eJournals Colloquia Germanica 43/1-2

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/61
2010
431-2

Kalte Stimmung, or the Mode of Mood: Ice and Snow in Melodrama

61
2010
Inga Pollmann
cg431-20079
Kalte Stimmung, or the Mode of Mood: Ice and Snow in Melodrama INGA POLLMANN U NIVERSITY O F N ORTH C AROLINA The strange power of images of coldness in melodrama presents a particular case of the aesthetic question of the relationship between images of landscapes or nature in films on the one hand and affect and spectatorship on the other hand. Images of snow, frost, ice and other signs of coldness often partake in a particular aesthetics of nature or, at least, an aesthetics of natural processes, exemplified by, for example, the aesthetics of the sublime in the infamous German Bergfilme of the 1920s and ‘ 30s by Anton Fanck, Leni Riefenstahl or Luis Trenker. I argue that these signs of coldness function in other mediaspecific ways as well. These images have a narrative function, indicating, for example, place and time, and also play an important role in the affective economy of the film, an economy that might best be described as an atmosphere or Stimmung (attunement, mood). The most haunting instances of coldness in melodrama perform yet a third function: with cold hands, they inscribe technological mediation into the film so that the cinematic image becomes suspended between nature and technicity, eternal cycle and historicity, love and death. My argument unfolds in three stages. I begin by looking at Alexander Kluge ’ s recent film Landschaften mit Eis und Schnee (Landscapes with Ice and Snow, 2010) as a contribution to media theory in the name of coldness. Kluge draws on Theodor W. Adorno ’ s discussions of coldness, (instrumental) reason and natural beauty. Looked at through an Adornian lens, the film provides us with a blueprint for thinking about how to correlate coldness and media as well as nature and technological mediation. I then turn to D. W. Griffith ’ s melodrama Way Down East from 1920 with its spectacular dramatic climax in which the heroine is rescued from an ice floe after getting lost in a snowstorm. I argue that this film not only illustrates the various correlations among cinema, coldness, and pathos outlined in the first section, but it also highlights how these correlations are always organized according to a particular historic constellation, in this case the film-historical context of Griffith ’ s drama. In the third and final section, I focus on Max Ophuls ’ s 1932/ 33 film adapation of Arthur Schnitzler ’ s play Liebelei (Flirtation), in which Ophuls marks moments of love and death by situating them in winter landscapes. I argue that Ophuls ’ s film indicates how in a different film-historical moment, both coldness and pathos are internalized in melodrama, so that cold landscapes not only threaten the melodramatic heroine as they do in Griffith ’ s film, but also mirror the impossible conflation of coldness and pathos, love and death by means of a pervasive, cold Stimmung. Alexander Kluge ’ s recent film Landschaften mit Eis und Schnee and accompanying slim book Stroh im Eis 1 are a meditation on, and investigation into, images of and stories about ice and snow. They explore the potential of technological mediation to create an aesthetic of ice and snow in tandem with a critical gaze at the role of coldness in modern society. The central question of Kluge ’ s film is driven by conversations Kluge had with Adorno shortly before the latter ’ s death, in which Adorno urged him to make a film about coldness. In one of the stories in Stroh im Eis, Kluge describes how Adorno conceived of coldness in modernity as a dialectical image. Adorno suggested that in the ice age, coldness produced intelligence and reason by creating the fundamental distinction between warm and cold, thus forcing human beings to find ways to keep warm. He also suggested that instrumental reason itself eventually engendered a more fundamental coldness as a by-product of the modern process of alienation (Kluge 2010, 69 - 70). It is this latter point in particular that Adorno discusses in «Education after Auschwitz.» Adorno posits that humans, under the pressure of the forces of capitalism, technology, authoritarian structures and superceded bourgeois ideals, develop a «reified consciousness»; they «have, as it were, assimilated themselves to things. And then, when possible, they assimilate others to things» (6). These individuals are «cold through and through» (6) - indeed, according to Adorno, coldness is a basic trait of the human condition. Love, especially as an imperative, «is itself part of the ideology coldness perpetuates. It bears the compulsive, oppressive quality that counteracts the ability to love. The first thing therefore is to bring coldness to the consciousness of itself, of the reasons why it arose» (6). The stories Kluge tells in both his film and the book explore the correlation of coldness, love, clarity of vision, adventurous quests, social norms and imperatives, community formation, and capital and state interests. In combination with this dialectical pursuit on the narrative level of coldness as a state of being corresponding to a society under industrial capitalism that has embraced instrumental reason, Kluge ’ s film performs an aesthetic inquiry into the aesthetic potential of texts about, and images and sounds of, coldness, including wind, ice, and snow. The film consists of 31 parts and combines interviews, photographs, drawings, portraits, computer generated imagery, 80 Inga Pollmann and clips from films spanning the history of film, thus juxtaposing different formal conceptions and media that constantly permeate one another. While all parts revolve around coldness, snow, and ice thematically, they vary in the way they approach the topic. In their arrangement in the film, the parts not only inscribe themselves into the film as a whole, but each part also consists of a multiplicity of visual, acoustic, and narrative layers. This second pursuit concerns the role of technologically mediated nature in and for aesthetics, a question that can also be traced back to Adorno and especially his thoughts on natural beauty, «das Naturschöne» (Adorno 2004, 91 ff.). «The technical medium par excellence,» Adorno said cryptically in his essay «Transparencies on Film,» is «deeply related to natural beauty» (201). Fig. 1: Drops swell at the tip of an icicle and reflect the surrounding landscape (Kluge, Landschaften mit Eis und Schnee). The potential of natural beauty is probed in Kluge ’ s film by many images and sounds, including scenes of snowscapes, snowstorms, ice crystals, an icicle, and footsteps in the snow. Technical mediation, however, is always inscribed in these images, so that even as we give ourselves over to the aesthetic experience of what we see and hear, we cannot separate the experience from technological mediation and manipulation. A case in point is the repeated 81 Kalte Stimmung, or the Mode of Mood static closeup of the tip of an icicle releasing water drops. The image ’ s duration brings us into close contact with the icicle ’ s peculiar temporality - a form that recounts its genesis and makes visible the passing of time only in its disappearance through a change of states of matter. But ice and film refer to one another in other ways as well. The sequence of swelling and falling water drops recounts the materiality of the filmstrip, that is, the vertical sequence of discrete images; the genesis of fluid water out of static ice reiterates the magic of film ’ s creation of movement out of photograms. The image in the drop of water, in this case the silhouette of a forest against a sky with a radiating sun, comes into being again and again inside the swelling drop, creating a precious, ephemeral apparition. In these images of nature as technological mediation and technological mediation as expression of natural beauty we may glimpse a historical configuration of human, nature and technology wherein these three elements are not antithetical to one another, but rather each includes the other. 2 In the image of the dripping icicle we come to understand coldness as the latent storehouse of an energy that can produce discrete images, images that retain their power of difference and differentiation, but nevertheless afford a moving aesthetic experience. It is this complex intertwining of coldness and aesthetic expression, of nature and technological mediation, that I want to apply to melodramas of ice and snow. The power of melodrama as a mode rather than a distinct genre lies in its ability to produce strong affective and emotional responses. As such, it has traditionally been understood, produced, and marketed as a woman ’ s genre. However, what makes melodrama so interesting is not just its female protagonist and its predominantly female audience, but also its emphasis on a «feminine» mode of communication between spectator and film, that is, a form of communication that exceeds the logic of the narrative and which is based on emotional affection. Critics such as Linda Williams, Tanja Modleski, and more recently Hermann Kappelhoff have articulated part of this logic of melodramatic affection by emphasizing differentiated and productive ways of understanding female communication and suffering in women ’ s melodramas. They have demonstrated that even as its plot lines often simply reinscribe conservative patriarchal norms and values by means of passive female roles and a narrative that ultimately reaffirms gender stereotypes, melodrama can nevertheless be a productive and creative cinematic mode since the affective engagement with the dramatic conflict that melodrama demands does not necessarily or ultimately believe in its narrative resolutions. The combination of melodramatic mode and images of ice and snow, of passion in a cold atmosphere, demands a complex affective negotiation 82 Inga Pollmann between temperatures. D. W. Griffith ’ s 1920 film version of the stage melodrama Way Down East provides some of the starkest imagery of melodramatic action, female suffering, and coldness. In this film, snow and ice not only mediate nature and technology, passion and reason, but also mark a particular film-historical configuration in the negotiation of melodramatic mode and realist impulse. Lillian Gish plays the passive heroine Anna Moore who, in classical stage melodrama fashion, cannot herself speak up and announce her innocence and virtue. 3 Succumbing to the wiles of the nobleman Lennox Sanderson (Lowell Sherman), she is tricked into a fake marriage. When she finds out the truth, he deserts her. She gives birth to a child who dies soon thereafter. After finding new employment with Squire Bartlett on a country estate, she finds out that her former lover lives nearby. Soon rumors of her past reach the Squire and he orders Anna to leave the house. She leaves despite a raging snowstorm outside. The Squire ’ s son David (Richard Barthelmess), who has fallen in love with her, follows and rescues her from the drifting ice floes on a river. Back home, the Squire forgives her, Sanderson is expelled, and Anna marries David. The snowstorm and ice floe sequences combine the symbolism of raging storm and thawing ice with the visual spectacle of a real snowstorm and real ice floes, and thus constitute the melodramatic climax. The melting and breaking of the ice enables the physical and psychological movement that is necessary to bring about the transition from doomed victim to rescued bride. In other words, if it were not for the wild winter weather, the woman ’ s rescue would just have been a physical rescue not resulting in a transformation. She needs the cold and, in particular, the dangerous and extreme weather conditions of the ice melt to open up to the warmth of family love and hearth. Our interest in and excitement about the scene is informed by both the emotional implications of the melodramatic story and the visual attraction of the breaking ice itself. This combination was not lost on contemporary viewers and reviewers, who scorned the old-fashioned stage melodrama on which the film was based, but lauded the ice floe sequence. 4 Analyzing reviews from the era, Lea Jacobs shows how Griffith ’ s film emphasized the cinematic medium ’ s specificity precisely by breathing new life into this melodrama «of fearful dialogue and even more fearful construction» (Smith 84), as one critic put it in 1920. Jacobs argues that Griffiths was able to do so especially because of his skillful parallel editing and the visual attraction of real nature. In other words, there was both a formal and a phenomenological change that turned a dusty stage melodrama into a riveting, acclaimed film melodrama, even though Griffith made hardly any changes to the main plot and its melodramatic conflict. 83 Kalte Stimmung, or the Mode of Mood Figs. 2 and 3: Anna (Lillian Gish) lies unconscious on ice floe (D. W. Griffith, Way Down East). 84 Inga Pollmann Dramaturgy, natural scenery, and montage in Way Down East establish a triangulation of cinematic medium, melodramatic convention, and cold landscape that, as I will suggest below, perseveres through film history and not only complicates any account of what is modern, but also inscribes film melodrama with a coldness that will permanently reflect back on the technological mediation of both nature and emotional artifice. Griffith ’ s film accomplishes this first through dramaturgy. The melodramatic ordeal sets in with a snowstorm in which Anna gets lost and David searches for her in vain. When Anna reaches the river a moment of retardation and calm sets in as she falls down on the ice exhausted. The breakup of the ice adds a new dramatic element as, on these shifting grounds, David tries to get to Anna ’ s floe. Finally, the introduction of a waterfall, preceded by shots of rapidly moving ice and breaking floes, provides the sequence (and the film) with a race to the lastminute rescue. The orchestration of threatening nature thus proceeds from the chaotic, blinding, disorienting storm, to the clear, abstract pattern of shifting, swiftly moving ice floes, to a final intensification that juxtaposes the deadly waterfall with Anna and her savior. The sequence moves from chaotic to more orderly movement when the multi-directionality of the storm is replaced by the linearity of the river and the two-dimensional shifting patterns of floes, which in turn are eclipsed by the forceful dramatic linearity of the last-minute rescue. In his discussion of Way Down East in his treatise on Film Technique and Film Acting, Russian director Vsevolod Pudovkin claims that the sequence of storm, river, and waterfall repeats, «on large scale as it were, the same line of that increasing despair - despair striving to make an end, for death, that has irresistibly gripped the chief character» (129). The strength of Griffith ’ s filmmaking lies in the fact that «the action of the scenario develops among characters blended directly with that which takes place in the surrounding world» (Pudovkin 128). For Pudovkin, the sequence stands out in its achievement of homogenizing, as it were, human drama and environment, not in the sense of one symbolizing the other, but rather in the sense that one expresses and intensifies the other, such that internal and external drama become indistinguishable. In addition to the dramaturgy, the photographic realism of snow, ice and water in Griffith ’ s film impacts its melodramatic economy. Moving beyond Pudovkin, Linda Williams argues that within the logic of the melodrama, the snowstorm and breaking ice are able to restore the virtue of the passive heroine and reestablish order not only because the melodrama «blends» the characters with the surrounding world, but precisely because the punishment is transferred from the punishing patriarchal figures (Sanderson and David ’ s father) to the cold, hostile natural elements: 85 Kalte Stimmung, or the Mode of Mood Ice, icy water, and snow are frigid elements that counter the sexual fires that produced the illegitimate child [. . .]. They cool and wash Anna metaphorically clean of the crimes she technically did commit and which the patriarchal double standard still believes stain her. The ‹ moving picture › of the frozen heroine passed out on the ice, hair and hand trailing in the water, rushing toward the falls - enhanced by the extratextual legend that Lillian Gish suffered acutely from frostbite during the shooting of the film - moves us not only because it combines the pathos of her suffering with the action of David ’ s rescue; it also punishes the heroine in the most appropriate manner for a sexual crime that the melodrama both believes and does not believe she is guilty of committing (Williams 2001, 37). According to Williams, snow and ice have both a metaphorical and an actual, a melodramatic and a realist function. Their realism as well as the somatic ordeals for heroine and spectator guarantee the melodramatic structure of having it both ways: presenting, preserving and confirming the patriarchal order as well as proving the heroine right and defending her. One could even say that in this sequence, a social and moral struggle is eclipsed by a struggle against cold nature. This melodrama thus transposes the general thrust of Adorno ’ s connection between coldness and instrumental reason into the specific constellation of cold nature and patriarchal order. Finally, Griffith ’ s montage further ties cold nature to the formal properties of cinema. The mise-en-scène of the storm highlights the violent, chaotic movement of storm-tossed branches, whirling snow, and rushing ice floes; Griffith ’ s parallel editing draws a direct line from the melodramatic conflict to the snowstorm. He cuts from David ’ s violent movement as he attacks the culprit Sanderson following Anna ’ s accusation, to Anna ’ s similar, rushed movement of throwing a scarf over her hair and fleeing outside, where strong, snow-carrying winds immediately tear at her scarf and coat. Another graphic match occurs moments later when David storms out of the living room and up the stairs, where he bangs against Anna ’ s door and calls her name, not knowing that she has already left the house. The shot is followed by the intertitle, «And then the storm,» whereupon we see Anna in the raging storm, reduced to a mere shadow, turning around. When David enters her quiet, neat room and looks around, we cut back to Anna again, who is enclosed by bushes and trees and seems trapped in the blinding weather. David begins to look for her outside and goes over to the camp, where he meets Sanderson who, during his rushed exit, fell from his carriage. A similar «match-on-movement» cuts from the fight between the two men back to Anna, who is flanked by two dark, wind-shaken fir trees. These examples of Griffith ’ s intricate parallel editing indicate how the dramatic action and emotional conflicts are transferred visually and emotionally onto the snowstorm. The parallel editing between Anna and David 86 Inga Pollmann gives no clues as to their location vis-à-vis one another nor do we get a coherent sense of the landscape and the river as a whole. The same destabilization takes place with respect to time. As Michael Allen notes, Anna seems to be outside from dinnertime, when she is expelled from the house, to early morning, when she and David return to the house, although there is no visible ellipsis in the depiction of the search and rescue (157). Likewise, the conflict between «too late» and «in the nick of time» that provides the suspense for the final rescue stretches time unbearably; we feel we cannot wait for the rescue. The disorientation provided by the snowstorm and the threatening breakup and erratic movement of the ice provide visual, physical parallels to Griffith ’ s montage technique which is itself a cinematic disorientation and breakup of time and space. The storm and breakup of the ice thus have a medial function; they are inseparable from the film ’ s form. In Way Down East, snowstorm and melting ice play out the reflexivity of the technological medium and cold nature that was not only illustrated, but also instantiated, in Kluge ’ s film by the image of the icicle. By marking the moment the drama switches from internal to external conflict, patriarchal to natural force, emotion to action, snow and ice also indicate the historical, formal, and media-specific relevance of the film. As an early cinematic melodrama, it still retains certain elements from nineteenthcentury stage melodramas such as the combination of pathos and action; yet by making use of cinema ’ s visual-photographic powers, the film translates the old-fashioned dramatic conflict into something else, namely a modern visual spectacle. 5 Snow and ice simultaneously tie the film drama to its past stage format and instantiate film drama ’ s very modernity in form and effect by means of montage, close-ups, and long distance shots of the landscape. Following Adorno and Kluge, one can posit that by means of the formal and visual affiliation of film technology and cold nature, the film seems to illustrate the cruel coldness of patriarchal law, revealing that love and the bourgeois hearth are no more than cold ashes. Yet due to its particular film-historical form, namely the point at which film melodrama still externalizes the dramatic conflict and combines pathos with action, Way Down East is able to instrumentalize cold nature on two levels. Narratively, cold nature serves as the Other as patriarchal punishment is displaced onto nature and the outside in order to enable a happy ending in the protected bourgeois home. Formally and visually, however, this cold nature becomes the ally of the technological medium and thus is not Other at all; on the contrary, cold nature reflects the technological medium in its capacity to visualize, i. e., externalize, inner turmoil and to manipulate time and space. A contradiction runs through the melodrama; namely, the contradiction between cold nature as naturali- 87 Kalte Stimmung, or the Mode of Mood zation of patriarchal order and cold nature as reflexive technological mediation. Another way of putting the contradiction would be to ask how we conceive of the particular modernity of film melodrama. Adorno ’ s dialectics of coldness make it difficult to comprehend fully the function and effect of cold nature in melodrama, since the dramatic affect, which is so undialectical and very much inscribed onto the bodies of both heroine and spectator, can only be conceived as ideologically complicit with the culture industry in his theory. A framework is thus needed that can incorporate spectatorial affection into deliberations on the nature of coldness. For this reason, more recent attempts to focus on the expressivity of landscapes, while making useful distinctions, are ultimately unsatisfying as well since they likewise separate out environment, action, and affection. In a recent volume on landscape and the cinema, Martin Lefebvre distinguishes between landscape and setting. Landscape, as Lefebvre rephrases an expression used by Anne Cauqelin, is a «space freed from eventhood» (21). He thus defines cinematic landscapes as those moments in which the view of a landscape escapes or exceeds the confines of the narrative for a moment. It is in these precise moments that a view of an environment is more than a mere setting for an action that takes place in it. While this definition is useful in helping us to think about the roles of «environment,» «nature,» or «place» in films, and while it highlights that what is seen is cinematic (presented/ represented rather than real, and thus imbued with cinematic value) and dependent on the spectator ’ s perception and involvement, it nevertheless begs several questions. How can «action» or «narrative» be delineated? Is the definition of narration vs. spectacle - a distinction Lefebvre takes from early cinema scholarship - sufficient? Finally, what is the relationship between cinematic landscape and «real» landscape? 6 According to Lefebvre, landscape in narrative film becomes visible only in flashes, that is, in moments in which the setting draws attention to itself and attains meaning outside of or beyond the narrative context. However, such a conceptualization seeks to distill autonomous meaning from the landscape, rather than focus on the intricate ways in which setting and action interact. Because setting remains a relatively passive concept in Lefebvre ’ s account that carries meaning only insofar as it relates to the narrative action, it also does not incite a particular spectatorial affect. Additionally, this definition of landscape and setting reduces cinematic landscapes to what would be considered a landscape in reality as well. As a consequence, the idea of a cinematic capacity to imbue objects with a quality akin to landscape falls by the wayside (Béla Balázs ’ s description of the landscape as face and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ’ s correlation of face and landscape as parallel mechanisms of 88 Inga Pollmann subjectification and signifiance are two examples of this capacity. See Balázs, 52 - 53; Deleuze and Guattari, 172 - 73). Therefore, I suggest that we collapse the distinction between landscape and setting into a third term that has the capacity to encompass autonomous expression, interaction with narrative, and spectatorial investment: namely, the notion of Stimmung. The German word Stimmung is closely related to the notions of «atmosphere» or «aura» and has assumed a prominent place in recent German literary studies. 7 In contrast to Adorno ’ s dialectical coldness and theories of landscape, the concept of Stimmung can account for the complex interplay of cinematic image, dramatic narrative, and spectatorial affect. Yet there is a problem with the conventional notion of Stimmung. Stimmung, especially the way it was used as an analytical concept by the art historian Alois Riegl and the philosopher Georg Simmel in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, always presumes a holistic congruence of inner disposition and environment and is thus quite similar to Walter Benjamin ’ s concept of aura (Benjamin 1999 a, 518 - 19; 1999 b, 103 - 05, 112). Stimmung is a «warm» concept; it envelops us like a coat. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht recently advocated for Stimmung as a reading practice that foregrounds the prosodic element of literary texts and focuses on presence rather than representation, on atmosphere, tone, and rhythm rather than plot and interpretation, thus allowing for a merging of historical and aesthetic experience. For Gumbrecht, the capacity of literary texts to «surround» and «envelop» us with a Stimmung fulfills a need felt in times characterized by technological mediation to experience the thickness of material presence (Gumbrecht 29). Against this concept of Stimmung and (literary) mediation, I want to invoke the role of technological mediation and its capacity to reflect on (cold) technological conditions by means of what I would like to call a cold Stimmung. Melodramas of snow and ice interweave not only cold nature and dramatic narrative with somatic affection, a texture we could describe by means of the traditional concept of Stimmung, but they also interweave cinema ’ s own technological conditions, so that the technological medium becomes the place where nature is empowered to speak of and against coldness and rationalization in a language that addresses the reasonable subject as much as the embodied subject. This is even more obvious in later, more classical film melodramas that have turned the elements of action from stage melodrama into affective passion. In order to illustrate the cold Stimmung in melodramas of snow and ice, I want to conclude by looking at a somewhat later film that has the historical context of cold society written into its passive structure; cold nature does not act out in place of a patriarchal force, but rather provides the pervasive subtext 89 Kalte Stimmung, or the Mode of Mood for all passion. In contrast to Way Down East, Max Ophuls ’ s Liebelei (1932/ 33), the film version of Arthur Schnitzler ’ s play of the same name, has completely internalized the dramatic conflict, so that most of the time, it is the inner landscapes of many of Ophuls ’ s characters that make us shudder with cold, rather than a dangerous snowstorm. The many winter landscapes that populate Ophuls ’ s films thus seem more like mirages of social dispositions than natural environments. While Schnitzler ’ s play takes place in spring, but quickly disappoints our expectations of spring folly, Max Ophuls ’ s film is set in a bleak, militarized fin-de-siècle Vienna that is wintry cold and snowy. Most of Ophuls ’ s other films, for example, Die verliebte Firma (Company in Love, 1930), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), or La Ronde (1950) are set in similar winter landscapes. Both the fun-loving shopgirl Mitzi (Luise Ullrich), who starts a flirtatious affair with Theodor, and her friend Christine (Magda Schneider), who falls in love with Fritz (Wolfgang Liebeneiner), have to protect themselves from the cold throughout the film, much like the heroine in Alexander Kluge ’ s Yesterday Girl (1969), who steals a sweater because she is freezing even in the summer. Theodor ’ s insistence that one should not love too much, and Mitzi ’ s commitment to living for the moment as well as her obvious familiarity with many other military men, stand in stark contrast to Christine ’ s feelings, which constitute the emotional focus of the film. Half way through the film, a sequence outside the city set in a blinding white landscape of soft, snowcovered shapes surprises the spectator; the soundtrack too makes a shift as the scene is smothered in a relentlessly repetitive, dramatic tune despite the otherwise sparse use of music in the film. Christine and Fritz, both wrapped up in white furs, ride in a horse-drawn sleigh. They are caught up in a discussion of the meaning of «forever» (ewig). Fritz announces that he will be late to their rendezvous that night due to a meeting and Christine expresses her desire to find out more about Fritz ’ s life. The spectator knows that he will have to visit the baron with whose wife he had an affair. Throughout the scene, telegraph poles and lines interrupt the idyllic scenery. A final pan over the snowy landscape reveals that the snow is covering up a graveyard. And indeed, the next time a wintry landscape is again seen it is the setting of Fritz ’ s deadly duel with the baron. This time, the ground has only a thin, harsh snow cover that stands in stark contrast to the dark trunks of barren trees. The duel itself is concealed from our eyes; we only hear the bullet echo through the forest. After Mitzi has thrown herself from a window in despair, the film ends by returning to the snowy landscape for a final pan over the graveyard, and over the music, we hear Fritz ’ s and Mitzi ’ s alternating voices again: «I swear. . . » - «I swear. . . » - « . . . that I love you. . .» - «that I ’ ll love you forever . . .» 90 Inga Pollmann Fig. 4: Christine (Magda Schneider) and Fritz (Wolfgang Liebeneiner) talk about love and eternity during a sleigh ride (Max Ophuls, Liebelei). In Liebelei, coldness prevails. Men and women are locked into a societal arrangement that discourages or even disables genuine love. As Alan Williams observes, in Ophuls ’ s films, society is not the opposite or repression of instincts, but their expression. The films are not structured around a play of total opposites, but a «union of opposites» (74). As a consequence, social coldness underlies the love story from the outset. Like Hans Christian Andersen ’ s Snow Queen, who is a key figure for Adorno and Kluge alike, ice has penetrated the heart of Ophuls ’ s film. While Way Down East still worked with the opposition of cold and warm, wild nature and bourgeois idyll, and only momentarily conflated them qua technology in the snow and ice sequence, in Liebelei, love means death, nature is a bourgeois construction, and technology invades emotional moments. Yet the film makes the spectators ’ cheeks burn and their hearts beat fast, to the point of provoking weeping, precisely because the film is able to indicate and expose its cold conditions. Liebelei warms because it affirms the power of the technological medium to reveal coldness. As such, what I have called cold Stimmung to indicate the historical genesis of this quality is similar to what Benjamin 91 Kalte Stimmung, or the Mode of Mood Fig. 5 and 6: A final pan across the snowscape reveals telephone lines and poles as well as the headstones and crucifixes of a graveyard (Max Ophuls, Liebelei). 92 Inga Pollmann describes by means of the ambivalence of the decline of the aura and Adorno by means of «Hauch» (breath) as a counter-term to Stimmung (Benjamin, 1999 a, 518 - 19; 1999 b, 104 - 05). An artwork ’ s «Hauch» is its approximation of nature not by means of imitation, but rather by exposing its facticity, its forming process (Adorno 2004, 170 - 71). The Stimmung that Liebelei produces thus stands in contrast to the linear identification and the corporeal kinaesthetic involvement that dominates the reception of, for example, straight action films, as well as the reflective, critical, and less immersive engagement with certain documentary or avant-garde films. The reception of melodrama is a «passive activity,» since it is dominated by an emotional investment in the drama of passion on the screen, which generally depends less on an exclusive identification with the central female protagonist than on a more diffuse empathic feeling for the dramatic conflict that extends to all of the characters involved. In that sense, crying, as ultimate dissolution, is paradigmatic for a model of melodrama spectatorship. 8 If Stimmung and coldness are correlated, and the latter is understood, with Kluge and Adorno, as the basis for reason and instrumental rationality, the safe warmth can be subtracted from the discourse on Stimmung and it becomes available as a concept that can describe precarious, unprotected states. This precariousness is historical and film-historical. It is film-historical, since film melodrama gradually abandons the externalization of the dramatic conflict and folds it inside into affective intensity. It also seems to indicate a historical moment in which the natural bond between subject and environment breaks, after which the safe cloak of Stimmung, which connected the individual to its environment while simultaneously affirming the boundaries of the subject, had worn off. In this sense, the last image of Liebelei visualizes what the previous scene had slowly prepared. At first glance, the sleigh scene seems to have picturepostcard value as Stimmungsbild. A closer look reveals, however, that telegraph poles and lines disturb the idyll and the soft snow cover conceals a graveyard. Additionally, Ophuls ’ s otherwise fluid camera and inventive framing is replaced by static frames at right angles, techniques that emphasize the awkwardness of Fritz and Christine ’ s conversation. The scene thus already indicates the breaks in the relationship between subject and environment, a relationship the film completely severs in the final image. Making use of its potential to separate image track and audio track, this early sound film projects the voices of the dead couple over the snow-covered graveyard as a technological specter that reveals that the bond between subject and environment can no longer be sought in an authentic expression of life, but may only be mediated by technology. 93 Kalte Stimmung, or the Mode of Mood Notes 1 Film and booklet are sold together under the title Wer sich traut reißt die Kälte vom Pfred (He Who Dares Can Tear Coldness from the Horse). 2 I am indebted to both Lutz Koepnick and Richard Langston for their outstanding papers on Kluge ’ s film for the panel «Aesthetics after Adorno» at the 35th Annual German Studies Association Conference in Louisville, Kentucky (2011) 3 On the silent virtue in melodrama, see Brooks (1976). 4 See, for example, Sherwood (1921) and the anonymous review in Variety (1920). 5 On this aspect of the history of stage and film melodrama, see Brooks (1976), Singer (2001), and Gledhill (1987). 6 The examples Lefebvre cites - Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Michael Snow - stem, not coincidentally, from a particular modernist strand in film history, i. e., from films that explore the expressive potential of images to thwart, complicate, or undermine narrative coherence. 7 This is due in particular to David Wellbery ’ s genealogy of the concept, which unearthed the multiple meanings and contexts in music, painting, literature and philosophy that make Stimmung such a productive concept for literary studies. See Wellbery (2000), Gisbertz (2009 and 2011) and Gumbrecht (2011). On an exploration of the notion of atmosphere, see Böhme (1995). 8 According to philosopher Helmuth Plessner ’ s comprehensive theory of crying, crying entails giving up our controlled relationship to our body: the body takes over and answers. Crying is a combination of reflexive response and bodily reaction, a combination of the individual as person and as body; the human being «lets himself fall into crying» (234) in an act of self-abandonment, and thus «respond[s] with his body as body as though it was impossible for him find another answer at this point. And in this lost mastery over himself and his body [Leib], he simultaneously proves himself to be a being also of a non-corporeal [außerleiblich] kind, which exists in tension with his physical existence, yet entirely bound to it» (235, my translation). In crying, the ambivalent relationship of a human being to his/ her body, to both having a body and being a body (a distinction German expresses with the words Leib and Körper) - becomes apparent (Plessner, 1982). For theories of crying at the movies, see Neale (1986) and Koch (2004). Works Cited Allen, Michael. Family Secrets: The Feature Films of D. W. Griffith. London: BFI Publishing, 1999. Adorno, Theodor. W. Aesthetic Theory. New York: Continuum, 2004. — . «Transparencies on Film.» New German Critique 24/ 25 (1981): 199 - 205. — . «Education after Auschwitz.» Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 19 - 33. Anonymous. «Way Down East.» Variety (September 10, 1920). Balász, Béla. Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film. Ed. Erica Carter. New York: Berghahn, 2010. 94 Inga Pollmann Benjamin, Walter, «Little History of Photography. Selected Writings. Eds. Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings and Gary Smilth. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. 507 - 30. — . «The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility, Second Version.» Selected Writings. Eds. Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings and Gary Smith. Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. 101 - 33. Böhme, Gernot. Atmosphäre. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Gisbertz, Anna-Katharina. Stimmung - Leib - Sprache: Eine Konfiguration in der Wiener Moderne. Munich: Fink, 2009. — , ed. Stimmung: Zur Wiederkehr einer ästhetischen Kategorie. Munich: Fink, 2011. Gledhill, Christine. «The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation.» Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: BFI Publishing, 1987. 5 - 39. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Stimmungen lesen: Über eine verdeckte Wirklichkeit der Literatur. Munich: Hanser, 2011. Jacobs, Leah. «Way Down East.» The Griffith Project. Ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai. Vol. 10. London: BFI Publishing, 2006. 80 - 95. Kappelhoff, Hermann. Matrix der Gefühle: Das Kino, das Melodrama, und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2004. Kluge, Alexander. Wer sich traut, reißt die Kälte vom Pferd - Landschaften mit Schnee und Eis. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2010. Koch, Gertrud. «Zu Tränen gerührt - Zur Erschütterung im Kino.» Pathos, Affekt, Gefühl: Die Emotionen in den Künsten. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. 562 - 74. Koepnick, Lutz. «Ice.» Landschaften mit Eis, Schnee und Wind: Aesthetics, Nature, and Media after Adorno. German Studies Association Convention. Marriott Hotel, Louisville, KY. 24 Dept. 2011. Langston, Richard. «Snow.» Landschaften mit Eis, Schnee und Wind: Aesthetics, Nature, and Media after Adorno. German Studies Association Convention. 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