(Email, University of Virginia)
The silenced woman – psychoanalytic and neo-Marxist approaches towards Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ‘Lili Marleen’
My presentation tries to bring together two methodological approaches in film theory and its history that on the first glance seem to have nothing to do with each other – studies in the apparatus theory, as a derivation of neo-Marxist film theory, together with post-modern studies of a psychoanalytic film theory. More clearly, where the apparatus theory seems to be mainly interested in the filmic hardware, psychoanalysis, when applied as a theoretical approach towards film, seems to neglect the technical issues in favor of the psychic conditions of the spectator and – in connection with this – the imagery of filmic figure who are to arouse certain feelings within that spectator.
In my presentation, however, I attempt to demonstrate that a combination of the two approaches leads to productive results in the interpretation of film as a product displaying and examining societal and political circumstances. This combination of the two theoretical approaches is to be exemplified on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s movie ‘Lili Marleen’ from 1981. I intend to demonstrate how film theories neglecting the filmic apparatus – and very important: neglecting the replay of music and its distortions within the filmic plot – runs danger to ignore important insights into the filmic dealings with socio-political issues. A special interest lies in the attempts shown in Fassbinder’s movie to use the singer Willie who sings the song ‘Lili Marleen’ as a propagandistic instrument during the period of the national socialist Third Reich. My presentation wants to show, with the help of the methodologies indicated above, how the national socialist propaganda uses Willies desires to sing, to make herself heard, to express herself in her music, in order to – paradoxically – silence her as an individual. The usage of apparatuses like a broken record player, a disturbed telephone line, or the camera which records Willie on a Nazi stage, underlines the disappearance of both the individual in general and the woman in particular in a totalitarian regime which equalizes the artist with its displayed figure – Lili Marleen – and thus dehumanizes the woman.
