslavia marks the new nation’s construction and then expulsion from the Cominform—in Germany describes a time of suspension: between Nazism and partition, and between war and Cold War. During this time, Germany was a nation only by default, with no government other than that imposed by the various Allied authorities and an entirely uncertain future. Thus, the narrative space of Zentropa is already not-quite-national. In Zentropa, German space is not legible as national and does not primarily evoke a traditional national history; rather, Germany stands in a metonymic relation to the troubled political and historical spaces of something called “Europe.”
“Go Deeper into Europa”
The first site of metonymy the film creates is a gap between the voice-over and the image—more accurately, the voice-over and the diegesis. Zentropa opens with a lengthy sequence in which a traveling shot moves rapidly along a train track at night, while in voice-over we hear the monotonous countdown of a hypnotist (played by Max von Sydow), instructing an unseen subject that on the count of ten, he will be in “Europa.” Since the next scene depicts Leo’s arrival in Germany, the spectator quickly realizes that Leo is the hypnotized subject and “Europa” is the narrative’s location. But there is an immediate ambiguity here. The hypnotist exhorts Leo to go “deeper into Europa,” and his words do not take Europe merely as object but connote internationality in their form. He speaks English, yet says “Europa,” which is Italian or Spanish, and his voice carries a Scandinavian accent. By contrast, the narrative is not taking place in some vague Europa but in a specific Germany, and the image that matches this voice-over is a concrete one of train tracks. Leo, the addressee, is located in a material place on a route between specifically listed German towns. Further, the relationship between the voice-over and the diegesis in which Leo’s narrative takes place is temporally irresolvable. Since Leo dies at the end of the film, there is no future time in which he could be hypnotized to recall his time in Germany. Thus, the space of the voice-over (in which Leo is in “Europa”) and the space of the diegesis (in which Leo is in “Germany”) are contiguous but irreconcilable. Germany cannot simply signify as part of Europe in a naturalistic manner, and the two terms are brought into a tense proximity.
This example makes clear the cinematic distinction between a national space—which can be represented visually, as in the idea of the national landscape—and the international space of Europe, which cannot be. “Germany” appears to exist at the level of the image (seen in rail yards, houses, fields), but “Europa” is possible only through the disembodied voice. European space is invisible, existing as a political idea but not as a coherent location. While there are engrained histories of representation that underwrite the cinematic conjuration of Italy, of Yugoslavia, or of Germany, there is no image that, on a purely visual level, can claim to transcend those national signifiers to represent the continent directly. Any possible image would in the first place be national, and the connotation of European-ness could be of only a second order.8 Thus, for Zentropa to speak as a European film, it must go through the national but at the same time must unhinge cinematic space from its national connotations and refigure it as European. For Germany to become Europa, German space must be denationalized. And this cinematic imperative to denationalize German space dovetails with the narrative location of the film in zoned and occupied—that is, denationalized—postwar Germany. It is in this brief period of national incoherence that the problem of European space can come into view.
Zentropa tropes the relationship of national to European space insistently, circling the problem of a terrain that is historically precise and yet not visibly marked and in which one element slides into the other, refusing clear and proper boundaries. The clearest textual condensation of this problem is the train, which should be a machine for the rational mapping of space but which instead works to destabilize any coherent narrative space. Thus, while Leo spends a good deal of time traveling across Germany, he mostly remains on the train, never able to enter the space of the country directly. Within the discourse of train travel, the film schematizes German space both visually and aurally: through the list of destinations heard in voice-over while Leo travels, through the rail map of Germany that he stands in front of in an early scene, and through the model train set we see in Max Hartmann’s attic. Indirect representations of German space multiply, but the thing itself becomes more and more attenuated. Just as Leo is a hypnotized subject and not a direct participant, so the figure of the train allows only a mediated relationship to a European landscape that is never actually reached. Like Leopold, the film is never really there.
Zentropa German space is mapped graphically.
Furthermore, the objectivity of the train itself is brought into question. Leo’s uncle, the railway worker, confesses his fear that sometimes the train changes direction and finds itself going backward instead of forward. Leo rejects this fear as irrational and offers a scientific explanation for what he interprets as an optical illusion. However, the climactic scene—following Leo’s defusing of the bomb that he himself had set on the train—appears to prove his uncle right after all. Throughout the time that the bomb has been aboard, there has been a series of cutaways showing both the train and its relationship to the Neuwied bridge. First, we see the bridge in the distance, from Leo’s point of view on the train, and then several shots (not point of view) showing the train approaching and then crossing the bridge. These shots, we can presume, provide a metadiscursive view of where the train really is. But after the train has crossed the bridge and Leo has defused the bomb, and after some intervening sequences dealing with Leo’s examination and Katharina’s arrest, Leo looks out the window and sees, once again, the same bridge approach. Immediately after his realization, there is a cutaway to a long shot of the train, which is, irrationally, once again crossing the same bridge, and from the same direction. Space is repeating itself, and with this objective proof of impossibility, the train blows up, demonstrating a narrative as well as a spatial disjuncture.
Zentropa The model railway repeats German space in miniature.
That an impossible German space should be figured by a train also has a historical precedent. Timothy Garton Ash writes that the concept of Mitteleuropa, a middle Europe rather than an eastern or a western Europe, became an impossibility during the postwar years. Not only did the splitting of Europe into two rigid spheres preclude any cultural sense of middle Europe, but in Germany the term was tainted by associations with its previous use by the Nazis. The word, he writes, lived on “only as a ghostly Mitropa on the dining cars of the Deutsche Reichsbahn.”9 Thus, the concept of a middle Europe existed only on trains, in an impossible space that had no political reality in a Germany split into East and West, but only, in Garton Ash’s apt formulation, a spectral reality in the non-place of the train. In the wake of reunification, he argues that the idea of central Europe began to return as a political and cultural discourse, and it is this ghost, I think, that Zentropa projects onto its postwar trains. Mitropa is, after all, very close to Zentropa, and like the real-life railway’s trace of a lost Mitteleuropa, the film’s trains map a space that does not really exist.
The idea of German space as a void resonates with the trou noir (black hole) that Thierry Jousse finds structural to Zentropa.10 In his article “The Voids of Berlin,” Andreas Huyssen relates a discussion of the post-Wall Berlin architecture debate to what he sees as an entire history of voids. If Berlin in the early 1990s was famous mostly as a non-space, literally centered on a hole in the ground, Huyssen contends that “the notion of Berlin as a void is more than a metaphor, and not just a transitory condition.”11 He traces the twentieth-century history of the concept, citing Ernst Bloch, who in 1935 described Berlin as a place that “functions in the void,” and touching on the architectural voids left by Hitler’s grand projects, as well as by Allied bombings. Thus, he says:
When the wall came down, Berlin added another chapter to its narrative of voids, a chapter that brought back shadows of the past and spooky revenants. For a couple of years, the very center of Berlin, the threshold between the Eastern and Western parts of the city, was a seventeen-acre wasteland that extended from the Brandenburg Gate down to Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz, a wide stretch of dirt, grass, and remnants of pavement under a big sky that seemed even bigger given the absence of a high-rises skyline that is so characteristic of the city.12
For Berlin, as for Germany, the center that formed the border of East and West is the biggest void of all, and it is this uncanny space between places that Zentropa works to bring to light.
The difficulty of seeing such a non-space is voiced textually, where the void of German space resolves into a relationship between nothing to see and too much to see. The claim that there is nothing to see is first made by Leo’s uncle, when Leo tries to look out the window in the dormitory room in which he is staying. Angrily pulling back the curtains, Herr Kessler accuses Leo of waking those workers on night shifts and tells him that there is, in any case, nothing to see from the window. The phrase recurs on the train, where once again Leo is attempting to look out a window. This time, as the train leaves the platform, he pulls aside the blind and sees a mass of people running alongside the departing train, begging for money. Again his uncle pulls down the blind, claiming angrily that there is nothing to see and asking, “Have you no decency? The blinds must be closed, that is the rule.” The visual consequence of this rule is to prevent the train windows from becoming screens to depict the landscape, and so the space of the train appears to be entirely separate from the country around it. As far as the landscape goes, there may or may not be nothing to see, but there is certainly nothing seen.
Zentropa Nothing to see, or too much to see?
The claim of nothing to see is also made by the hypnotist in voice-over. Addressing Leo during his first journey as a sleeping car attendant, he intones, “You have traveled through the German night … you have met the German girl … but as you go on with your job in car 2306 there is little to see.” The image that accompanies this speech is an extreme close-up of Leo’s eyes at the top of the frame, and superimposed at the bottom is the train itself moving across the screen. As the juxtaposition of this voice-over with the image of huge eyes begins to suggest, however, the repeated claim that there is nothing to see implies an anxiety that the reverse might be true. And Leo does see out the train window in one scene, when Katharina opens the blinds to reveal the horrific sight of two hanged terrorists. If the discourse of “nothing to see” speaks of the fear of what might be seen, then this momentary image of dead bodies confirms that the view from the train is, indeed, too much. These dead bodies, like the starving men glimpsed later on the train, exemplify the European history that is too horrific to be seen, where “too much to see” refers explicitly to a politics of representability. But this notion of excessive vision is not just a political metaphor but a function of spectacle, where the tension between what can and what cannot be seen structures the film’s historicity and enables a complex engagement with the image of the German and European past.
Intertextuality, Postwar Film, and the Ruin Image
We can see a key elaboration of this structure in Zentropa’s intertextual references to another group of films set in immediate postwar Germany. In the wake of occupation, a number of films were shot in the ruins of Berlin and Frankfurt, and, like Zentropa, most of them were not German. In films such as Germany Year Zero, A Foreign Affair, and Berlin Express (Tourneur, 1948), the country was imagined not from a national but from an international perspective. These 1940s films—made, respectively, by an Italian and by expatriate Europeans in the United States—provide some of film history’s most iconic images of post–World War II Germany, and yet they are not products of a German national cinema. In them, the nature and status of Germany become not national truths to be represented but the object of visual inquiry. To refer to these films is to invoke this history, in which the image of Germany becomes a projection by others onto a divided and uncertain space. Zentropa repeats this work of projection by dint of its status as another non-German film representing Germany in 1945, but it also textualizes the repetition through visual and narrative reference.
The narrative similarities are plentiful: from Germany Year Zero, Zentropa takes the fraught process of denazification, a question that also figures prominently in Berlin Express. Both films question the process’s efficacy but nonetheless depict somewhat idealistic characters who are determined to make a difference in the new Germany. A Foreign Affair centers on a romance between an American man and a German woman who may or may not have been a Nazi. Like Max Hartmann in Zentropa, Marlene Dietrich’s character, Erika von Schlütow, has the questionnaire designed to assess past Nazi involvement falsified by an American officer. And like von Schlütow, Katharina Hartmann turns out, indeed, to have had a Nazi past. Also quoted is the German postwar film Murderers Among Us, which, along with the foreign films, narrates the problems of national reconstruction in terms of guilt or innocence. Zentropa takes the noirish cast of its investigation from Murderers Among Us, and it cites, almost shot for shot, a scene in a bombed-out cathedral.
Murderers Among Us Christmas Mass takes place in a bombed-out cathedral, with snow falling on the congregation.
Zentropa The scene in the cathedral echoes that in Murderers Among Us, with a reverse shot of Leo entering the ruined church.
The most extensive structure of intertextuality, though, is that between Zentropa and Berlin Express, which, as its title suggests, is also a film about trains.13 Both films feature an American protagonist in Germany, with Lindley, like Leo, something of an innocent caught up in political intrigue beyond his grasp. Both films center on the dangers of terrorism from remaining Nazi sympathizers. Berlin Express contains an assassination plot against a good German on a train, a narrative device that is echoed directly in Zentropa’s sequence of the assassination of Mayor Ravenstein on Leo’s first overnight assignment. Most strikingly, Berlin Express also uses a second-person narration, in which a disembodied voice-over narrates the American protagonist’s actions as they happen on-screen. Thus, as Lindley walks toward the American military headquarters in Frankfurt, the voice-over says: “You approach the entrance to the U.S. Army base.” This unusual narrative strategy comes closest to that of Zentropa in a scene in which Lindley travels on the titular train. He is looking out the train window, uneasily, as the voice-over says: “You’re in his territory now … you’re still not so sure you’ve got the upper hand … then you find yourself rolling over the former enemy border.” The image is a point-of-view shot out the train window at night, showing a forest and a deserted road. The mysterious quality of the German landscape in relation to the known but perhaps still dangerous space of the train is made explicit when the voice-over comments: “Then back comes the doubt … you’re in his territory now. The trees look the same, the sky’s the same, the air doesn’t smell any different.” Like Leo, Lindley experiences German space by means of the train, and both films question what you can tell by looking out the window and whether the space of Germany is, after all, safe for foreigners.
But if Zentropa reminds us of a history in which German space was imagined from an international perspective, it also opens up a temporal and formal gap between the conditions of visual possibility in 1945 and those in 1991. For what makes the films of Jacques Tourneur, Billy Wilder, and Roberto Rossellini historically significant is not merely their timely narratives but their location shooting. These films were shot among the ruins of German cities, and they show an extremity of destruction that was historically unique.14 A Foreign Affair opens with the American contingent flying into Berlin, and the aerial point-of-view shot from the window of their plane makes visually clear the vast extent of the city’s destruction. Entire streets are missing, and most buildings are empty shells with only a few jagged walls left standing. Later in the film, in a shot construction also used in Germany Year Zero, characters walk or drive through the streets in sequences barely motivated by journeys that would classically be elided. In these narratively excessive tracking shots, the characters in the foreground signify less than the rubble that is constantly behind them. Here it is the documentary force of the ruin image—familiar to the contemporary audience from newsreels—that anchors the films’ claim on the real. Although the films variously involve romantic, political, and mystery narratives, their power to represent the stakes of the postwar German problem comes as an effect of the evidentiary quality of their ruined mise-en-scènes.
A Foreign Affair Ruins are emphasized in the background of shots.
Germany Year Zero Ruins are emphasized in sequences of journeys that would classically be elided.
That this concern for the indexical truth of the ruin image is part of the averred work of the films can be seen in the opening credits of A Foreign Affair and Berlin Express, both of which refer explicitly to their location shooting. A Foreign Affair begins with the intertitle, “A large part of this picture was photographed in Berlin.” This assurance does not enable a better understanding of the narrative, which is largely generic and could have easily been shot in a studio; what it does is authenticate the film’s relationship to Berlin’s impossible space. Even more clearly, Berlin Express opens with the credit, “Actual scenes in Frankfurt and Berlin were photographed by authorization of the United States Army of Occupation, the British Army of Occupation, the Soviet Army of Occupation.” The opening shot—as with all these films—is of rubble, and the title ensures that this space is read not as a set but as an index of the film’s spatial and hence political authenticity.
Of course, the image of the German ruin is not confined to these films, and, indeed, within Germany, in what remained of a national film industry, a genre only half-ironically called the Trümmerfilm (ruin film) grew up. In addition to the well-known Murderers Among Us are films like Marriage in the Shadows (Maetzig, 1947) and Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (Braun, 1947), which use established genres such as the family melodrama and the thriller to address the recent past.15 The relation of these films to discourses of indexicality is complex and can by no means be reduced to a univocal realism. For example, Thomas Elsaesser has emphasized the nonnaturalistic generic forebears of the German films, describing them as “halfway between Weimar’s sordid realism and Hollywood’s film noir.”16 And politically, too, these films run the gamut from critical social engagement to flagrant apologism and self-pity. Nonetheless, what binds these disparate films to one another and to the American and Italian ruin films is not reducible to a coincidence of location but pertains to the Benjaminian aura and to the effect of indexicality that we find in certain spatial images.
As I suggested with regard to Underground, two radically different images stood in the moment of 1945 as guarantees of indexicality and, as a consequence, as fetishistic promises of the visible truth of various postwar nations: the beautiful national landscape and the impossible space of the ruin. In regard to Germany, more than anywhere else, the ruin became in 1945 the key signifier of postwar truths. Germany Year Zero demonstrates the extent to which these spatial tropes are intertwined: in this film, the neorealist logic of the Italian national landscape is replaced with German destroyed space, for these images are two sides of the same coin. As Jousse argues, “Through a process asymptotically approaching documentary, [Rossellini] again delineates a quite concrete territory where the question of real space is determinant (especially in Germany Year Zero).”17 The idea of real space, of the materiality of the postwar nation, became central at the historical moment when the future of many European nations was uncertain, and their physical destruction by war rendered visible a cost in human lives that was less easily representable—hence the ability of certain images of national space to produce an emotional effect of indexicality, wherein these cinematic images could offer to stand both within and beyond realism as the punctual truth of the postwar nation.
But there are no true ruin shots in Zentropa, and this absence as much as any of the intertextual references determines the film’s relationship to the time and space of postwar Germany. The only views of wartime destruction in the film are the few establishing shots of the exterior of the Hartmann residence in Frankfurt, a brief exterior shot of a street, and the scene that echoes Murderers Among Us in a bombed-out cathedral. For example, we see Leo and his uncle arrive at the Hartmann house in long shot, with the house taking up most of the background and some rubble on the street in between. Although the rubble clearly connotes ruined buildings, the house in the background is intact and, indeed, somewhat palatial. The cathedral scene also undercuts its ruin status: while there is logically a ruin, for snow is falling inside the church, the establishing shot of the cathedral’s facade does not reveal this destruction, and once inside it is impossible to see the walls. Editing produces the meaning of a ruined cathedral, but there is no individual image of destruction. In none of these scenes is ruination either clear or foregrounded. Aside from these few and inconclusive shots, the film takes place almost entirely indoors: on trains, inside the train station, in offices, and in the Hartmann house. The few exterior shots that exist either are in the countryside or are so tightly framed that no setting can be discerned.
Of course, there could be no actual ruins in a film made in 1990: unlike Underground, Zentropa was not filmed in a new battleground that could stand in, visually, for a historical one. And as a result of this difference, any ruin shots that might exist in Zentropa could not produce the affective shock of those in the 1940s films, for they would code only as set design rather than as momentary flashes of the real. Nonetheless, given the extent to which the film quotes these earlier ruin films, it is striking that the destroyed urban landscape of its German city settings is virtually absent from the mise-en-scène. Zentropa’s omission of ruin shots—and, indeed, its virtual omission of exterior long shots of any kind—is a structuring absence, a void that works against any mobilization of nation, effectively bracketing the mise-en-scène as a spectacle that refuses authenticity, a cinematic space outside the discourse of place.
This de-realization of space separates German space from the discourse of the nation. Without reference to the image that claims to be an index of postwar Germany, the film’s space becomes both nonnational and unreal. But the absence of the ruin image is more than a refusal to represent a concrete national space: it is also a refusal of the ideological implications of the postwar German ruin. For if the Italian films used the indexical landscape image as part of a leftist claim on the new republic, the films set in Germany took the ruin as a liberal, rather than a radical, signifier of political redemption. In the conflation of liberation with ruination, images of rubble became signifiers of a cleansing of Germany, in which the Third Reich was physically swept away and the pain of destruction formed a catharsis for the German people. The ruin spoke as the fresh start made material. Thus, Michel Celemenski can argue that “at degree zero, humanity cannot but find its redemption. This is the principal message of Tourneur, Staudte, and Rossellini.”18 Here, the real landscape has a redemptive power that the narratives of the films, to a greater or lesser degree, can endorse.
But although the idea of the year zero caught on in public discourse, it holds little water as a serious political category. Elsaesser asks pointedly: “Was May 1945 the famous ‘Zero Hour’ and the chance for a new beginning or, rather, already the return of a period of political restoration, the creeping and scarcely clandestine rehabilitation of former Nazis in positions of power: industry at first, then government, administration, the judiciary, press and education?”19 Clearly, he thinks the latter, and this interpretation of the postwar years is the dominant one in contemporary historiography.20 And if the concept of a year zero is problematic, then so, too, is the ruin film, which became its visual correlative. The ruin image proposes a fictional break, which preempts any need to engage with the recent past. It enables the reassuring idea that Nazism is firmly consigned to the past, producing a discourse of new beginnings, at once optimistic and self-indulgent. For any claim on German national subjectivity, it is a sign of guilt and a sign of penance. It implies a new “we”—the we who regret—and this new subject cancels out the old Nazi one, articulating a non-Nazi German subject that precludes any possibility of Nazis remaining in the rubble. Thus the notion of a redemptive year zero can be seen as papering over the recent past.
The humanistic use of the ruin as redemption is put under scrutiny by Elsaesser with regard to the German-made films. Far from enabling a liberal politics of reconstruction, he suspects, the narratives of “middle-of-the-road protagonists, ordinary people, caught up and implicated through cowardice and misguidedness … offered a [German] audience prepared to be contrite the comfort of fatalism and self-pity.”21 While he does credit such films as Murderers Among Us with critical social engagement, he is also suspicious both of that film’s noirish mise-en-scène and of the various attempts at a neorealist engagement with everyday life among the ruins. He argues: “Thus the thriller format made it seem as if Nazism had been a conspiracy perpetrated by a clique of fanatics, lunatics and underworld criminals. The neo-realist mode, however, was always in danger of becoming frankly apologetic, suggesting that moral decency and individual courage had prevailed throughout and that the war when it came was the universal human tragedy it has always been in the popular mind, like a natural disaster such as a flood or a drought.”22 Naturally, these two impulses are not identical, and I do not want to conflate the politics of the postwar German film industry with the texts of Rossellini and Tourneur. But across their variously debated ideological imperatives, these films all share a logic of trauma in which the image of the ruined city promises both access to the real and a more or less overt stake in a liberal definition of that reality. The disruptive trauma of the real, along with the bombing of Germany, is defined as happening before the “now” of the indexical image. By locating the horror of German space in the image of the ruined city, the ruin film places the dislocation of Nazism firmly in the past and offers the need for reconstruction as a visual correlative of the political need to look forward and begin anew.
In omitting the ruin image, then, Zentropa refuses this logic and, with it, the liberal discourse on German identity and postwar history. If the year zero is a lie, the film refuses the contemporary image of that lie and, in so doing, suggests a different articulation of postwar history. The film’s narrative directly thematizes a rejection of year zero optimism, both generally in the idealistic Leo’s failure to help Germany and specifically in the focus on Nazi sympathizers from the Werewolves to the Hartmann family. The logic of the German ruin is one of temporal breaks, wherein the past is fundamentally distinct. It is the time before ruins. The future, equally, is distinguished as the time after ruins, when reconstruction will enable a new beginning predicated on complete change. Although this logic considers loss, basically it works to separate the present from both past and future, presenting Germany in 1945 as a blank slate. By contrast, Zentropa’s refusal to use the ruin image means that it can neither engage a rhetoric of a separate before nor look forward to a different future. Like Underground in this respect, the time that would seem to form a before is actually already in the history it seems to precede. For Germany, as for Yugoslavia, the end of the war is not a simple break. The supposed year zero was a fake, and in 1945 there was both still the legacy of Nazism, which has not disappeared, and already the divisiveness, zoning, and international expedience that would form the basis of the Cold War.
In its intertextual construction, then, Zentropa performs a doubled movement: on the one hand, it refers to the films of the immediate postwar years in Germany, but, on the other, it works to remove those textual elements that function as signs of a material space and time. As a result, place becomes unsettled, with German space being overlaid with the uncanny space of “Europa.” But this troubling of the cinematic year zero discourse is not only spatial but temporal. It is temporal first in that by refusing the year zero concept, the film also refuses to locate Germany in a historical limbo. Instead, time spreads outward, bleeding back into Nazism and forward into the Cold War. But the ideological weight of these references is also historically contingent. To cite the aftermath of World War II takes on new meanings also in the wake of German reunification, when the relationship of Germany to Europe and the history of war and Cold War became once again politically central. It is in this context that Zentropa was released, and it is therefore necessary to read the stakes of its history through the politics of its present. We return once more to the question of 1945 from the perspective of 1991.
The historical moment of Zentropa’s release was much on the minds of its critics: as with Underground, current events conspired to ensure that the film was easily read as topical. Zentropa was released in Europe in 1991, just over a year after the reunification of Germany and less than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And although the film is set entirely in the past, with none of the narrative codas that tie Cinema Paradiso’s and Mediterraneo’s historical situations to the present day, many critics saw the film as a direct commentary on post-Wall Europe. Cahiers du Cinéma read the film as a metaphor, in which postwar fascism and colonization of Europe by America made points about the same forces at work in the 1990s. And Jousse makes the case that “this country in ruins, plunged into a dark night … in a tunnel we can’t see the end of … makes us think irresistibly of Eastern Europe (or Central Europe) today. The same confusion of values, the same sense of nihilism, the same chaos, the same hegemonic force of capitalism.”23
That critical response to Zentropa should have focused on this metaphoric substitution of present for past is not surprising. While Underground makes plain its spatial tropes (the underground tunnel or the broken landscape), Zentropa makes plain a work of historical projection: from postwar to post-Wall. But while most critics saw this projection as a straightforward replacement, I would argue that the two historical spaces must be read together, with this temporal layering producing as much disjuncture as comparison. Just as the space of “Europa” and the space of “Germany” prove irreconcilable in the gap between voice-over and diegesis, so the relationship of past and present is one of proximity rather than substitution. Rather than pursue a metaphoric reading, in which 1945 is a veil covering over the truth of 1991, I suggest a metonymic relation in which the spaces of Germany and Europe, 1945 and 1991, must be seen as contiguous and mutually determining.
For Lars von Trier, Germany is what haunts Europe, exceeding its borders to stand for the continent. In Zentropa, German space can become European space because it is dematerialized and denationalized. Refracted through the lens of 1945 film references, and shorn of the indexical images of the ruined city, “Germany” is conjured not as a national landscape but as a haunting presence for postwar European history. The claim that Zentropa is a film of reunification is correct to the extent that its historical space does imply the unseen space of its contemporary location. The confusing landscapes through which Zentropa’s trains carry Leo are not identical to those of the post-unification nation, but its denationalized space echoes the geography of 1990, in which both Germany and Europe became once again contested concepts. The two spaces are overlaid, without ever touching, like a ghost image on doubly exposed film. In order to map Zentropa’s disjunctive logic of European space and time, we must follow the appearances of this ghost and interrogate just how the film frames European space as horrific.
Dark Continents
Of course, it is not hard to imagine Germany in 1945 as a place of horror. In addition to the vast material destruction documented by the ruin films, postwar German space resonated both with the recent atrocities of the Nazi regime and with the social and political turmoil that came with reconstruction. Widespread displacement and homelessness, a rise in looting and violent crime, and the possibility of violence from Allied soldiers and Nazi terrorists alike produced an atmosphere of, if not horror, certainly uncertainty and menace. And while the zoning of Germany by the Allied occupying forces enabled the construction of new government and social structures, these changes coincided both with the wider shift to a Cold War relationship among the Allies themselves and with the intensely controversial processes of denazification and reeducation of the German populace.24 The remapping of German space that took place as the four zones gradually morphed into two states also entailed a remapping of German national identity, a question that was, after reunification, once more in process.
Zentropa’s narrative deals quite directly with a number of these historical issues, most centrally the problems surrounding the denazification questionnaires. Politics is not relegated to the margins of the narrative, as in the Italian films but, as in Underground, forms a major part of the plot. Max Hartmann’s problem is the tension between his high-level links to the Nazis and the economic desire of the American authorities to see that his rail company remains in business. The questionnaire that Colonel Harris delivers to him becomes a dramatic turning point in the scene in which Max is obliged to agree that he saved a Jew. In this scene, the corruption of the process is precisely the point, as the Jew—who has clearly never met Max before in his life—unhappily performs a charade of recognition in front of the American soldiers who have blackmailed him into appearing. In one shot, a close-up of Max has a background of windows that dissolves into a back projection of the questionnaire itself. The document, whose briefly legible lines deny membership in the Nazi Party or paramilitary organizations, fills the frame in extreme close-up, its disproportion emphasizing its narrative significance. In the following sequence, Max is overwhelmed by his lies and commits suicide.
As with the Italian melodramas, however, the substance of Zentropa’s political engagement is not located in such overt narrative references. Rather, politics is again subject to a work of projection, in which generic codes structure the visual and narrative possibilities of the historical look back. The form of Zentropa’s look back is conditioned by the nature of its dark history: since mourning is not the obvious reaction to the German year zero, then it is clear that melodrama will not be the mode in which the period is reimagined.25 Instead, the film appears to evoke dark genres such as the thriller, film noir, and horror. The space of Germany is shadowy and menacing, and in it lurk Nazi guerrillas called Werewolves, a reminder of primitive fears of supernatural beasts. That Nazism should be represented in terms of such a pre-modern discourse of terror might seem simplistic, but this space is repeatedly located in voice-over as “Europa.” It is not that fascism is primitive but that Europe itself must rethink its claim on civilization.
Zentropa A denazification questionnaire is projected behind Max Hartmann.
In this construction of a horrific and nightmarish space, Zentropa takes up a philosophical rhetoric that reverses claims to European civilization and presents the continent’s history of imperialism and genocide as the true locus of “primitive” barbarism.26 Historian Mark Mazower elaborates this position in his book Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, in which he argues that Europe, not Africa, should be given the epithet “dark continent.” For Mazower, Nazism is not an aberration but the defining ideology of the twentieth century in Europe. Moreover, Mazower sees Nazism’s policy of spatial expansion as primary rather than simply practical: it took the logic of imperialism but transferred its North/South structure into an East/West one in which eastern Europe replaced the primitive colonies. Thus, Nazism brings the imperial dark continent to Europe and, in so doing, inadvertently reveals the true nature of European barbarism. Like Mazower, Zentropa reverses the terms of primitivist discourse, invoking the binary of civilization versus primitivism in order to question the place of Europe in this structure.
Within the field of film theory, the phrase “dark continent” is probably more familiar in the context of its use by Freud to refer to women than in its original, geographic meaning. In her article “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,” Mary Ann Doane points out that “Freud’s use of the term ‘dark continent’ to signify female sexuality is a recurrent theme in feminist theory.” And, she continues, not only do many feminists forget that the phrase is a Victorian one about Africa, but “in its textual travels from the colonialist image of Africa to Freud’s description of female sexuality as enigma to feminist theorists’ critique of psychoanalysis … the phrase has been largely stripped of its historicity.”27 Doane’s article mostly considers the role of the white woman in articulating race and sexuality in American cinema, a topic that might seem distant to the historical questions posed by Zentropa.
And yet both Mazower and feminist theory share a desire to debunk an ideologically problematic attribution of “darkness,” and Mazower’s usage shares with Doane’s rereading of feminist theory a concern for historicity. Freud’s use of the term is metaphoric—the woman is like Africa in her unknowability, her mystery, her need to be mapped by man—whereas Mazower’s dark continent is a literal attempt to rewrite the history of Europe so that it becomes the object of its own description. He is, as it were, returning the gaze. Zentropa also reverses the terms of civilization and primitivism, so that the space of Europe is dark, mysterious, and dangerous. As with Mazower—and, indeed, with Underground’s mobilization of Balkanism—this reinscription of primitivism in relation to European history brings into question the discourse’s structuring assumptions. But in Zentropa, the trope of European space as horrific operates less through a realist representation or narrative engagement with the politics of the war than through a projection of those political questions onto two generic paradigms in which darkness, mystery, and violence are visually and narratively central: film noir and horror.
While Mazower’s use of the dark continent trope is underwritten by a reappropriation of its historicity, he is not concerned with the subject of gender. But film noir and horror frequently center on issues of gender and sexuality and, indeed, have been key areas of analysis for exactly the kinds of feminist psychoanalytic theory with which Doane is engaged. The figures of the femme fatale and the feminized/sexualized monster have been widely theorized by feminists as laying bare the workings of a patriarchal visual economy, and Laura Mulvey’s model of bodily display and narrative investigation corresponds neatly to the colonialist/Freudian metaphor of mapping the mysterious space of Africa/woman. Certainly for Doane, the relevance of Freud’s comparison for feminist film theory is the way it clarifies, inadvertently, the interdependence of notions of the feminine and the primitive, particularly in cinema, where the image of the white woman takes on a crucial role in articulating a racial and gendered ideology of desire.28
The femme fatale, standing for the dangers of femininity yet visually coded in terms of her whiteness (albeit sometimes a pale-skinned, dark-featured type), provides an example of how Doane’s argument complicates previous feminist psychoanalytic theory. But Zentropa forces yet another turn of the screw, explicitly returning the mysterious femme fatale to the history of European expansion and racial politics. Katharina’s uncertain morality derives from her potential connection to Nazism and its policy of, in Mazower’s words, “treating Europeans as Africans.”29 The racial and ethnic politics of Europe in the 1940s underlie, and not only thematically, the mise-en-scène of the 1940s film noir. In Zentropa, the question of genre subtends both a spatial logic (here the dark continent instead of the political landscape) and a gendered one. The discourse of mysterious and primitive space, which encodes an ethnic and geopolitical logic of Europe, cannot be fully exhausted by the spaces of a spectacular mise-en-scène but must be diverted through the body of the woman. Within the intricate layering of these ideological and historical figures, the femme fatale forms a vector through which the logics of primitivism, historicity, and the dangerous space of Europe can be mapped in cinematic terms. By projecting politics onto film noir and horror, Zentropa forms a locus for all these meanings, connecting a critique of the European history of primitivism with a psychoanalytic and cinematic reinscription of the gendered questions of seeing and knowing, desire and memory.
Noir and Fatality
Of course, in analyzing Zentropa in terms of horror and, especially, of film noir, it is necessary to recall that the film is not, really, either. Zentropa must be considered in the context of the contemporary art film rather than as a genre film per se. But it is one of the qualities of the postclassical art film to refer extensively to popular genres: as Amina Danton has argued, while the art cinema of the 1960s often transformed genre conventions, contemporary art films use them directly.30 In addition to the issue of art-cinematic intertextuality, we must consider the generic specificity of film noir. Whereas the Italian films are melodramas, Zentropa is not a film noir but a set of references to noir. Noir, unlike melodrama, is generally thought of as historically and nationally specific. Certainly, there are arguments for various national noirs (for example, in the United Kingdom, France, and Denmark),31 and it has become commonplace to speak of “neo-noirs,” such as The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995) and The Last Seduction (Dahl, 1994). But there is no need to invent terms such as “neo-comedy” and “neo-melodrama,” and we do not have to make arguments for most genres existing in different countries. Noir is by definition American and postwar, and thus for a contemporary film to be considered noir is inevitably a question of reference. Through this doubling, this distance from the genre’s original status, Zentropa invokes the historical and spectacular codes of film noir.
Zentropa’s most evident reference to film noir is its use of black-and-white cinematography. While some of the film is in color, or colorized, it is mostly shot on a shiny black-and-white stock that implies classical cinema in general and film noir in particular. In the opening scene, for example, Leo stands in a railway yard in the rain. Here, the mise-en-scène adds to the black-and-white film to produce a typically noirish effect: low-key lighting emphasizes dark shadows, with areas of bright light where the rain reflects on the bricks. In addition, other aspects of the mise-en-scène refer to noir conventions (or, indeed, clichés). Leo is wearing a raincoat and fedora, smoke is rising from the building, and he stands in a seedy urban milieu. The only dissonant element is the graffiti on the wall that he begins by facing, which gradually becomes legible as written in German. Within the first scene, the mise-en-scène of American films is recapitulated and then shifted into a European context.
Zentropa’s reiteration of film noir conventions is not limited to the mise-en-scène. The politics of postwar Germany also resonates with the noir narrative of mystery, crime, and moral uncertainty. As Janey Place describes it: “The dominant world view expressed in film noir is paranoid, claustrophobic, hopeless, doomed, predetermined by the past, without clear moral or personal identity. Man has been inexplicably uprooted from those values, beliefs and endeavours that offer him meaning and stability, and in the almost exclusively urban landscape of film noir (in pointed contrast to the pastoral, idealised, remembered past) he is struggling for a foothold in a maze of right and wrong.”32 Almost all these paradigmatic noir elements can be found in Zentropa: Leo is the center of a paranoid structure in which he is observed by everyone, from the terrorists to the American colonel and the railway company adjudicators, and the mise-en-scène of the trains is highly claustrophobic. Leo is a hero uprooted from his stable life as a conscientious objector in the United States and thrown into the amoral and dangerous universe of Germany in 1945. And the setting is indeed mostly urban, for the impossibility of landscape returns as a defining feature of Zentropa. The distance of Zentropa’s version of Europe in 1945 from that of the Italian films can be described as the distance from the political landscape to the impossible space or from the 1945 of neorealism to that of film noir.
The relationship of present to past is also, as Place makes clear, one of the key narrative tropes of noir. Pam Cook takes up this discussion in her reading of Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945), in which she argues that noir as a genre works on the historical anxieties of the postwar period. For her (and for much feminist work on the genre), noir expresses both the repression of women and the reestablishment of a failing patriarchy after the war, where “this re-construction work … rests uneasily on this repression, aware of the continual possibility of the eruption into the present of the submerged past.”33 Place’s version of the lost idyllic past—represented, for example, in Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947)—is not taken up directly by Zentropa, where there is no image of a time before the chaos and mystery of the narrative present. Neither does Zentropa’s version of the postwar situation so easily fit Cook’s gendered reading, which is, of course, specific to American films and politics. But the notion of a barely repressed past that might at any moment erupt into the present is uniquely relevant to the notion of postwar Germany as dark continent. The idea of a past crime that haunts the present is quite obviously political in Zentropa’s Germany and only shallowly submerged.
Of course, film noir already has a European past: while the genre is by definition American, its roots in interwar Europe are well known. Its aesthetic forebears include German Expressionism and French poetic realism. Even more important in this context is the mode of transmission of these influences to Hollywood, largely in the shape of European filmmakers (including actors, cinematographers, and other technical crew, as well as directors) who emigrated to the United States to escape from Nazism. Directors such as Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder helped influence American film of the 1940s, and thus we can read film noir, even at an industrial level, as a palimpsest of the history of Nazism. While only a few noir films refer directly to Nazism (for instance, the British noir The Third Man), the bad past is central to the historical evolution of the genre.
But Zentropa includes the investigation of an explicitly wartime past: Leo must discover whether Katharina was a Werewolf, if her father was a Nazi, and what was the history of the Zentropa railway company. The weighty question of what happened in the German past appears at various points in the narrative, most obviously in the scene with the Jew who tells the lie that Max Hartmann saved him. This sequence opens up the past in terms of German guilt or innocence and, of course, implies that the past is being falsified and covered up. Not only is there a bad past in noir, but the present does not always bring truth to light. There is also a sequence of emaciated Jewish prisoners on the train, which forms a brief visual trace of the railway’s past of transportation. (The figure of the Jew appears in Zentropa only in terms of what cannot be seen within the text. Either it is the unrepresented past—where the first Jew narrates a false past to cover over the implied real one, and the Jews on the train appear as hallucinations from a past that the film cannot represent—or it is the extratextual future, for the Jew who exonerates Hartmann is played by Lars von Trier, in a cameo role that reminds the spectator of the present-day origins of the film.) In both cases, the difficulty of excavating the German past underwrites the noir investigation.34
Moreover, Zentropa adds another level of temporality to the noir relationship to the past, for Leo’s experiences in postwar Germany are themselves the subject of a historical excavation. The noir plot is framed by a narrative structure of hypnosis, in which the entire diegesis is supposedly being remembered by Leo as an analysand at some time in the future. The film opens with a shot of railway tracks in the dark, and as the camera penetrates farther into this almost abstracted space, the voice-over intones “you go deeper and deeper and deeper.” Falling into the psychic depth of a hypnotic trance is figured visually as moving forward into space, and this depth of field thematically sets up the dark, mysterious space of Europe as the landscape traversed by the German train. The voice-over continues, “on the count of ten you will be in Europa,” placing European space as the end point of an unknown etiology and suggesting psychoanalysis as the mechanism for investigating the traumatic past. Shifting noir conventions slightly, the voice-over comes not from the protagonist but from his apparently omniscient analyst. Read in these terms, the entire narrative is an attempt to bring the past to light, a psychoanalytic return to the scene of the crime.35
It is telling that the form in which the present exists within the film is so marginal. We never see the present: it is entirely absent from the image track and heard only at the edges of the soundtrack. The hypnotist’s voice is the only trace of the present within the text, and his second-person monologue serves to emphasize the empty or invisible space of the present-day European subject. We can see Leo, the conjuration of hypnotic suggestion, who dies in 1945, but what remains unseen is the subject who looks back. Equally, we can see the Europa of 1945, with its noirish mise-en-scène and its primitive and horrific spaces, but there is no image of the Europe of the present from which this historical space is projected. The horrific nature of this past inheres for the spectator, much as it does for the hypnotized Leo, in the fact that there is no outside to it. The hypnotic voice-over is a framing device, but there is no access to the frame. It exists only to demand a position of knowledge, to locate the spectator as a subject who looks back to the historical moment of the narrative, but it does not allow the present to rescue either spectator or protagonist from the exigencies of the past.
Thus, Zentropa takes up the temporality of noir to figure the impossibility of a certain kind of historical narrative: the past does not necessarily shed light on the present. If the Italian films offer the experience of mourning, and Underground the uncertainty of melancholia, Zentropa textualizes the failure of psychoanalytic mechanisms to excavate the past. As Leo overcathects to the past, he loses the present, dying inside his hypnosis. The narrative of psychoanalysis promises to uncover the root of neurosis, just as the film noir promises to reveal the truth of past crimes. In each case, there must be an originary scene that will, as in Pascal Bonitzer’s theory of the filmic labyrinth,36 explain all that has come before in the narrative and all that comes after temporally. But, like many film noirs, Zentropa provides no primal scene at the center of its labyrinth: all that Leo’s analytic inquiry leads to is death, and the film’s investigative structure disappears into a void. Within the historical narrative, Leo is unable to help Germany or Katharina and is instead killed by the forces competing for Germany’s future. In the framing narrative, there is even less resolution, for Leo’s death inside his hypnosis illogically precludes any return to the narrative present. In either case, the look back is neither nostalgic nor melancholic, but fatal.
And the concept of fatality leads us inexorably to the figure who is, in 1940s films noir, the locus of moral uncertainty and possible past crimes: the femme fatale. Place’s description of “man” as the subject uprooted from his moral values and stability is deliberate, for noir films conventionally center on the tension between a simple, upright male protagonist and a dangerous urban landscape, which is, quite directly, personified in the morally dubious but sexually alluring woman. Katharina is coded as a femme fatale first by her appearance: she dresses in glamorous 1940s fashions and is frequently framed in close-up. In the scene where Leo meets her for the first time in her father’s private train compartment, she is initially seen in a full-color close-up, while the surrounding shots—including a reverse shot of Leo—are in black and white. This emphasis on her image as spectacular goes hand in hand with a conventional noir narrative of ambiguous morality. In the train scene, Katharina explains to Leo the existence of the so-called Werewolves: Nazi guerrillas who are being executed by the Allies. Later in the narrative, Leo has fallen in love with Katharina, and as she undresses, she confesses that she used to be a Werewolf. As she makes this confession, Katharina is framed in a moment of classical to-be-looked-at-ness, lying down and wearing a sheer slip, her hair fanned behind her. The femme fatale as erotic spectacle and as narrative threat are momentarily identical.
Zentropa The femme fatale is framed as an erotic spectacle of bodily display.
Where Zentropa alters, or rather augments, the traditional noir narrative is in the overt and self-conscious emergence of history into this scenario. While film noir has been theorized as a reaction to the politics of postwar America, Zentropa textualizes this process, making the recent history of the continent central to the plot. Thus, the dangerous urban landscape that Katharina personifies is not merely criminal but specifically Nazi. Elizabeth Cowie describes noir in terms of “a masculine scenario, that is, the film noir hero is a man struggling with other men, who suffers alienation and despair, and is lured by fatal and deceptive women.”37 Here, the men with whom Leo struggles are the mysterious forces of Nazism, who do not form an individual threat as much as a constantly unknowable and alienating landscape. Marc Vernet has mapped this relationship spatially, arguing that “the ‘triangle’ has often been pointed out as a principal form of relation among the characters: the young hero desires and conquers a rich woman who is quite often tied to an older man or some other representative of patriarchal authority.”38 In Zentropa, Nazism forms the third point of the triangle, to which Katharina is tied through the figure of her father. As the owner of the Nazi-era rail company Zentropa, as well as Leo’s father-in-law, Max Hartmann represents patriarchal authority as inescapably linked to the Nazi past.
According to Doane, the femme fatale represents, above all, a problem of knowledge: “She harbors a threat which is not entirely legible.”39 And it is this mystery that the film noir narrative works to uncover. Her illegibility goes hand in hand with her spectacularity, so the question of knowledge is tied to vision. Excessively visible and yet narratively ambiguous, the femme fatale disturbs the relationship between what can be seen and what can be known. Katharina centers the question of what we can see of Nazism: the spectator cannot be sure if she is still a Were-wolf, and the narrative works to close up this disjuncture between sight and knowledge. But this problem of knowledge—that we cannot tell who is guilty just by looking—not only is the case with regard to Katharina but describes the key problematic of Zentropa’s postwar German landscape. The space of Zentropa’s narrative is determined by this “epistemological trauma,” where, as in Berlin Express, Leo’s point of view is based on doubt about the status of the landscape around him. (“Then back comes the doubt … you’re in his territory now. The trees look the same, the sky’s the same, the air doesn’t smell any different.”) This is where the femme fatale focuses the political logic of the dark continent, defining European space as that which is dangerous, uncertain, and, most of all, duplicitous.
Werewolves, Cats, and Women
“Duplicity” is a defining term of the femme fatale, but Katharina’s duplicity is not limited to this generic figure. The narrative source of her guilt is her membership in a Nazi terrorist group, the Werewolves, and the idea of the werewolf also connects Zentropa to the horror genre. The doubled body of the werewolf is another figure of duplicity, seemingly human by day, but transforming into a monstrous creature by night. Of course, Katharina is not literally a werewolf, unlike the protagonists of classical “monster films” such as The Wolf Man (Waggner, 1941), supernatural beings who morph from human to wolf. Her change is not physical but ideological, from the “good German” during the day to the Nazi terrorist by night. This day/night logic is underscored when Katharina tells Leo how she worked with her father by day and then at night wrote the threatening letters that he received from the Werewolves. But the generic conventions of the werewolf (and of the hybrid human-animal in general) nonetheless underpin Zentropa’s construction of the dark continent and the discursive place of the woman within it.40
The first characteristic of the werewolf, as of the femme fatale, is a question of visibility. Because he or she seems human during the day, we cannot be sure who is a werewolf. In a generic horror film, this uncertainty becomes the site of suspense—either about the existence of a monster or about the time and place it might strike.41 In Bonitzer’s terms, the werewolf exists in blind space: the off-screen space that produces suspense. The monster, like the femme fatale, is a spectacular object, but its spectacularity depends on its being invisible for most of the horror film. In Zentropa, the invisibility of the monster is figured in terms of the thriller narrative, where the terrorist Werewolves operate clandestinely and are rarely seen. Moreover, when they are seen, they are hard to see as werewolves, for their bodily duplicity means they look just like everyone else. Thus, on two occasions, werewolves are labeled in writing to ensure visibility. The first example comes when Kate raises the blind and looks out the train window, only to see the bodies of two hanged men, with signs around their necks reading “werewolf” in German and Russian. Here, the writing serves narratively as a sign of guilt, but it also initiates a structure whereby the werewolf’s body is deceptive and must be made to speak visually.
This structure repeats later in a train sequence, when Leo is sitting alone in the train corridor. He is in the lower-left-hand corner of the frame, and projected behind him is the word Werwolf in disproportionately large letters. At this point, the image works mainly to reinforce the idea of the werewolf being visible only through the written word, where the identities of the terrorists are mysterious and their plans unknown. Much later in the film, however, Leo is once again on the same train, on his honeymoon with Katharina. Again, he sits alone and is framed in the corner of the screen, and once more a giant image is projected behind him, representing his thoughts and anxieties. This time, the image is of Katharina’s face. The effect is unusual, and its repetition inevitably recalls its previous use, so that Leo’s projected image of Katharina is itself superimposed, for the spectator, onto the earlier image of the word Werwolf. This doubt about Katharina’s status follows the moral ambiguity of the femme fatale: while she is repeatedly connected to the Werewolves—in mise-en-scène, as here, and in narrative—she is never seen to be one, and the spectator can therefore never be entirely sure of her guilt.
The second defining term of the werewolf proceeds also from its doubled body: the binary of day and night, human and animal, entails a logic of civilization and the primitive. In the horror film, it is frequently a modern, scientific milieu that is threatened by the supernatural, inexplicable, and animalistic. And the werewolf, with its human and animal elements, is able to trope a specifically modern fear of the primitive lurking within civilization. Thus, Walter Benjamin, writing about Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” describes the story as “the case in which the flâneur completely distances himself from the type of the philosophical promenader, and takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness.”42 Here, the werewolf represents the frightening aspect of modern life, which includes the possibility of evil existing within the city crowd, precisely because the city is also a wilderness. Modern space is also primitive space in the werewolf metaphor: the modern man may also be a beast, and the problem is that you cannot see the difference. Thus, by presenting postwar Germany in terms of hidden werewolves, Zentropa works on both the overt iconography of the horror genre and its historical underpinnings. Europe becomes a primitive place where beneath the veneer of civilization lies the dark continent.
There is one notable difference between Katharina and the conventional horror film werewolf, however, and that difference is gender. As a femme fatale, Katharina is structured as a gendered spectacle, but the werewolf figure in most horror films is male and rarely seen as a site of sexual threat. The threat of the werewolf is primitive violence, but the primitivism is that of excessive masculinity, viewed as unrefined by the morality of civilized society. The beastliness of the werewolf contrasts in this respect with the feminization of many other horror film monsters, such as the vampire and the alien. However, Zentropa’s shape-shifting femme fatale does have a cinematic predecessor: the protagonist of Cat People (Tourneur, 1942), who may turn into a more conventionally feminine feline monster. Cat People, I think, functions as another art-cinematic intertext for Zentropa,43 but, more important, its interconnection of the femme fatale and the monster subtends a discourse of primitivism that enables a clearer analysis of exactly how these generic figures produce, in Zentropa, a somewhat different historical and spatial system.
Cat People ties monstrosity quite explicitly to both female sexuality and a dark European history. Irena is a Serbian woman who believes that is she is under an ancient village curse, whereby she will turn into a panther if she is sexually aroused and attack her partner. Her all-American husband rejects this belief as mere superstition, but he is finally attacked by Irena, who kills herself in remorse. The film has been analyzed frequently, mainly in terms of its sexual logics (although not always from a feminist or psychoanalytic perspective), with Irena’s excessive and animalistic sexuality forming the central term of debate.44 Doane’s reading ties a feminist reading to a historical one, pointing out that “this opposition [between rational and irrational, science and poetry] is mapped onto what in 1942 was necessarily another heavily loaded opposition—that between the native and the foreign, the ‘good old Americano’ and the Serbian, the familiar (Alice) and the strange (Irena).”45
This nexus of terms is part of a wider analysis, and Doane’s interest in Irena’s national identity is only that “Serbian” connotes a general sense of sinister exoticism. In the context of my argument, though, it becomes telling that, in World War II, Serbia was on the American side and not, therefore, an obvious historical choice for demonization.46 A wartime suspicion of the foreign undoubtedly plays a role in the narrative’s general opposition of American to exotic, but the specificity of Irena’s Serb background returns to a familiar structure. Serbia, as I argued in the previous chapter, signifies as primitive and exotic within the twentieth-century Western discourse of Balkanism, the same logic of abjection that Underground works on. And so Cat People, too, places its fatal woman within the logic of the dark continent. None of the readings of the film take up this ideological structure of primitivism, other than implicitly in the chain of associations—woman/irrational/primitive/sexual—that operates in the various feminist analyses. As with the trope of the dark continent in feminist theory, the primitive and exotic space is a secondary marker of the strangeness of female sexuality. That Irena is Serbian functions analytically as a symptom of her excessive sexuality, even though narratively it is presented as a cause.47
Cat People Framing, costume, and mise-en-scène associate Irena with the animalistic, the dark, and the exotic.
But in Zentropa, the elements of this structure are reversed, and the sexuality of the monster/femme fatale is no longer primary but symptomatic of the primitive nature of postwar European space. The political duplicity of 1940s Europe, which is unable to be expressed fully in the historical narrative, recurs in the mise-en-scène of film noir and horror, and, as with the Italian melodramas, the body of the woman is the site of this projection. Katharina, like Irena, is figured as both femme fatale and monster, although her duplicity does not imply an excess of female sexuality; rather, like that of the romantic objects in Il Postino and Mediterraneo, her duplicity operates as a fetish, standing in for what cannot be seen. And what cannot be seen, in Zentropa, is the impossible space of the continent: the barely submerged history papered over with a discourse of civilization and a western definition of “Europe.” As politics is displaced onto romance in the Italian films, here it is displaced onto the amour fou of the fatal woman, which stands in not for the optimism of the young nation but for the seduction of the dark continent.
Gender is the discursive space in which this historical logic becomes visible. The figure of the dark and mysterious woman is a placeholder for political and historical traumas that are textually unspeakable. And this is exactly Doane’s argument about the cinematic dark continent, where the white woman figures the unspeakable difference of race. In Cat People, we have the Serbian woman, in whom Balkanism returns in a gendered economy in which primitivism and darkness operate not in the usual Balkanist discourse of masculinity and savagery, but hitched to the Hollywood visual economy of excessive female sexuality and the visible/invisible monster of the horror film. These disparate versions of otherness have a cinematic history of interconnection: the foreign, the un-European, the feminine, the primitive, the sexual, the thing that you cannot quite see or cannot quite know, the epistemological problem of the femme fatale. What changes in Zentropa is that Katharina is not locatable as un-European. She is German and, in terms of the film’s geographic slippage, stands as an exemplar of Europe as a whole. Germany in 1945 is, for Zentropa, the center of and not the exception to the continent’s dark history. Thus, the space of excessive femininity and geographic abjection moves west and north, becomes “whiter.” In Underground, the space of Yugoslavia is abjected, precisely unable to be located within Europe. In Zentropa, the excessive part is not only in Europe but also at its center. It is too European. And in locating an excess not within Europe but of Europe, the film begins to reimagine the continent’s visual geographies.
This shift in the structure of abjection is bound up with the discourse of the werewolf figure itself, which, as a signifier of that which is primitive in European space, has its own geopolitical history. While the werewolf is an enduring character in the horror film, the genre borrows from a specifically European mythology. Folklorist Adam Douglas traces the idea of the werewolf as both ancient and overwhelmingly European, and he describes the frequent occurrence of the figure in Scandinavia, Denmark, and Germany. And if the werewolf has symbolized the dangerous and the pre-modern throughout northern Europe, it has also been overlaid in Germany with more political meanings. In the seventeenth century, a guerrilla group called itself Wehrwolf (a pun on the words “werewolf” and “war”), and in the 1920s, a book about the group proved immensely popular with the nascent German nationalist movement, selling almost as many copies as Mein Kampf. A paramilitary group sprang up at around this time, calling itself Operation Werwolf, and it, in turn, influenced the Nazi group depicted in Zentropa, so that by the mid-twentieth century the werewolf had become a political figure, connected to ideologies of land and nationalism.48
According to Douglas, “The Nazis recognised the value of the group spirit engendered by these hunting societies: in the 1920s a secret right-wing terrorist group in Germany called ‘Operation Werwolf’ prosecuted political murders …. Goebbels revived the organization in the last days of the Second World War as an underground resistance movement, and Himmler gave a peptalk urging them to harass Allied lines of communication ‘like werewolves.’”49 Like the political landscape, the idea of the terrorist werewolf proves to have been given its contemporary meaning by a Nazi. Opinion has been divided among historians as to the extent to which these Werewolves really existed, but Perry Biddescombe argues the case in favor:
A careful examination of surviving evidence shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there was in 1944–5 a string of guerrilla attacks aimed at both the enemy powers and the German “collaborators” who worked with the occupiers in maintaining civil government. The number of such incidents probably peaked in the spring of 1945, when bridges were destroyed by saboteurs, Allied and Soviet soldiers murdered and their vehicles ambushed, public buildings mined or bombed, and underground leaflets widely used to threaten domestic opponents of the defeated Nazi regime.50
Moreover, the political logic of the Nazi werewolf did not end in 1945 but returned to haunt the new Europe of the 1990s. In Russia, a neo-Nazi group calling itself the Werewolf Legion perpetrated various terrorist attacks throughout the decade and claimed to be opposed to “Jews, Communists and democrats.”51 The 1990s haunt the image of the 1940s, and Zentropa’s political Werewolf conjures both histories.
Bloodsuckers
The terroristic adoptions of the werewolf name are not the whole story, for horror has a cultural history in which the werewolf, along with other European monsters, developed along geopolitical and ethnic lines. In horror, the monster is frequently abjected in bodily terms, disturbing the boundaries of human and inhuman. In addition to the cat woman and wolf man, there is the category of the undead—the zombie, vampire, or mummy—which offers perhaps the best-known type of monstrous abjection. As with the work on Cat People, these monsters have been theorized in feminist terms, by which the abject is connected to the feminine.52 But, as Cat People demonstrates, there is also a geographic component to this logic, in which monsters such as the werewolf and the vampire have been coded in modern texts as ethnic outsiders, who come from distant countries and whose unhuman nature derives from their primitive origins, which disturb the boundaries of European-ness.53
To clarify the stakes of this generic history for Zentropa, it may be productive to compare it with another west European art film that rewrites the ideological history of a horror figure and also does so in relation to Nazism. Dr. Petiot (de Chalonge, 1990) is set during and after World War II in Paris and is loosely based on the true story of a wartime serial killer who murdered Jews. In the film, Petiot is a doctor who poses as a Resistance agent in order to acquire his victims. He seeks out east European Jews hidden in France, and, by promising to smuggle them to South America, he persuades them to come in secret to his house, where he kills and incinerates them. Like Zentropa, the film is predominantly an art film but also draws on the conventions of both the thriller and the horror film. The serial killer plot offers a crime narrative, in which the Nazi occupation allows Petiot free rein for his killing, and he is threatened with capture only after the liberation of Paris. While the crime narrative follows a more realist historical structure, however, Petiot is also a horror film in which the doctor is constructed visually and ideologically through the generic codes of the vampire.
The film connects the figure of the vampire to the politics of ethnicity in its opening sequence, in which Petiot watches a film program that begins with a newsreel. After a bland story about a Parisian bike race, the newsreel turns to an anti-Semitic story on “how to tell a Jew from a Frenchman.” This propagandistic sequence establishes that the film takes place under Nazi occupation, but it also prefigures two central questions: the meaning of the opposition between Jew and Frenchman (foreigner and European), and the question of what you can see by looking. After the newsreel, the feature begins, a horror film called Hangman’s Castle, about a Nosferatu-like vampire. At this point, Dr. Petiot stands up, and his shadow falls onto the screen, where it coexists in an uneasy two-shot with the image of the vampire. He then steps through the screen and reappears in the black-and-white diegesis of the vampire movie. He exits the castle, but what is found outside is not a generic horror landscape but a Parisian arcade and the doctor’s own office. A shift back at the end of the sequence from black and white to color implies a return to the real world of Paris, but Petiot’s seamless transition from vampire’s castle to arcade implies that the whole film takes place in the fictional space of the movie, in a diegesis that includes vampires.
The connection of Dr. Petiot with the figure of the vampire continues visually. As he cycles to see his patients, he wears a black cloak that billows behind him in a style reminiscent of horror films. His skin is excessively white in a manner that suggests the undead and references a history of screen Draculas. And as he travels to see his patients at night, Petiot is frequently shot in dark streets and tunnels, where smoke, fog, and shadows imply a horror setting. Aurally, too, Petiot is connected to the vampire seen in the film within the film. In a scene in which he is arranging with a Jewish couple their “journey” to Argentina, the sound effect of sharpening knifes, last heard during the horror film, recurs on the soundtrack. And, of course, this effect points to the root of the film’s narrative conflation of Petiot with Dracula: like Dracula, he is a charming and powerful figure who preys on those he can entice into his home, consuming them in ritual fashion.
Dr. Petiot Petiot looks like a vampire bat in a shadowy nighttime Paris.
But there is more at stake here ideologically than the horrific nature of the serial killer or a metaphoric comparison of vampire with Nazi.54 In locating Petiot as a French vampire and his victims as east European Jews, Dr. Petiot opens up a critique, both of the generic history of the vampire figure and of the historical location of that figure in relation to the politics of ethnicity in twentieth-century Europe. If the European monster exists as a dark and primitive contrast to white European civilization, then nowhere is this more evident than in Petiot’s primary intertext, Dracula. The vampire was, of course, not invented in Bram Stoker’s novel, and like the werewolf it has a long history in various European countries. However, it is in the novel that the modern cultural discourse of the vampire was codified, a structure that has been more or less repeated in the many filmed versions. In the novel, Dracula is ethnicized first of all as Slovakian. There is a strong discourse of Balkanism in the descriptions of Transylvania as primitive and full of feudal peasants, guttural speech, and pre-modern superstitions. However, Count Dracula is also described in terms that were, in the nineteenth century, typically coded as Jewish. Thus, “his face was a strong—a very strong—aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily around the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion.”55 The count’s Semitic features, like his east European origin, prove symptomatic of his bodily monstrosity. He looks human but is actually unhuman.
This logic of corporeal uncertainty, in which ethnicity can only be hinted at and the count’s body is rendered abject while appearing human, rewrites an already existing ethnic discourse in terms of the horror genre. The European outsider, an abject figure who is part of Europe but yet not really part of it, is a central discourse in European anti-Semitism, which focuses on the uncanny quality of the Jew. Unlike a more clearly defined racial category, the Jew has been perceived as slippery: he or she does not provide a spatial boundary but appears within “civilization.” And the Jew is not necessarily visibly distinctive; the obsession of the Nazis with mapping Semitic features or heritage resulted from the impossibility of recognizing Jewishness visually. (Hence the prominence in Dr. Petiot of the newsreel story on how to tell the difference between a Jew and a Frenchman. Such films have a historical basis in Nazi propaganda and are often cited in films about the Holocaust.) Thus, the Jew provides the central template in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the monster who looks like everyone else but may underneath be sinister and foreign. And this is not only a question of cultural or literary history, for the same social forces that enabled the Jew to turn into the vampire also produced the extremist ethnic ideologies and Western policies on “Europe” that led to the rise of Nazism.
So for Petiot, the connection of the vampire and the Nazi is not only metaphoric but historical. However, the film reverses the ethnic and geographic structure of Dracula, so the vampire is west European—Parisian, no less—and the innocent victims are east European Jews. While Dracula works to abject the Eastern and the less-than-European, Petiot makes explicit the historical stakes of this structure and renders excessive and horrifying a figure of the West. And a comparable strategy is in play in Zentropa, where the figure of the werewolf undergoes a reversal from primitivism to “civilization” and from abject outsider to the position from which such abjection takes place: while Petiot’s vampire is narratively aligned with the Nazis, Zentropa’s werewolves literally are Nazis.56 In both films, the center of Europe (according to the Western discourse of postwar European civilization) becomes the origin of horrific monsters, and in both this horror returns explicitly to its origins in the ethnic politics of European space.
But Zentropa produces a more complex and, indeed, contradictory logic than Dr. Petiot, where the figure of the werewolf, unlike that of the vampire, comes doubly politicized by the various nationalist groups in Germany. Thus, what is in Petiot a neat reversal of white European and Jew, monster and victim, becomes in Zentropa a messier narrative, less susceptible to allegorical resolution. In part, this difference arises because the werewolf is a less obviously ethnicized figure than the vampire and can, as the existence of the Nazi Werewolves demonstrates, be construed more easily in positive terms than can the vampire. But more important than these factors is the question of historicity, for while Petiot’s narrative remains bounded by the war and by its symbolism of the Holocaust, Zentropa demands that the postwar past be read in relation to the present.
The film insists on the pastness of the narrative, and from Leo’s hypnosis to the intertextuality of the film noir style, it frames the image of postwar Europe in terms of the look back. The reversed abjection, in which Europe and not its others must be seen as monstrous and primitive, is also implicated in this temporal structure. The horrific image of 1945 is haunted not only by its immediate past but also by its close future, in which the fifty-year splitting of Europe reiterated the logic of abjection. The East again became the site of difference, and in the West the ideological production of “European-ness” in the postwar years relied implicitly on abjecting discourses of civilization, Western-ness, and whiteness. In the context of German reunification, from which point Zentropa looks back, these logics began to take on new forms. For this reason, in the new Europe, neo-Nazi Werewolves recur in the former East, and fears of contamination in the European Union led to the politics of “fortress Europe.” For Zentropa, the postwar doubles back fatally on the post-Wall.
Surimpression
I have been arguing that Zentropa’s version of 1945 is textured by many levels of historicity: the contemporaneous history of genres, the past of war and of ethnic discourse, and the future of East and West, splitting and unification. But this density of reference, in which the film’s Germany comes to center Europe and its troubled history, does not produce narrative space as a locus of historical origin, nor does it render the relationship of present to past fully legible. In all these instances, historical truth is defined as that which is hard to see. I would like to turn, now, to this question of vision and to think about history in relation to the cinematic image. For Zentropa, the relationship of past to present is figured primarily as a problem of vision: How do you see 1945 from the point of view of 1991? If 1945 in Germany is not a year zero, not a point of origin, but rather an in-between moment, fatally compromised by both its past and its future, then there can be no single image that could stand, indexically, as the truth of postwar Europe. Thus, Zentropa forces a radical engagement with the continent’s impossible space, and it does so both narratively and visually. The problem of geopolitical space becomes a problem of cinematic space.
What is most striking in Zentropa’s art-cinematic form is its layering of discrete images, where a technologically sophisticated form of matte effect combines several superimposed and/or back-projected images in a single frame. This layering takes place in almost every shot in the film, combining color film with black and white, 16 mm with 35 mm, and wide angle with telephoto lenses. Thus, the foreground image usually has a different quality from the background; for example, in a scene by the river, Kate is in color, while the river behind her is filmed in black and white and shot at an entirely different angle from the straight-on image of Kate. Furthermore, image layers are frequently manipulated: in addition to the difference between black-and-white and color film, there is colorization, where part of the image may be sepia toned or highlighted in red. (The shot of the train’s communication cord is an example.) The layers are also frequently projections, the quality of the back-projected image made visible by the flickering and degradation of the film. And it is not only a question of foreground versus background: von Trier describes adding up to seven layers of images, each shot with a different lens and different kind of film.57
The material differences among these layers preclude the production of a single, stable diegesis, and, instead, there is a proliferation of narrative spaces. Most obviously, there is a visible gap between foreground and background where color, film stock, and perspective do not match. All of the film’s exteriors were shot without actors, so in these scenes there is always this disjuncture in which the characters and their locations never share the same actual space. Even within the shot/reverse shot structure, layering prevents the construction of a seamless space. In the sequence of Ravenstein’s assassination, for example, there is a shot through a train compartment window, from behind the victim’s shoulder, showing a medium frontal angle of the boy shooting at him. The image is monochrome, but the compartment window is a color layer that becomes visible as blood spatters against it. We cut to a reverse angle shot, from over the boy’s shoulder. Here he is in color, but Ravenstein is now a back-projected black-and-white image, in extreme close-up and disproportionately large. While the shot structure implies a coherent narrative space, the layers of the image work against it. These multiplied narrative spaces, which are readable in relation to one another but remain apart, provide a visual correlative of the voice-over, which stands in proximity to, but is never part of, the diegesis. It, too, implies another space, one that is related to that of Germany in 1945, but is never fully integrated into it. Like the voice-over, the image layers produce a non-space that is narratively meaningful and yet unlocatable, refusing to cohere into a singular form.
Zentropa The boy in the foreground is in color, while the assassination victim in the background layer is back projected in black and white.
The proliferation of spaces finds its obverse in moments of transition between sequences, which often work to conflate spaces that are not, according to the narrative, the same. For example, the scene in which Kate and Leo stand by a riverbank ends with a two-shot of the couple, with the river projected in the background. Rather than cutting to the next scene, the two-shot remains and the background image dissolves from water to another back projection, that of a minister conducting a marriage ceremony. Leo and Kate appear not to have moved, but the new scene takes place in a different space, that of the church. Thus, transitions become graphic, and superimposition becomes a form of editing. Here, the classical logic of space is undermined not only by too many spaces but by too few, where the same image apparently represents two different spaces.
In Figures de l’absence, Vernet analyzes superimposition in both historical and semiotic terms, honing in on the specificity of its formal effects.58 He distinguishes between two forms of surimpression: one corresponding to the English word “superimposition,” and the other to back projection. In superimposition, he argues, there is a disproportion between the two elements in the frame, which works against the production of a coherent diegetic space. This effect could be disruptive but is usually classically contained—for example, in a psychological superimposition, where one of the images represents the thoughts of the character seen in the other image. There are examples of this form of classical superimposition in Zentropa, such as the scene discussed earlier in which Leo sits in the train corridor, worrying about Katharina. There, the background dissolves into the word Werwolf, which is precisely what Leo is thinking about at that moment. Or, to take another of Vernet’s examples of classical containment, there is the slow dissolve, in which two images are briefly visible simultaneously without any undermining of realism. Zentropa uses this technique, too—for example, in a dissolve from the front of the train moving through a tunnel to Kate’s face as she sleeps inside it. In both cases, the disproportion is “explained” by the two images not actually representing a single space.
Vernet describes back projection as distinct from superimposition because in it there is no disproportion between the two layers of image, and the effect is supposed to remain invisible. In a classical use of back projection, the two images represent the same space, and the identity of perspective and scale enables the effect to place objects together that could not be filmed together. The most common example of this kind of projection is the view from the car window, in which characters appear to be driving in an exterior location that is, in fact, a separate image projected onto the internal frame of the windshield. Zentropa contains one of these conventional shots: when Leo sits in the car of the Werewolf leader after Max Hartmann’s funeral, the view from the rear window is a back projection. However, the effect is made obvious because the projected image is grainy and degraded, and the lengthy static shot emphasizes the appearance of an internally framed movie. This visibility points to the difference between Zentropa’s uses of superimposition and the classical logic outlined by Vernet. For while in classical cinema, back projection seeks to remain invisible and superimposition is visible only because it does not threaten the coherence of realist space, Zentropa renders both effects visible and uses both to fracture the integrity of its narrative spaces.
Zentropa A classical use of back projection is rendered visible, as the composition emphasizes the internal screen.
In Zentropa, superimpositions are not contained as momentary evocations of two spaces at once but represent the same space through layers of image with different scales, perspectives, film stocks, or colors.59 There is not the motivated break in diegetic space that Vernet’s examples produce but, instead, a demand that narrative space be read as singular despite the disjunctive effects of superimposition. And the opposite takes place with back projection, which already represents a single space but is made to do so visibly, exchanging a special effect that was designed to efface itself with a formal effect that emphasizes the internal screen. This shift recapitulates the tension between what can and what cannot be seen—or, perhaps, what should and what should not be seen. Back projection, like the view from the train windows, should not be seen, yet here it is made spectacular. Ultimately, the distinction between back projection and superimposition disappears, at least as far as their narrative use goes, and both become part of a visually spectacular yet semiotically troubling multiplication of space.
As a result of this distinctive use of superimposition, not all of Vernet’s analysis can be applied to Zentropa. His consideration of layering as a psychological metaphor, for example, is unhelpful in regard to Zentropa’s more radical restructuring of the image. What is important is his placement of surimpression as a textual figure that, while often a part of classical realism, alters the mechanisms of representation. For Vernet, it is part of a cinema-specific discourse of absence, which undermines representation even as it produces certain narrative meanings. Thus, he claims that “the flattening effect of superimposition is paradoxical since more representation (two or more spaces in one frame) gives less representation by the supression of visual depth perceived and by the projection on a single plane of two perspectival images at least.”60 More representation is always and at the same time less representation, and this idea begins to define the doubling process by which Zentropa’s layers can produce both too much to see and nothing to see.
Vernet attributes a certain radicalness to the surimpression, arguing that this push and pull of more and yet less representation necessarily makes the spectator aware of the apparatus. This claim may be overly general, and while Zentropa’s superimpositions can more easily be argued to foreground the apparatus than a more classical text could, it does not necessarily follow that any ideological conclusions can be drawn from this effect. Stephen Heath describes style as an area of “controlled excess,”61 and in the context of art cinema, this caveat is especially significant. We cannot consider this self-conscious spectacularity to be radical when it is exactly this kind of visual excess that defines art cinema as a genre. Nonetheless, while it is not enough simply to claim that the film’s mise-en-scène is excessive, it is crucial to examine the specific textual work done by its style.
Like the spectacular effects discussed in the preceding chapters, Zentropa’s projected layers “fall out” of the narrative, breaking with verisimilitude and producing a fetishistic relationship to the spectacular image. But unlike the landscape or the underground tunnel, their effect is primarily located not in mise-en-scène per se but in the formal manipulation of the image. Here, Andrew Higson’s idea of spectacle “falling out” becomes almost literal, as layers of image are separated from the body of the text. In Mulvey’s terms, spectacle momentarily breaks with Renaissance perspective, producing a flat space in which surface replaces narrative depth.62 Zentropa’s superimpositions do this almost constantly, emphasizing the surface quality of each layer. To take one example, during the scene of Leo in the car of the Werewolf leader, there is a shot/reverse shot in which no single layer is able to stand unmarked as a direct representation of three-dimensional space. We first see Kate, outside, from Leo’s point of view: she is in color, against a background that is back-projected black-and-white film. We then cut back to a two-shot of Leo and the Werewolf in the car, in which Leo is now in color and the other man is back projected, in a grainy and degraded black and white. While the spectator can and must read narrative across these disparate layers, each codes primarily as a surface, in which the materiality of the film preempts any sense of depth.
One of the results of this texturing is a difficulty in producing identification, so the spectator is distanced from the mechanisms of classical narrative absorption. Certainly, there is some identification with Leo, from whose point of view the narrative takes place, at least in terms of knowledge. (And in the previous example of layering, it is Leo’s color, 35-mm, unprojected image that comes closest to being formally unmarked.) But identification with Leo as an optical and narrative point of view is weak, and the constant emphasis on the spectacular surfaces of each projected image prevents a full effect of suture. Heath, reading Jean-Pierre Oudart on suture, claims that “cinema as discourse, that is, is seen as implicated in loss, the loss of the totality of the image, the loss of the extreme pleasure of absorption in the image as the spectator is set as the subject of the film: ‘the cinema is characterised by an antinomy of reading and pleasure.’”63 Thus, suture regulates the relation of spectacle and narrative, Imaginary and Symbolic, with, for Oudart at least, spectacle and pleasure slipping into one structure. What happens with Zentropa’s superimposition, then, is that the undermining of suture does not operate to disorient the spectator in regard to narrative—the plot is still quite clear—but, rather, to reorient the spectator toward spectacle.
Spectacle, Historicity, and Absence
Privileging spectacle has both a spatial and a temporal significance. For Heath, the key operation of suture is the changing of space into place that classical cinema performs. But Zentropa does not let this happen, and the back-projected images remain in separate spaces, never entirely stitched into a singular diegetic place. And this question of place, for Zentropa, is always also a question of location, where the ideological vectors of the term have both a cinematic and a geopolitical inflection. To the extent that Zentropa prevents the production of cinematic place, it also unbalances its representation of geographic place. Where there is no single narrative space, there also can be no geographic specificity, and the disjunctures involved in layers of superimpositions prevent the articulation of a coherent location for Europe.
Thus, we can read the layers of projection in Zentropa as a formal replication of the cellar/surface structure in Underground: both imagine impossibly split spaces in which a singular image of nation is precisely what is impossible. Like Underground, Zentropa refuses the national landscape image of neorealism, but the two films make international as well as national claims on these spaces. Just as Underground’s cryptic cellar cannot be imagined as part of a Western concept of Europe, so Zentropa’s projected spaces are, in the supposed center of the continent, insurmountably fractured. The image layers that touch but cannot be merged refract the divisions and impossibilities of postwar Europe—suggesting a history that runs from the zoning of occupied Germany, through the splitting of Eastern and Western Europe, to the imperfect present of unification (German) and union (European). And the ghostly spectacle of projection, the uncanny doubling in which one image is always an absent presence, reinscribes the splitting of Europe in terms of the circuits of desire that the “real” West projects onto (and receives from) its insubstantial other. In both films, Europe is defined by the spaces that cannot meet. However, in Zentropa, what Vernet calls the vertiginous space of the surimpression effects a more radical deconstruction of European unity, in which the ambivalent identifications and impossible location of “Europe” seep into the very form of the image.
And there is also a temporal element to this mode of spectacle that, in Zentropa, in turn, makes a claim on the historical. The pressure of the spectacular, which is for Heath a complex play of imaginary pleasures within the symbolic discourse of narrative, is affective to the extent that it stages an outside to the discursive logic of costumes, mise-en-scène, story, and so on. It is always a “field of absence,”64 the space that classical narrative sutures. Insofar as Zentropa incompletely sutures the spectator, that absence takes on a greater presence. Moreover, it is not only the imperfection of suture as a general category that produces an effect of absence but the particular nature of surimpression. For Christian Metz, superimposition performs a unique doubling, combining fusion and separation, metaphor and metonymy, and, most important, enunciative and evocative markers.65 Vernet takes up this idea of grafting evocation onto representation—in other words, turning signification into affect—as a way of thinking: superimposition as a figure of absence. The doubling of the superimposed or projected image redoubles also the gap between photograph and reality: like the photocopy, the projected image is another step removed from the profilmic, and it is the sudden visibility of this gap that is evocative.66
Vernet suggests a temporality to this effect, not in the structure of absence itself but in the history of cinema. Superimposition, he argues, has become such a cliché that it inevitably signifies a nostalgic historicizing of a lost classical form. For him, it is, above all, this encrustation of reference that proves evocative, as a signifier of film history as much as any specific content.67 This element of referentiality is undoubtedly at work in Zentropa, where formal and textual references to films of the 1940s abound, and where classical uses of superimposition and back projection are revisited. The film has little to be nostalgic about, but there is, nonetheless, an emotional investment in the forms and images of the past, whereby spectacle negotiates between immersion in the past and knowledge of the present’s difference. Zentropa’s superimposition produces exactly this oscillation in the pleasure of the historical effect and yet also the more distanced and more ambivalent pleasure in the effect.
Sean Cubitt also analyzes special visual effects in terms of the history of cinema, arguing that most media theorists read digital spectacle nostalgically, as evidence of postmodern loss. Citing Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and Paul Virilio, he identifies a narrative of “previously … but now,”68 which in cinematic terms refers to a previous investment in the real and the human, to be contrasted with the current vogue for the digital and the spectacular. While he clearly does not buy into these readings entirely, Cubitt uses them to trace a broad context for contemporary special effects, historicizing postmodern theories rather than applying them directly. He links the theoretical narrative of nostalgia to the claim that postclassical cinema has turned away from narrative and performance and toward special effects as an attempt to regain a sense of awe. Thus, spectacle is connected intimately with loss as a symptom of postclassical cinema’s relationship to the history of the medium. This idea is a useful one, because it historicizes postmodern media theories, enabling a less pessimistic reading of the simulacral image. By interrogating films like Independence Day (Emmerich, 1996), Cubitt suggests that contemporary effects also have a textual temporality, which he thinks of in terms of the sublime. For him, however, this effect is a temporality out of time, with no access that he can see to history. His analysis is compelling, but I would contend that in different uses of effects technology we can discover the relationship to history that Cubitt leaves open but undiscovered in the blockbuster. Zentropa explores this temporality of loss, for it uses effects within the context of a historical narrative, so the contemporary impetus to recapture the awe of early cinema is coarticulated with the direct representation of an earlier historical moment. Effects in the history film take on even more keenly the attempt to make real what is not real: the hypercathexis involved in bringing an image of what has been lost to light.
Thus, alongside the narrative history of Europe, Zentropa thematizes the postmodern narrative of cinematic loss, in which it becomes difficult to conceive of the real and the indexical in relation to a digital age of spectacular effects. The difference between the 1940s and the 1990s is the historical gap at issue narratively, and this difference is also coded as a problem of the image. If 1945 is a central moment of European political history, it is also the moment of neorealism and the ruin film, when the truth-claim of the cinematic index exerted its greatest ideological pressure. Correspondingly, if 1990 involves the loss of cinematic certainty in the digitally altered image, then it also implies the ambivalent politics attending the collapse of European Communism, the reunification of Germany, and, indeed, postmodern theories themselves. And what is significant is that Zentropa not only textualizes but problematizes this narrative of before and after. There is no year zero, and the ruin film cannot show the unmediated truth of Germany. As a consequence, the image of 1990 is no less true for its spectacular manipulations, and it becomes necessary to read historical difference through rather than against the nostalgic investment in a cinematic or a political “before.”
This work of textualization accounts for the way in which the Zentropa uses effects technology, as compared with a film like Independence Day. While Independence Day works best if you do not think about the digital (even as you take extratextual pleasure in its technological splendor), Zentropa works at all only to the extent that the effect problematizes the status of the image. While you cannot film alien spaceships without effects, you can film a man standing on a train, and to create such an everyday image out of back projections is to destabilize rather than to extend representation. In other words, Zentropa’s effects do not work to make the impossible look real but to render the everyday less real. This is different from the use of effects in Hollywood blockbusters because while we know that the alien spaceships in Independence Day are effects, we do so because we know that there are no aliens, not because we can see a visual gap. Content excepted, they look real. Or if they do not, then this is a failure of effects technology, the criticism of the spectator who found the film unconvincing because the effects looked like effects. In Zentropa, seeing the cracks is precisely the point; in fact, it is in these cracks, in the interstices of superimposition, that historicity takes place.
The way that Zentropa’s effects draw attention to their distance from the real shows how the temporal break produced in the back-projected image not only is contingent on the cinematic history of the trope but also derives from its textual production. While the classical use of the figure minimizes its disjunctive effects, in Zentropa the back-projected image draws attention to its manipulation, its reprojection, its distance from the profilmic. And yet, in the moment of this distance, it simultaneously reminds us of that which is absent, drawing attention to the indexical precisely by pointing out its attenuation. There is a shot of Katharina standing in front of a river, where the “wrongness” of the superimposition produces a momentary impression of indexicality in regard to the background image. The water running behind Kate is seen from a “wrong” perspective, in a close-up rather than a medium shot, and from a straighter angle than that of the foreground. But this disjuncture forces the spectator to see the water in detail, to focus on the materiality of its movement, on the small twig that directs the stream into a V shape. In noticing the “wrongness” of the water, we take note of something we would otherwise have passed over as background: we direct our attention to the exact location and physical presence of the water. And this effect of indexicality depends on the doubled gap between projected image and the profilmic: it becomes a fragment of the real precisely because of its compelling absence.
Like the auratic image of the tree and the branch, these moments of indexicality cross the pleasure of the spectacular with the shiver of loss. The projected images are a constant reminder of the apparatus, of the temporality of cinema by which that which is represented is absent. And absence defines the historical image. As with the Italian films, a temporal effect of spectacle overlays and complicates the historical discourse of narrative. This is clear in a shot of Leo’s uncle talking to another railway worker in the station. The two men are framed in a medium shot, in black-and-white, bright film, while the background, showing people working and a building partly obscured by smoke, is projected, also in black and white, but in a grainier, old-looking film stock. Proportion is kept between the two layers, and yet the image is haunted by its temporal and historical gaps. The background image looks like old film, degraded and scratchy as a document of the past. Its immediate effect is to make the characters in the foreground appear stagy, their claim on history new and inauthentic. This effect is reminiscent of Siegfried Kracauer’s “real trees,” as the indexical pull of the background usurps the costume-based realism of the narrative’s historicity. But what disrupts the narrative in this case is not the materiality of nature but that of film itself. A pastness based on signification is momentarily supplanted by a pastness based on affect, on the temporal loss implied by the doubly inaccessible space of the projected “old” film.
Zentropa A fragment of the real: the background image of the river is shown in disjunctive close-up.
In this instance, the footage itself is not actually old, and its content is not historically punctual: its effect is purely a function of the image. In these moments,69 the doubled and projected image produces historicity formally. Thus, in the railway scene, even within the diegesis of 1945, the background image connotes age. This is not because of its content, which is only an appropriately atmospheric setting, with no historically significant details, but because the projected image itself implies pastness. Seen as a piece of film, it compels in its indexicality: this comes from the past. Emplaced within the narrative space of 1945, it suggests a mise-en-abyme of temporal distance: we look at an image of the past, within which there is an image of the past, and so on. We can never reach the truth of historical space, only multiplying markers of historicity, and the moment of this realization produces a sense of the impossibility of the past. The constant refusal of symbolic cohesion textualizes historical absence, the impossibility of seeing a place and time of European postwar origin. Just as Leo cannot quite reach the real space of Germany, so the spectator cannot quite reach the real space of a historical diegesis. History becomes not only a question of representation but also one of haunting.
Jousse describes the subject of the film as trucage,70 which in French means both “cinematic special effects” and, more generally, “conning” or “duplicity.” These visible superimpositions are examples of trucage as effects, but they also suggest a work of duplicity, understood as a discourse on doubling and impossibility. The layers of back projection in which there can be no single diegetic truth follow the same logic as the split body of the werewolf and the duplicitous one of the femme fatale. And haunting is another kind of splitting, where past and present, or East and West, come into proximity without ever quite touching. The relationship of Europe in 1945 to Europe in 1990 is a similarity but also a disturbance: there is no comfort in this proximity.
Conjuring the European Subject
To some degree, the look back in Zentropa is of the same nature as that in the Italian films and in Underground: the period from 1945 to 1948 in Germany was once again a time of great political upheaval, with the optimism that comes with the institution of a new republic. And in this instance, the slide from the moment of possibility into a Cold War stagnation could not be clearer, with the breakup of Germany into East and West. Soviet control in the East mirrored conservative hegemony in the West: like Italy, West Germany’s postwar governments were dominated by the Right, and despite various resurgences of opposition throughout the 1960s and particularly the 1970s, it was not until reunification that the political landscape was subject to radical change. Thus, as in Italy and Yugoslavia, Zentropa’s production was contemporary with the collapse of the postwar order. In the wake of its end, the film returns to the historical moment that led to its inception.
Further, the nature of the change in Germany invited widespread meditation on the nation’s relation to the past. While the wars in the former Yugoslavia demanded a response that left little immediate space for analysis, and the “clean hands” scandals in Italy were not necessarily viewed in their historical context, the fall of the Berlin Wall was first and foremost experienced as a historical shift, prompting an intellectual and cultural reexamination of Germany’s place in Europe. This reviewing was also a form of haunting, in which the new Germany was compelled to return to the specters of its shared Nazi past, as well as those of Communism in the East.71 But perhaps most significant in this context is the debate over the past and future of the Left, in which the lost moment of potential in 1989 to 1990 recapitulated a similar missed opportunity in 1945 to 1949. The lost cause that was the postwar hope for a neutral Germany, aligned neither with the United States nor with the Communist bloc, was briefly resuscitated in the discourse of the Third Way.
Before reunification, there had been support, particularly in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and among leftists in the West, for a new German constitution and a system that would be “neither capitalism nor Stalinism but genuine and democratic socialism.”72 With reunification, the space of Germany returned closely to its postwar borders, but this expansion was also a loss for the Left, since, of course, the former GDR was simply incorporated into the West, and the Third Way degenerated into a watered-down form of postsocialist party politics. There proved to be little space for engagement with the politics of the anti-Communist Left. Thus, while the events of November 1989 could be regarded as only a positive change, the discourse of reunification inevitably entailed an experience of loss and ambivalence for the European Left. As Peter Schneider wrote in 1991: “Doesn’t it look as if developments have proved our worst enemies right?”73 The fear of appearing to be on the wrong side, to having been consigned to obsolescence alongside Soviet Communism, stymied the west European Left in the early 1990s, and it was in Germany that this discourse was most overtly articulated.
Andreas Huyssen describes the mood of the post-unification East in terms of melancholia and nostalgia, while Matthias Greffrath argues that the loss of a leftist utopia had occurred fifty years before and that German melancholia was thus misplaced.74 In both cases, the national-political discourse of 1990 is contingent on a relationship to the postwar past and a relationship defined in terms of loss. And for Greffrath, the experience of 1990 is basically a misreading, a projection of the past onto the present in which the proximity of these images allows for a political slippage. It would be more accurate, I think, to say that while the political losses of the postwar order had their origin in the 1940s, only in the wake of the collapse of that order can they be felt and understood as such. And the proximity of these two historical spaces—their sudden geographical and ideological closeness, and yet the disjuncture of their essential historical distance—is what Zentropa’s structure of projections and splittings makes visible.
Zentropa’s textual work inscribes the ambivalent relationship between Germany now and Germany then, but it also maps a fractured and recursive form of historical engagement for Europe in general, along with a no-less-fractured European space from which to look. There is the disjuncture between East and West Germany and that between Eastern and Western Europe: the “painful border” of Emir Kusturica, in which two geopolitical spaces are proximate but structurally unable to meet.75 Further, as the reunification debate suggests, the question about the future of Germany was also, both in 1945 and in 1990, a question about the future of Europe. The years following the fall of the Wall were also those leading up to the Maastricht Treaty, which inaugurated the European Union. And this is not so coincidental. As Ron Pryce points out, the uncertain status of postwar Germany led to the defensive formation of the European Coal and Steel Community,76 while the crisis of reunification spurred moves toward economic and political union. Thus, German space is historically central to the formation of European-ness, and there is another proximity between the image of Germany and the uncertain self-image of Europe.
Moreover, for a coproduced film, there are other national identities at play. There is a relationship between Germany and Europe, but there are also relationships between France, Sweden, Poland, and, most strikingly, Denmark and Europe. As its producers inadvertently say, Zentropa is primarily a northwest European film, and the structure of splittings and impossible spaces also refers to the disjuncture between Denmark and Germany or that between the smaller west European countries and Europe as a whole. Denmark became somewhat notorious within Europe in 1992, when its populace voted against the Maastricht Treaty—Desmond Dinan describes a national “ambivalence toward European integration.”77 The final agreement gave Denmark “opt-outs” from many of the treaty’s clauses, and jokes circulating in the early 1990s described the new Europe as incorporating a footnote that read “except Denmark.” Thus, the main location of the film’s coproduction also implies an ambivalent proximity to Europe, a discourse on inside and outside, European and not-European.
The result of these spatial and temporal doublings is a very different form of historical engagement, in which the coproduced film maps a European rather than a national subject position.78 The film does not speak as a German film; it does not address a national subject; and, most important, it does not engage a specifically German relationship to history. Instead, it attempts to address a European subject and to articulate both the horrors and the losses of a European history. Of course, this European subject does not actually exist: it is another void, another of the impossible spaces around which Zentropa’s non-space coheres.79 To project the precise spectator position whose impossibility the film simultaneously narrates demands a constantly shifting relationship to historical desire and spectacular affect. This is what makes Zentropa such a compelling case study for the question of a European cinema at the moment of inception of the so-called new Europe. The film hails a European subject while calling attention to the textual and ideological pitfalls of doing so. Moreover, it stages the historical exigencies of such an identity for all Europeans.
Here we can pin down Zentropa’s relationship to the discourse of mourning, for without a coherent subject position, there can be neither an affective historical image nor a place from which to cathect to such a lost object. Thus, there is no beautiful landscape, no image that could stand in for the losses of the European past. In mapping the terrain of splits and projections, the film at once acknowledges this impossibility and yet attempts to construct a European space, like Frankenstein’s monster, out of disparate scraps of image. There is still a historical look back from a position of loss, insofar as the film reiterates the failures of the postwar order. However, this look produces neither the melodrama of mourning nor the stuckness of melancholia, because it cannot envisage a subject who mourns. It has no apparatus of nostalgia with which to look back and no lost object to mourn. As the monster analogy suggests, history in Zentropa inevitably entails horror.
But instead of refusing the discourse of loss altogether, Zentropa constructs history as a double loss, looking back on a history that it also needs to debunk. There is no single Europe at the moment of reunification, and there was no single Europe before partition. What centers the historical image is exactly this knowledge—that it is necessary to return to the postwar past despite its feet of clay. Zentropa structures the impossibility of creating a truly European image, but in staging the collocation of the continent’s disjunctive historical spaces, it begins to imagine the stakes in an idea of Europe outside the dominant Western discourse. And if there is none of the emotional charge of mourning, neither is the film’s historicity simply ironic or affectless. Like the Italian films, Zentropa was released at the moment when change became imaginable, and its production of European space in terms of impossibility speaks to the “where now?” moment of the European Left, in which the fall of Communism and the collapse of the German Third Way exerted a troubling pressure on any ability to conceive of a future. Any engagement with Europe as a point of identification is, at this moment, necessarily ambivalent. Thus, the film does not invoke historical affect—it is not a claim on “our” history—but, rather, it stages the problem of affect for the yet-to-be-produced European subject.
Spectacular images in Zentropa entail loss despite themselves, producing a haunted relationship to the image of a past in which the film nonetheless refuses to believe. Thus, the film textualizes the impossibility of this historical relation, splitting the diegesis with disjunctive layers of film. Along with the other films I have been considering, then, Zentropa’s historical image at once speaks of the ideological impact of the past and of its contemporary status as beautiful image. It circles the spectator from the historical moment to the moment in the present from which history can be experienced as such. In Zentropa, this constant circling articulates an ambivalent spectator position, at once invested in the losses of the past and yet critically distanced from any form of identification with its image. The impossibility of reaching a singular image of historical truth reflects back on the impossibility of representing the European present.
This circling structure connects Metz’s reading of superimposition to the dialectical image. The layered and projected image in Zentropa is at once enunciative and expressive, producing specific historical meanings, short-circuiting representation altogether, and creating a dialectical relationship between history as signification and history as the affective pull of spectacular loss. What remains affective is the missed opportunity in which things could have been different: Leo’s brief and quickly fatal period of optimism in the moment before Europe was split. But there is no longer any belief in such optimism, either with regard to understanding that past or, for the European Left in 1990, about the future. It is this moment—of desire for political desire—that the impossible spaces and half-structured mournings of Zentropa describe.
The idea of the dialectical image describes this imbrication of past and present, which goes beyond a nostalgic or a horrified relation to the past, and beyond the political melancholy of the present, to demand that the spaces, histories, and identities of postwar Europe be thought anew. Benjamin argues that “while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural,”80 and in Zentropa, the figuration of spectacular space subtends a historical tension. For Benjamin, a dialectical approach to history transforms the present as much as the past, and, indeed, he describes Konvolut K of The Arcades Project as “an attempt to become aware of the dialectical … turn of remembrance” and as “an experiment in the technique of awakening.”81 The collocation of memory-work and the reemergence of consciousness is familiar in Zentropa’s context: a frequent trope of the fall of the Wall was a “return to history” or an “awakening” for Eastern Europe. But temporality, like space, is open to reversals. In its spectacular projections, its reiteration of the stakes of splitting at the moment of unification, and its historical return to a nightmare landscape from which there is no awakening, Zentropa suggests that such radical changes are no less necessary for the European West.