Madoka Ozaki
WL391 - Assignment #2
2-26-98

Cinema is a complex art form. Unlike paintings or music, cinema lets audience use two different senses in appreciation. The ability of it to both show and tell simultaneously, it can powerfully absorb the audience, maybe more easily than other media.

For its outstanding ability to engross mass, cinema is often regarded as a lower art form. However, through the course of its history, scholars explored new possibilities making it a more profound form of expression, Emil Benveniste's distinction between histoire and discours is one of the discoveries that enabled cinema to be more versatile. Jutta Bruckner and Helma Sanders are two auteurs who challenged that boundary and came up with masterpieces, A THOROUGHLY DEMORALIZED GIRL and GERMANY PALE MOTHER,

Bruckner calls A THOROUGHLY DEMORALIZED GIRL a "fictionalized documentary." In one perspective, the film is a histoire documented since it is a reality for Rita portrayed in the movie, Her actual father, mother, son and friends appear on screen. The film was shot in her apartment, her workplace and her city. Furthermore, Rita, herself, talks about her life.

However, it has many elements of discourse for which it becomes hard to categorize it as a documentary. For example, the scene in which Rita shaves her body in front of the mirror, we hear words of her inner thoughts obviously added over the actual event. This non-diegetic sound here lets the audience be aware that they are watching staged scenes. When she takes a lover inside her house after an encounter at a pick-up bar, viewers know that was staged since the camera crews were already in the house when she opened the door.

By manipulating recordings and staging scenes, Bruckner made the story flow smoothly, every detail working up to the final shots of the cartoon depicting her goal to marry an ideal man. Bruckner seems to have known from the beginning that the elements of discours in this film would not lessen the actuality of the film, for Rita is used to acting multiple personalities in her real life.

Helma Sanders-Brahms, too achieved a triumph with her movie, GERMANY, PALE MOTHER, by blurring the line between histoire and discours. Like A THOROUGHLY DEMORALIZED GIRL, the film is in one sense a histoire for it is autobiographical. SandersBrahm, herself does the narration to add the film a tone of cinema-verite, Also, she blends real footage of World War II in to achieve more plausibility, Most of the scene was shot on location, not in a studio.

However, it is a discours portrayed by Sanders-Brahms. She recreated the story of her mother on screen, having a total control over mise en scene, There are details of how Lene and Hans fell in love, which must be a product of pure imagination of SandersBrahms. Professional actors are used to act the part of Lene and Hans, The dialogue was written prior to shooting.

By doing the narration, and adding documentary footage, Sanders-Brahms achieved illusion of reality in some parts of the movie. While Bruckner manipulated the film to make the story flow better, Sanders-Brahms added elements of histoire to remind viewers that the tragedy was once a reality. As a result, GERMANY, PALE MOTHER became more emotionally charged.

Both Bruckner and Sanders-Brahms are bold enough to experiment with new possibilities in their films to enhance quality. Those kinds of bravery of directors are what raised the status of films into a form of art. The criticism like Ellen Seiter's, "My concern ... is with the way that the filmmaker's use of melodramatic codes obscures the ability to read the family narrative in political, rather than pathetic terms," (p. 193, "Confronting German History: Melodrama, Distantiation, and Women's Discourse in GERMANY, PALE MOTHER" by Richard W. McCormick) is pointless, because the film is an artwork within which Sanders-Brahms should be granted all the freedom to express her message. If a filmmaker began to be excessively concerned with interpretation of the audience, films by her will be nothing but an entertainment for mass. Bruckner and Sanders-Brahms deserve nothing but acclaim for their creativity in use of histoire and discours elements in A THOROUGHLY DEMORALIZED GIRL and GERMANY, A PALE MOTHER.