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Dark Scenes from Austria:
German Studies Events at King’s College London in November and December
Please join the German Department at King’s this Wednesday lunchtime for a panel of three talks on contemporary Austrian cinema.
We meet from 12-2pm in Room 6.32 of the Virginia Woolf Building, 22 Kingsway, WC2B 6NR.
All welcome!
This event will form the first in a series of research talks and outreach events that will culminate in the UK premiere of two award-winning Austrian films, Stillleben and Blackstory (2012), at the ICA on Wednesday 4 December. Tickets for this screening may be booked on the ICA website:
http://www.ica.org.uk/39747/Film/Austrian-Film-Premiere-Blackstory-Still-Life-QA.html
LUNCHTIME RESEARCH SEMINAR: WEDNESDAY 13 NOVEMBER
Martin Brady, King’s College London
Paedophilia on stage and screen: from Kroetz and Jelinek to Schleinzer and Meise
This talk will examine a wide range of plays and films which have used the theme of paedophilia to tackle social and political questions: Fassbinder’s play Pre-Paradise Sorry Now explores the violence of religious, political, and social rituals through the case of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley; Franz Xaver Kroetz reflects on things “Made in Deutschland” in his play Du hast gewackelt: Requiem für ein liebes Kind; Elfriede Jelinek has worked the Kampusch and Fritzl cases into recent plays (Winterreise; Faustin and out); filmmakers Markus Schleinzer (Michael), Ulrich Seidl (Paradies: Hoffnung) and Sebastian Meise (Outing and Stilleben) have all recently turned to this once-taboo subject. The politics and ethics of staging and watching real and fictional narratives of child abuse will be addressed.
Katherine Stone, University of Cambridge
Remembering the Mass Rapes of 1945: Another Taboo Broken?
This paper will consider the problematic status of the mass rapes in contemporary memory culture. The experience of the million plus women who were raped by Allied troops at the end of the war has hardly been out of the limelight since the republication in 2003 of the anonymous diary Eine Frau in Berlin, the release of its film adaptation by Max Färberböck in 2008, and the extended television première in 2010. This paper will argue that the reception of Anonyma and its various adaptations can be understood as a form of ‘screen-discourse, a dispersion-avoidance,’ (Foucault, History of Sexuality, volume 2, 1976) that works to conceal the most difficult discursive and ethical challenges posed by memory of the mass rapes behind a range of other, more easily manageable, issues. The paper asks whether such patterns of representation ultimately conceal the mass rapes behind metaphorical meanings, reinforcing their taboo nature as a result.
Rachel Green, University of Leeds
Voyeur/Auteur: Addressing recent Austrian child abuse cases in contemporary German and Austrian film.
Five years have passed since the horrors of Josef Fritzl’s ‘dungeon’ dominated news broadcasts across the globe and seven years since Natascha Kampusch escaped the hands of her captor after being abducted on her walk to school. These abhorrent Austrian child abuse cases have engendered numerous debates worldwide and have relatively recently become the impetus for two contemporary German and Austrian film narratives. Austrian director Markus Schleinzer’s film, Michael (2011) and US born but German raised director, Sherry Hormann’s film 3096 Tage (2013) both address these recent Austrian abuse cases, however represent them in very different ways. This paper will assess the different approaches made by Schleinzer and Hormann in their separate quests to portray horrific acts of child abduction and abuse onscreen. While 3096 Tage builds on the actual events of Kampusch’s ordeal, using autobiographical information provided by Kampusch who played an active role in the writing process of the film, Schleinzer’s film on the other hand rejects any conscious link between the abuse featured in his film and these actual child abuse cases. Drawing on the different perspectives used in each of the films, and assessing the different cinematic techniques used by each of the filmmakers, this paper will determine that Hormann’s film, in its focus on the victim and its graphic portrayal of sexual, physical and psychological abuse, ultimately places the viewer in the role of the voyeur. Meanwhile, Schleinzer’s film, with its focus on the banal everyday life of the perpetrator and opting for subtlety over sensationalism, is representative of the work of an auteur, placing Schleinzer into a wider Austrian filmmaking habitus.
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