III - Memory and repression in recent German cinema

Summary

On representation and repression

Representation is never neutral, for it is usually reserved for and by the strongest, who deem themselves the fittest to reproduce and be reproduced. And yet even when we are consciously aware of this we are still likely to concentrate so exclusively upon what the representation places before us that we fail to perceive what it omits. But if a society's prevailing modes of representation can therefore be experienced as uncanny, in league with evil, on the other hand omissions can be justified as the unavoidable corollary of the necessity of form: Structure is founded upon exclusion. In any case, is an event's omission always tantamount to its repression? This is one of the central questions the present chapter will address to a series of recent West German films.

Thinking the unthinkable

It is often contended that certain things are best left unrepresented, and that their omission from the visual sphere is a matter of tact rather than repression. Foremost among these are intimate sexual encounter and death, linked by Elizabethan puns on “dying” and critiques that speak of a “pornography of horror.”