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Richard Burt
Spectral Historicism:
From Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba to Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds
Reading not from perspective but from perspective understood as
perspectrarchivalization, of a kind of phantom citation or repetition in the process of
editing, of reducing dissemination to philology (of the collection and thematizing of
works dispersed as articles but now gather together in a single book.
“Ediots” (neologism for naïve editors)
A great example may be found in The Work of Mourning. The editors in their
introduction do not give the source of a Derrida article they reference on Sarah Kofmann
(p. 28) but do on p. 166. The footnote on p. 166 gets the title of the book writing as well
as the cuts short the full title of the essay. And they refer to the book as published, giving
he year of publication as 2001. But the book was not published until 2007, and under a
different title. All this takes shape under a page devoted to the title of the essay “ . . . . “
and Derrida’s discussion of the various titles he wanted to give his essay but didn’t. He
writes off the title, as it were. The title as entitled becomes spectral and inadvertently and,
in hiding in plain sight, calls attention to the way Derrida does not lay title to SK in
speaking of her. The perspective is not a set frame, already given, but it comes into play
precisely becomes it mistitles, disrupts the function of the introduction as frame as well
as the assumed to given orienting as framing relation to the tile of Kofmann’s essay
(which is given in full in French on p. 170, which repeats some of what is given in the
footnote on p. 168, but shortened in translation.
Furthermore, the translotr sues “cadaver” 237) whereas drrid asays he prefers the English
word “scorpse” (withouts saying that he is correcting a translation because the essay had
not been translated yet, but, on the other hand, is reprinted as the introduction (in English)
to Slected Writings, Sarah Kofman, in much longer form and without the footnote in
Work of mourning identifying its source. In the preface they still refer to Conjuring
Death with its short title (x) even though the contents gives the entire title. “The volume
introduction is translated and published by permission of Jacques Derrida.” SO the
introduciotn is not intri=docud, prefaed as a reintroudciotn, and the curous passive
construction makes it seem as if Derrida permitted hsimelf to the translate and publish the
introduction.
See also Kofman’s autobiographical essay “Nightmare: At the Margins of Medieval
Studies” For Bernard [Cerquiglini], 251-54. She takes up the issue of philology in
relation to classifiying what may nevertheless remain strange.
Derrida’s work on mourning, the “last book” puts into question the translation of the new
arrival, the latest, as the now, of a new tool we can use to pry open, force open perhaps,
the crypt and sue it as a reserve to produce to new readings. Not Schmitt’s last work, but
his late work, interrupted by WWII. How to read this double trajectory in relation to
Hamlet and Hecuba,a work about mourning.
H/oratio/ns (see LEH esay on Horatio andspectrality.)
stage the translation of the new Schmitt book into English as an occasion to
revisit the question of what it means to read, to read resistance, by reading the
delayed, full translation of Schmitt's book in relation to Schmitt's interrupted,
delayed response to Benjamin. The delay is built into the paratextual
organization of Schmitt's book: WB is put in the waiting room of the appendix. I
would want to also use this staging of the book as a scene of reading as
resistance (de Man) to put some pressure, very gently, and open up questions
about the Telos book's self-presentation as the first complete translation and also
the first authorized translation."
I would furthermore want to focus on a page of the appendix that the French
translation of the book and the earlier Telos selections leave out of the German
original but reappear now in the book. This concerns Schmitt's reading of Hamlet
as not a purely Catholic text, unlike Don Quixote (I forget now his other example).
I want to read the text of Schmitt's book in relation to this engagement with a
Jewish writer, on the one hand, and Schmitt's own Catholic theology on the other
other. And this question is also a question of geography (the island versus the
continent). But, above al, and this would be my argument, is a question of
mourning and the time of reading, of death and the gift, of getting back what can
no longer come back (WB's text becomes readable now that he is dead), just as
Schmitt's text becomes translatable now that he is dead). And I would want to
engage this question of mourning through Derrida's characterization of the
Catholic eucharist as the default (even for Sarah Kofman. Holy EuCHaRIST!)
Reading Schmitt's H or H as delayed, deferred, destined or destin(t)erred, would
then be read in Schmitt's book as a question of address, of hailing the dead and
the economy of the gift, the difference between "Who goes there?" addressed to
the dead and the living in Hamlet as opposed to the challenge and recognition
HV gets when disguising himself to check on the soldier's morale the night before
the battle of Agincourt. Schmitt's delayed book is day of refusing to close the
book (as HV wants to), to settle accounts, to erase or cross out the names of the
dead (or say them, as HV does) in relation to a dead reckoning, a last judgment
(as Williams casts it). Schmitt is not settling accounts with WB but getting at the
relation between the book and the body as a question of the open or closed book
(Hamlet does nto give an account of himself in his last speech but "could tell" and
Horatio too interrogates the audience's desire to "see" on stage in terms of a
closed story figured by the assembled "dead' bodies. We end with a future
anterior of reading as the yet to be done but also as the never to be done but
already figured as an interrupted succession without a final national destination.
Hence Hamlet remains a figure to be read, just as Schmitt remains to be read,
even now, especially now, that he is here, once more, on English shores.
geography would then be less a question of Nomos (as the political) but a
politology, to use Derrida's words, of topology that gets rendered only through a
tropology, making the new translation of Schmitt's book something like the
shattered remains of a shipwreck that wash up on shore even as they arrive late,
perhaps too late, even washed out. But this very lateness would be the book's
"survival effect," rendering its varied kinds of resistance (un)readable.
Death’s watch (Death keeps the watch, as in Hamlet at the opening) and dath
watching,, as in waiting for us to die, and death watching over us (a watch as the
time of securing, of being awake, of hailing and demanding recognition (Hamlet
and HV scene when HV disguises himself and visits his soldiers the night before
Agincourt, and Williams turns the discussion to the last judgment and the King’s
debts.
Derrida, Work of Mourning obit on setting Catholic eucharist as the default for
mourning in Louis Marin and again in Sarah Kofmann, this time connected to the
book and body, to the last book and not being able to close—suspending the
Christian notion of the last judgment, keeping the gift and legacy in play as
opposed to giving a dead reckoning. You can give an account of someone dead,
of yourself, of the survival of the dead, of the way they living are posthumous in
writing, even give an account of yourself that does not settle accounts, pay off
debts, close the book, cross a name off a list.
The Last Book
Introduction to Derrida, The Work of Mourning, the editors note that he often talks
about the dead person’s last words of final book. In the eulogy for Louis Marin
he talks about the ”last book” and uses the phrase several times, especially in
relation to the way the temporality of reaing and writing is not reducible to a
future anterior even though he has just said that Marin effectively knew he was
going to die and knew he would not see the publication of his last book and how
all Marin’s books are written in a way that makes them posthumous even while
Marin was still alive.
Derrida, Work of Mourning obit on setting Catholic eucharist as the default for
mourning in Louis Marin and again in Sarah Kofmann, this time connected to the
book and body, to the last book and not being able to close—suspending the
Christian notion of the last judgment, keeping the gift and legacy in play as
opposed to giving a dead reckoning. You can give an account of someone dead,
of yourself, of the survival of the dead, of the way they living are posthumous in
writing, even give an account of yourself that does not settle accounts, pay off
debts, close the book, cross a name off a list.
Tell me why we wait for death. Marin’s last book will have helped me think
this. To think what which in fact regards each of so singularly, namely, the
law of what does not return of come back, if what comes back to us only
there where it can no longer come back to us, and so comes down, lie
mastery, that is, like the fiction of force, to the incontestable authority of
death, to the very inexistence of the image, of its fantastic power, to the
impresence [sic] of a trace.
Louis Marin knew that this authority begins before death, and that death begins
its work before death. Death’s watch [veille], the time of this book, had begun
long ago for Louis Marin, well before the eve [veille] of his death.
This is also why this book cannot be closed, why it interrupts itself interminably.
And however prepared I might have been for it, I read it too quickly, in a sort of
haste that no mourning will be able to diminish or console. It happened to me too
quickly, like Louis’s death. I feel as if I were still on the eve of reading it. (164)
“As if respect for this certainty were still a debt, the last one, owed to the friend.”
(160)
“And this is what secretly links the gift to death” (164)
“Well never have the time.” (163)
“To speak this evening of the last book of Marin as I might have spoken in
another time and in more conventional circumstances of his most recent book.
(158)
“With a certain time of reading” (158)
“survival effect” (157)
that we are all looked at (each of us singularly) by the one who, with each page,
will providentially deciphered and prescribed, arranged in advance , a reading of
what is happening here, of what makes the present scene possible, foreseeing
and watching over it with the benevolent regard (since it is he who watches out to
watch over us) and with all the love of someone who can say, at the moment of
dying, even if it is not Christ or Christian, hoc est meum corpus, which is given for
you. Do this in remembrance of me (Luke 22.19) 160)
Sarah Kofman
At first I did not know—and I still in fact do not know—what title to give to these
words.
What is the gift of a title?
I even had the fleeting suspicion that such a gift would be somewhat indecent: it
would imply the violent selection of a perspective, an abusive interpretative
framing or narcissistic reappropriation, a conspicuous signature that is Sarah
Kofman, Sarah Kofman alone, Sarah Kofman herself, ever there [la-bas], beyond
here, well beyond me or us here and now. Sarah Kofman who should be spoken
about whom I hear speaking.
Sarah Kofman
Would d then be the best title, were I not afraid of being unable to measure up to
it.
Finally-since the question remains the gift and of what it means to give a title—it
seemed to me more just to speak, and for just this reason, of the gift in Sarah
Kofman, of her gifts: those she gave us, those she left us, and those she too
perhaps received.
The title would then be
Sarah Kofman’s Gifts
And here are a few possible subtitles, to give you some idea of what I would like
to say:
Here There
Open Book, Closed Book
Protestations
Here and there we find the body and we find the book, the open book and the
closed book. And protestations. Between the two, between here and there,
between the body and the book, between the open book and the closed one,
there would be, here and there, the third, the witness, the terstis, testimony,
attestation, and testament—but in the form of protest or protestation.
For when I say body, I mean the living body as well as the sexed body—as if
thus testament, the oldest and the newest: “this is my body,” “keep it in memory
of me,” and so, “replace it, in memory of me, with a book or discourse to be
bound in hide or put into digital memory. Transfigure me into a corpus. So that
there no longer be any difference between the real presence or of the Eucharist
and the great computerized library of knowledge.”
This great eucharistic paradigm, was first of all, and perhaps will always remain,
what is proper to man I mean to the son or the father. For is this not a scene of
men? No doubt, as long, that is, as we keep to the visibility of the scene.
We will perhaps talk later about the veil of a certain Last Supper scene, I mean
the Last Supper [Cene] of the Holy Table. (168; 169)
The eucharist is thus a scene of reading, of transfiguration rather than
transubstantiation.
The obit ends with
“On October 15, 1994, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Nietzsche’s
birth, Sarah Kofman took her own life.”
She is both Jewish and a suicide, and yet Derrida reads her legacy rather
expansively in Christian terms.
Her father (French) was interned, deported to Auschwitz, and died there. “The
children were given French names to conceal their identities” (165). She lived
with her mothering hiding with a french family during the Occupation.
The obit of Sarah Kofman ends with her suicide in 1994. In the eulogy that
follows, Derrida singles out her last essay, published in 1995, entitled “Conjuring
Death” for attention because it is “unfinished,” because he can “read this both
posthumous and living” text, and because the text itself is about the cory and the
book, about the way Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicholase Tulp,
1632, is the doctors reading their books and not looking at the cadaver (Derrida
says he prefers corpse because it is like the French “le corp”
He cites a passage “which he mentions life three times in this place where book,
cadaver, corpus, and corpse exchange places” (177).
The editors have an endnote that hints but does not say that the text was
published posthumously and quotes thee editors’ note that preceded the original
French publication of the essay (that again acknowledges SK’s death without
mentioning it). The editors of the French original read the essay in entirely
secular terms: “Sarah emphasized that this pairing of the cadaver and the book,
both of them open and offered to the gazes of the doctors surrounded by objects
situated in a play of light, offered, quite beyond the conventions of the genre, a
representation of the scientific method. The book, a sum and source of
knowledge, at once confronted and supported by the materiality of
experimentation, gives a new impetus to the discourse of science, its texts and
its commentaries” (p. 293 n. 1 in Selected Writings: Sarah Kofman ed. Thomas
Albrecht with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Introduction by Jacques
Derrida. (Stanford UP, 2007).
Derrida’s reading of the essay follows the mix of dry obit and critical eulogy in
which he recasts her suicide as a kind of burial in his essay. She becomes a
kind of Ophelia who protests against, resists Christian burial, protests against the
transfiguration of her texts even as she makes them readable only by giving them
away in relation to a last supper.
Derrida in Work of Mourning on Louis Marin—talking about The portrait of the King,
especially the last chapter o theschipwreck, inrelation to Kanotorwicz, the simulcarum,
the way, the painting and the photograph are the same,and hten on the temporality of
reading and writing,.
Use Ricikels sentence about underground connection in Nazi pyshcoaalysis htat I cited in
my Nazi Shakespeare article. The phone call always comes form underground,
interferencedsaticetc are all death rlated.
Geopolitics of nomos of the earth shoul dnot be opposedto spectrality of Derridaorof
Benjamin.
Sepectality areadyoperatvein Schmitt’sconception of the Nomos.
Mistake about the materiality ofhtetextand hteapapratus as well.
Connect Nomos (land, geography—De Grazia----land versus territory in / body in
Richard II (buried fear) with spectrality in Hamlet in terms of burial, gravedigging.
De Grazia as performing a major exorcism of spectrality from materiality. Yet can the
spectre be better grounded? Is there a ground, national body, king’s body?
Corporeality and nomos? See Agamben’s critique of KaNTOROWICz too.
Questions about Schmitt? What is the evidence of intrusion and how does intrusion
differ from interruption? How doe s the intrusion mark itself on Hamlet? And what is
“time”?
Frame—play within the play
And history as spectral. Aduience doesn’t see James I.
And aparadox—structurla versus post strucutralist—the temporality of the state of
exception.
Corpses in WB Trauerspiel and demon as well as description of severedhead, the tree as limbless--Horatio describing a hung corpse as if itwere cut., as if its cuts cut him. The
descriptions of the battle—General to the
voiceory—severed head, limbs.
Shot in the backStrange reistnce to rading Schmitt who reads Benjmain in the appendix, exoteric versus
esoteric. But in each case the reading remains the same.
Monstroisites of Criticism, caterories of review
Categories of Monstroieties criticms
Reading in order not ot hve to read
Reading in order to lsice and dice—coreective, quaranting, caudterizing operation
Readingfrom the margin to total.
Reading form fists;
Readings to seaparte, put distance between writers are who perceived to be too close for
comfort.
Question ofsovereign, the state of exception, justice, violence, history and form,
intrusion, time.
Radical dialogisim of WB and Schmitt in lration to Derrida and spectrality—Marx and
Hamlet.
Also reading of Schmitt in relation to Strauss. Persecution of Writing and Dstrauss’s
appendix to The Concept of the Political. This candal gets less attetion. Persecution as a
double reading.
Opens up a post-structuralist reading of Schmitt.
Implications for rereading WB on Hamlet
Reading Schmitt without WB and WB without Schmitt via the ghost of Hamlet.
Derrida versus Agamben,
Not who read who first account of origins but a double origin—both on the line and
putting each other on hold.
Double origin in terms of WB’s Ursprung—not a chronological temporality.
Retrurn to philology is a return to the conflict between poetics and herrmentuics, between
philology and philosophy (violence of reading, danger of saving the text, danger of the
text.
Th eissue involves reading him in relation WB in terms of structuralism or post-
strucrualism—the text’s as ruins, as double readings. Not linear, transparent texts, parts
of a unified archive that can be retrieved at will. H or H not a detur not a lens through
which the entire Schmitt oeuvre may be read—equally familiarizing moves, totalizing ,
cutting off in order to totalize. S[ectral is uncanny—who cam efirst—Derrida on
Agamebms’s firsts in Homo Scare (in Beast and the Sovereign) and hten Agamben on
Schmitt as first to read WB, rathe rhtan reverse. A simple oirigin rahte rhtan a double
origin.
A kind of simplistic model of dialogue.
Why Hamlet and why the Trauerpsiel, similarly overlooked in the corpusof each writer.
Why the detour? Hamlet and Hecuba shows that the structure of decision is not only two
but three moments (see Weber on two moments, deciding there is a stae of exception and
hten suspending the law), and that it is everywhere. Hamlet itself is a paradoxical choice
—so the paradox proliferates endlessly. Tragedy does not serve to stabilize sovereignty
but to maximize in such a way that there are only states of exception. There is play within
the serious that Schmitt cannot get rid of.
Conversely, Hamlet and trauersspiel is only lack of sovereignty, lack of perfect form,
linked to the mazimizationof police spreaization and spirit of ditatorship in Critique of
Violence as read byDerrida in Force of Law.
So the opposites come out n the same place—of multple paradoxes andspectrality in
which the spirit of ditactorship means its clapse into intrigue (the third moment, after
suspending the law) or into total sovereignty, invisibleas such , of the ppolice 9the feds)
of a scret government.
There is the question of this ungraspable revolutionary instant, of this exceptional
decision which belongs to no historical, temporal continuum but in which the foundation
of a new law nevertheless plays, if one can say so, on something from an anterior view
that it extends, radicalizes deforms metaphorizes or metonymizes—this figure here taking
the names of war or general strike. But this figure is also a contamination. It effaces or
blurs the distinction , pure and simple, between foundation and preservation.
Force of Law 274-75
Derrida brings up the Trauerspiel book in “Force of Law,” pp. 280-81 in the context of
monarchy, spirit, “spirit is dictatorship.” See also “Second Aporia: the Haunting of the
Undecidable” (252-255) in Force of Law and also discussion of death penalty and
spectrality that begins on p. 276; true mechanism of decision (286) is explosion of
violence in anger Mentions Carl Schmitt, p. 283 in historicist and ahistoricist
(transcendental) way, p. 283. The essay is not bound by chornology260: “The
chronology of such events cannot be taken for granted.”
Schmitt has to skip a beat in order to make Hamlet a tragedy—instead of moving from
myth to tragedy, Hamlet creates a myth and turns it into tragedy at the same time.
So the intrusion of time—what kind of time intrudes? Alarm clock time? Empty
homogenous time? Uncanny time? And what odes ntrusion mean, as opposed to rupture
or interruption?
See the addition of prologues by St Jerome and then by later editors to the Bible (paratext
as theological supplement even before the secular, Enlghtenment Bible.
The unexpected and even embarrassing dialogue Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt
about political theology and tragedy has received a lot of critical attention recently, but
not with respect to Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time in Play. In
the special issue of Telos devoted to Schmitt’s book, I would like to write an essay
treating Hamlet or Hecuba as a kind of spectral text in the larger debate about political
theology, tragedy, and violence from Schmitt through Derrida, Agamben, and Weber)?
My point of departure will be an epilogue and endnote in Derrida's Politics of Friendship
saying he plans to write on Schmitt’s book (Derrida never did).1 Of central importance is
Schmitt’s spectralization of history: The central line of Hamlet or Hecuba, in my view,
is the one where he says he doesn't except the audience to see James I on stage. James I
(carrying the baggage of his beheaded mother, Mary Queen of Scots) intrudes, but only
as a ghost, in other words. So Schmitt is not doing a conventional old historicist Henry
Paul (see his Royal Play of Macbeth) reading since his notion of intrusion and formal
imperfection. Instead, he is writing a spectral historicism avant Derrida by implying that
sovereignty is always already weak sovereignty (that is, his own reading self-deconstructs
and becomes a Benjaminian Trauerspiel) and that his why he wants to keep Hamlet as a
hybrid play isolated geographically in England (see "Results" section) and also why his
appendix is contradictory--he divorces theology from politics (barbarism, religion versus
politics and the state) while again making England (Elizabeth) country in a transition, on
the way to becoming a state. But Schmitt cannot then explain how the Trauerspiel ever
emerged in Germany. At least he does not explain why it did, or why, for that matter,
Hamlet (and Shakespeare) was received as German so early. So my argument would be
that Schmitt's book is not a detour away form his political writings (into aesthetics) but
instead reveals the spectral, uncanny relation between theology and politics that haunts
Schmitt’s Political Theology. Apart from the appendix written to Walter Benjamin, by
then a dead German Jew persecuted by the Nazis who had sent Schmitt in 1928 a kind
letter along with a copy of his Trauerspiel book, Hamlet or Hecuba is a spectral book
that haunts the history of political thought Schmitt engaged (Locke vs. Hobbes) as well
Schmitt and Benjamin’s writings on violence as interpreted by Giorgio Agamben, Samuel
Weber, and Jacques Derrida). The present implications of rethinking the oft-noted
German Catholic / German Jew connections and tensions between Schmitt and Benjamin
through Hamlet or Hecuba considered as a spectral text about the spectrality of history
and play would then be made visible in Quentin Tarantino's most recent film, Inglourious
Basterds (2009), with its different set of connections and tensions and common reference
to Hamlet: the Nazi / the Jew (American Jewish GIs form a special unit of Nazi
hunters); the French collaborator / the resistance fighter and the spectral citation of
Hamlet. Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds uses Hamlet to relay the spectrality of history
(via film). Inglourious Basterds has two parallel film-within-the-film plots that roughly
parallels the Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet. In one of the two plots, highly flammable
silver nitrate film prints are used as an explosive to kill a Nazi audience, including Hitler,
Goebels, Goering, and Borman, trapped in a French theater I will conclude by playing off
Tarantino's Jean-Luc Godardian take on history as film history (in Godard’s Historie(s)
du cinema) and Tarantino's deconstructive view of violence in WWII and, by extension,
in the present (in interviews, he has compared the French Resistance characters to suicide
bombers) against the structuralist (and I think reductive) readings of violence (WB is the
same as Schmitt) by Agamben and Weber.
Also flag and handerkerchief
Horatio as double of Andrea.
Who worte the letter? Bel-Imperia? Who drops it?
Lack of motication for Don Andrea’s revenge—he says he was killed in battle. Doesn’t name a bad guy to avenge himself on—he cannot be placed, passed on Hell—his problem is hat they don’t know where to put him—so he goes through a dream to the frame via Persphone. Andrea is a weak sovereign, or a sovereign only after the play is over—he decides the fates—but even they are paradoxical in the play’s last line—“begins and never finishes”
The play in the play frame fragments rahter than unifies. Heironomo tears the text up, writes with blood (says he wants to) but uses the knife to kill Don Catillo (who he doesn’t care about, but Don Andrea, who is low born, like Horation, does).
The play sia bout a failure of translation—from life to death, from one language (sundry languages) t English (Latin is not translated0 and from text to peformance or performance to text. Fittingly,Kyd himself went missing as the play’s author, and it has an uncanny satus as being a partially missing play. The Ur-Hamlet—Hamlet via germany.
It’s a Trauerspiel—a ruination based on language and medium of language—finally Hiernomno bites out his tongue—silences himself thereby.
Silence is about a cut, a kind of violence,, and spectrality thatgets in the ay of trnsaltion, meaning carrying across. Hence the ned for a passport, for passage, pass on, that then turns into “consort” but only in death (when the characters are dead). Bel-Imperia doesn’t stick to the script. Not clear if Revenge is the author of the vents. He talks abut detny and can fall asleep at the wheel because he knows alreadyhowit will all (not) work out.Failure to translate Cahtolicism and greek mythology-Bindicita mihi both the Old Testament ad Seenca. He is a holding a obok, some editors say it is Seneca. Butthere is no info about the book in the play itself.
The book is a prop—action is not grounded in a foundational medium—lnguage—rahter language creates con-fusion –in the plot (Andrea’s revenge gets fused with Heironomo’s) and in the theology and in he characters (Horatio as avenged victim, like Don Andrea). And in the props (flags and handkerchief. And letters (Bel-Imperia’s is feinged not feigned.
Also a probem of staging—what to do withBel-Imperia’s corpse—shedes off stage or in in a small theater in the theater with curtains on stage.
Oddly enough "passport" comes up three times in Don Andrea's openingspeech. It is used n relation to going from life to earth, from earthto hell. (in the Arden edition, pp. 5, 6, and 7)
It also comes up later in relation to a mistaken execution, and"passport" is used instead of "pardon.""Sir, here is his passport; I pray you sir, we have done him wrong."
Act III, vi (in the Arden edition, p. 68)
Before the guy is hung (he actually is guilty of murder), he isawaiting a "pardon" (the word is used several times) from Lorenzo thatis supposed to reside in a box Lorenzo gives his servant to show themurderer (who murdered at Lorenzo's request) but that is actuallyempty. The servant look in it and sees it is empty but keeps pointingto it in order to reassure (though he does so out of sadistic joy)the murderer as he is about to be hung.
Andrea uses the word "consort" at the end of the play (in the tenseof transport, but he , apparently, still has his passport with him.
The play is really bizarre and interesting in saying that the playwithin the play will be and was multi-lingual but then actually beingin English after a note says that the original, in "sundrylanguages," has been set down in English, implying that the printededition is a translation of the originally multi-lingual performance.
Or was the note spoken during the performance?
In either case, the framing device is a disruption of the play'stextual integrity as well as translation, since we can never be surethere was an original with the different languages. Al we have is aspecter of a text in a play that is a ply within the play. Editors,of course, have no idea what to do with the note after having how itcontradicts Heironomo's description of the play.
I'm wondering if there is a connection H's reference to Babylon, as in"Babel on," because the play also mixes Christian theology and Greekmyths (making the latter the real frame) and the play within the playis about an Islamic turk who kills his friend to win the love of aChristian Italian woman, who rejects his advances. H says that in theoriginal the woman commits suicide but that he amended the play sothat Bel-Imperia would not kill herself. But she exceeds his"translation" and kills herself anyway.Speech and silence also come up when Hfinally bites off his tongue (ina strange Lavinia like moment from Titus A except that he does ithimself) and takes the "pen knife" and stabs the Duke of Castile.
The allegorical frame with Revenge and Andrea contains hte plot(recapitulates at the end) yet oddly departs form the play (H'sattempt at self-allegorization is dismissed by Lorenzo’s the ravings ofa madman. So as intriguer, H has to resort to a play in a play thathas to be translated, and is, yet is not (the original goes missing,becomes a ghost like Revenge and Andrea).
Interesting too the play ends on a Schmittian not about friend andfoe, ease and woe.
Thinking more about the play (I am teaching it Tuesday) and aboutextremity in it along Schmittian lines and the way te frame sets up adoubling (or series of them), mainly between Andrea and Heironimo, thatinitiates a ruination across the text, a collapse of linguistic,religious and national distinctions Kyd "gets wrong" the Englishhistory), and one could extend this spectralization effect to theplay's textual status--corrupt passages with missing lines , on theone hand, and additions from 1602 edition, on the other,additions that are published as fragments at the end of the Ardenedition.The text of the play is a ruin for the editor.
The plot of hte play WB , or the plotting via the ghost frame, and theextended speeches (also extreme) or single scenes with one character(Isabella when she kills herself) has a double origin in WB's sensethat creates a fntasy of an UR-play or that the play is the UR-Hamletand succeeds only in turning ruinination into urnination (a containerthat doesn't mange to contain its ashes, isn't installed intose palces--can't think of the word, where urns of ashes of dead people arestored.Columbarium
Also thinking of the play as a total Trauerspiel--almost a caricatureof itself, excessive (hyperextended speeches mixed with hyperbriefdialogue--stichomythia), eccentric, violent, and, in the view ofeditors, "corrupt" (inconsistent and incomplete--missing parts andhaving leftover parts). T.W. Rose has a pretty good intro to hisedition. The oddest (and sadly, totally meaningless) thing I havefound is that Milton's nephew Edward Phillips misattributed the playin 1675, and then in the last century, Philip Edwards edited it (in1959)! Perfect that the first name Philip has only one "l," not two.Too much (and not much).It works really well for my course because of the "Ur-Hamlet" (missingGerman edition of Kyd's "lost" play with a German title) comes in. Atotally non-Benjaminian notion of the Ursprung.
Hamlet (Out of Film) and the Irony of the Political
“The so-called immortal works just flash briefly through every present time. Hamlet is one of the very fastest, the hardest to grasp.”—Walter Benjamin, “Notes (II)” (285)
A reading of the film frame as ironic bombshell opening up spectral history in Tarantino’s film may be productively deployed by turning to the unexpected, even embarrassing dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt about the state of exception as it bears on political theology, tragedy, and temporality.1 From our perspective, the main interest of Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time in Play2 is Schmitt’s spectralization of history: Schmitt says he doesn’t expect the audience to see James I on stage. James I (carrying the baggage of his beheaded mother,
1 For a return to Schmitt in relation to the George W. Bush administration, see Horton.2 For further reflections, see also Kahn, Weber, Lupton, Agamben’s Homo Sacer (15–30; 75–112), and Derrida’s endnote on Hamlet or Hecuba in The Politics of Friendship (165–67, 169-70n32); see also Derrida on the ghost of Old Hamlet’s visor being open or closed having no bearing on sovereignty defined as seeing without being seen in Specters of Marx (7–8) and The Beast and Sovereignty (6, 293).
Mary Queen of Scots) intrudes, but only as a ghost, in other words. Schmitt is not doing a conventional old historicist Henry Paul reading, since his is a notion of intrusion and formal imperfection. Instead, he is writing a spectral historicism avant Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, by implying that sovereignty is always already weak sovereignty (that is, Schmitt’s own reading self-deconstructs and becomes a Benjaminian Trauerspiel). Schmitt’s book is not a detour away from his political writings (into aesthetics), but rather reveals the spectral, uncanny relation between theology and politics that haunts Political Theology. Apart from the Appendix written to Walter Benjamin, by
then long dead, who had sent Schmitt in 1928 a kind letter
along with a copy of his Trauerspiel book, Hamlet or
Hecuba is a spectral book that haunts the history of political
thought Schmitt engaged (Locke vs. Hobbes). Schmitt’s
book is gaining new attention from Shakespeareans now
that an authorized translation has been published, but may
best be read within the wider context of the relation
between force and justice that concerned Benjamin and
Schmitt. With the exception of Derrida’s explosive essay
“The Force of Law,” critics have tried to salvage Benjamin’s
conception of violence and dismiss Schmitt. Yet perhaps
Schmitt’s value lies in his repetition in the Hamlet book in a
more extreme manner, the implicitly paradoxical discussion
of sovereignty and the state of exception he had made
explicitly paradoxical in his political writings. To put it
another, to what extent it Schmitt’s book on Hamlet
overtaken by irony? Whether Hamlet is a tragedy and
Trauerspiel matters to Schmitt because he wants to
separate politics from play: politics is what interrupts play.
To demonstrate this point Schmitt returns to Hamlet, a play
Benjamin classified as a Trauerspiel about indecision.
Schmitt ironically demonstrates, however, that the state of
exception is everywhere in Hamlet, leaving Schmitt unable
to make his argument and necessitating an Appendix in
which he returns to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book.3 That is an 3 Kahn criticizes Schmitt for not be able to tell the difference between a true decision (as opposed to faked states of emergency) but misses the more important point that the truth of any state of exception can never be determined; indeed, any decision will immediately be attacked by enemies of the state as a fraud, and no one will be in turn to decide whether the critics are provocateurs, paranoid, or correct (or all of the above). Aesthetics and politics cannot rightly be separated out and reduced to truth and fraud, if 1 See Derrida’s endnote on Hamlet or Hecuba in The Politics of Friendship (1994; trans.
2005), note 32, pp. 169-70, and the epilogue to the essay 165-67. See also Derrida on the
ghost of Old Hamlet’s visor being open or closed having no bearing on sovereignty
defined as seeing without being seen in Specters of Marx (1994) and The Beast and
Sovereignty (2009).
argument to be made at another time.
Irony and the Character of Inglourious Basterds
LAERTES: Know you the hand?CLAUDIUS: ’Tis Hamlet’s character.
Hamlet makes a brief appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a kind of verbal cameo.4 A film actress and several Nazi soldiers on leave in Occupied Paris are getting drunk in a bar. They are playing a game that involves guessing the names of characters written on cards they have each stuck on their own foreheads. When one Nazi soldier fears that his character may be controversial because the character is American, the German film actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), who is secretly working as a double agent for the Allies, declares that
it’s not controversial. The nationally of the author, has nothing to do with the nationally of the character. The Character is the character. Hamlet’s not British, he’s Danish.
Although Inglourious Basterds makes no other overt reference to Hamlet or Shakespeare,5 the way that the film 4 The Hamlet cameo echoes the uncredited audio cameos of prior Tarantino stars Samuel L. Jackson and Harvey Keitel.5 It does, however, self-consciously divide itself into five “chapters,” which we might consider a displacement of the more conventional five-act structure of a play. The Austrian actor who plays S.S. Officer Hans Landa, Christoph Waltz, has, when interviewed, taken to likening Inglourious Basterds to “Shakespearean” drama (Topel), as did David Carradine before him with speaking of Kill Bill, and Bruce Willis for Pulp Fiction--although for all this seemed a
references Hamlet in the context of literary character criticism may have productive implications for Shakespeare film criticism. For some time, Shakespeare on film criticism has been trying to leave behind considerations of Shakespeare and effectively read a given film as a film. In practice, however, this apparently film-centered criticism has meant that a given film related to Shakespeare is read as if it were a text, and thereby historicized the same way New Historicists might historicize the text of Hamlet. More recently, the tendency to historicize Shakespeare films as discrete ideological reproductions inadvertently coincides with a tendency in Shakespeare textual criticism and “New New Historicism” (or material culture criticism) to divorce
vaguely honorific category more than any more specific claim about the cinematic inheritance of theatre. In a 2007 GQ interview, Tarantino gamely suggested that he’s
always had a thought maybe that I might have been Shakespeare in another life. I don’t really believe that 100 percent, and I don’t really care about Shakespeare, I’ve never been into Shakespeare, but then people are constantly bringing up all of these qualities in my work that mirror Shakespearean tragedies and moments and themes. People have written lots of pieces about the parallels of my work and Shakespeare. I remember in the case of Reservoir Dogs, writing this scene where the undercover cop is teaching Tim Roth how to be an undercover cop, and when the actors came in to rehearse it, Harvey Keitel read it, and he thought I had just taken Hamlet’s speech to the players and broke it down into modern words. I’d never read Hamlet’s speech to the players.
Titus Andronicus has been cited as “Shakespeare’s Tarantino Play” (see, for instance, the Reduced Shakespeare Company), to the irritation of Julie Taymor.
the Shakespeare text (considered as physical, not metaphysical) from its performance history.6
The Hamlet reference in Inglourious Basterds implicitly calls into question an ontological discretion that historicism requires in order to situate its object of study in a narrative sequence and map: seemingly transparent paratextual distinctions between title and character, author and character, author and title are subject in Tarantino’s film to a medium-specific spectralization that divides sound from script and that demands a careful attention to Inglourious Basterds’ allegorization of the medium of film in relation to its (re)projection and its shooting script. Consider Bridget von Hammersmark’s statement “Character is character.” Two interpretations arise from an inaudible but scripted difference between lower-case-[c] “character” and capital-[C ] “Character” when the line is delivered in the film and when it is printed in the screenplay. In the former, inaudible case, the statement may be understood as merely tautological [“c” is “c”]; in the other, scripted case the “Character” is only the character (independent from the other). In either case (lower or upper), the repetition of the word character calls attention, for it is spoken by a character in the film who is herself an actress playing a role in order to help the other side in a film. By extension, the difference between a letter “c” in character also calls up the meaning of ‘character’ as letter in a film that deliberately mis-spells7 its own title, perhaps 6 As is the case, for example, with Margareta de Grazia’s book, Hamlet without Hamlet (2007).7 Indeed, one is tempted to speculate further that such a wayward spelling (or, to use the language of the First Folio Macbeth, “weyward” [see Thompson]) additionally evokes the erratic precedent of “Renaissance” (or, as our students often imagine, “Old English”)-style orthography. While “inglourious” is not an extant orthographic alternative from the early modern period, “basterd” certainly is—in Shakespeare alone, the Quarto Henry V has Burgundy cursing “Normanes, basterd Normanes,” and the First Folio version of the same play has MacMorris’s “What ish my
in order to call attention to its own inaudible but scripted difference from Enzo G. Castellari’s earlier film of the same name, Inglorious Bastards (1978).8
By putting the “character of ‘character’” in play through a reference to Hamlet, Inglourious Basterds systematically unfolds oppositions between Allies and Nazis, between Nazis and Jews, in ways that bear similarity to Jean-Luc Godard’s retrospective montage of Hollywood films and stills and at World War II documentaries of the Nazis at war in Histoire(s) du Cinema.9 That is, like Godard’s a-chronological film about history, the cinematic self-conscious of Inglourious Basterds implies that history since the twentieth century cannot be understood apart
nation?” speech read: “Ish a Villaine, and a Basterd, and a Knaue, and a Rascall”; likewise, line 2 of Sonnet 124 speaks of “fortunes basterds” in the 1609 quarto. (For bastardy in early modern drama, see Neill and Crawford.) Note that the only instance of “inglorious” in Shakespeare’s works is uttered by the Bastard in King John in reply to the King’s peace treaty with the Pope’s legate:
Oh inglorious league!Shall we, upon the footing of our land,Send fair-play orders, and make compromise,Insinuation, parley, and base truceTo arms invasive? (5.1.65–69)
8 Underscoring need to read film history recursively with the history of Shakespearean performance, Enzo G. Castellari directed Romeo and Juliet as well as a Western version of Hamlet, entitled Johnny Hamlet (1968); furthermore, Castellari’s Inglorious Bastards itself mentions Elsinore. Castellari and original Inglorious Basterds lead actor Bo Svenson both appear in Tarantino’s film, in a characterological nod to the earlier version.9 For Godard’s other films also related to the Holocaust, see the prologue “Hell” in Notre Musique (2004) and In Praise of Love (2001).
from the history of film.10 In addition to linking war and cinema (as Godard, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler, and others have previously done), by literalizing silver nitrate film as an explosive device to be burned at a film premiere attended by Hitler, Tarantino metaphorizes film as a spectral medium that both precedes and follows “real” history.11
Loosely parallel to Hamlet’s inscription of Senecan tragedy and Elizabethan tragedy through the play-within-the-play, Inglourious Basterds uses a series of film-within-the-film references that invoke a history of cinema and film media. Beyond the nitrate footage, overtly meta-cinematic aspects include the shooting, development, and the splicing of a 35mm film print with a soundtrack into the final reel of the final reel of Stoltz der Nation (Pride of the Nation); and 10 For Tarantino’s biographical analogue to Godard’s a-chronology, note that
as a struggling young actor, Tarantino chose to put films on his resume that he had never acted in, but he chose obscure films by great directors, figuring casting agents would never have the time to confirm his claim while being impressed by the famous director. One of Tarantino’s favorite directors is Jean Luc Godard (Tarantino’s production company, A Band Apart, is named after Godard’s film Bande À Part). He credited himself for playing a part that he never played in the film Godard made in 1987. That film was King Lear. (David)
11 The finale’s coup d’cinema is thus a kind of Moustrap inset that actually works, instead of the somewhat uncertain results of Hamlet’s production of The Murder of Gonzago. Landa had earlier in the film had characterized Jews as rats—“How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!” Yet the grandiosely-theatrical ending is perhaps more Marlovian than Shakespearean, akin to what Barabas had planned in The Jew of Malta.
the character of British Lieutenant Hicox, who is recruited for a sabotage plot not only because he is fluent in German, but also because he’s a film critic, with a bi-monthly column and two published studies (Art Of The Eyes, The Heart, and The Mind: A Study of German Cinema in the Twenties and Twenty-Four Frame Da Vinci, described as a “a subtexual film criticism study of the work of German director G.W. Pabst”). Additional cinematic citations abound: the German actor Emil Jannings attends the premiere of Stoltz der Nation; references are made to UFA (the German film studio taken over by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in 1933); at the Parisian theatre, marquees are shown for Le Corbeau (The Crow, dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943—filmed during the Occupation, giving rise to contentious critiques about the degree to which it ought to be considered pro- or anti-Nazi) and the German “Berg” film starring Leni Riefenstahl, Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (The White Hell of Pitz Palü, 1929), is to be shown for “German Night.”
In Tarantino’s self-conscious hands, film history becomes a principle of divisibility and misdirection, tearing and taking down the political differences between characters on opposing sides. In some cases, the divisibility is literal, or letteral. For example, Shosanna12 Dreyfus (Melaine Laurent) is the solitary Jewish survivor from the massacre of her family in the film’s opening sequence, who turns revenger. Years later, in Paris, she takes down letters from the marquee from the cinema she owns when she first meets the Nazi turned film star, private Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl); in a subsequent scene, she is in the process of putting up letters on the same marquee for a new film when she is picked up by Frederick’s adjutant, and taken by force to take her to lunch.
The division between political sides unfolds through a vertiginous, ironically corrosive series of references to films in the film that link both sides. For example, Frederick 12 Along with many other orthographic irregularities, Tarantino drops the “h” from the conventional Jewish spelling of Shoshanna.
Zoller compares his role as a sniper in Pride of the Nation to Sargeant York (1941), which is to say both the World War I American soldier of the same name and the title of a Hollywood film based on his life, made by Howard Hawks during World War II as propaganda. Similarly, Frederick says he will become the equivalent of the Hollywood actor Van Johnson after Pride of the Nation is released. In other words, a Nazi character in the diegesis stars in a film in the diegesis based on an historical event outside the diegesis that resembles an American film. Yet this reversibility follows from asymmetrical relations between sides rather than from a straightforward mirroring. Whereas Frederick plays himself, Sargeant York is played by film star Gary Cooper (near the end Senator Hull tells York about ten job offers—the first to be in a Hollywood film about himself, the second to be in the Ziegfield follies, but he turns them all down and returns to his rural home); and whereas the anachronistically edited Pride of the Nation focuses entirely on the soldiers killed by the sniper, Sargeant York is mostly a romantic melodrama about the rakish Quaker Alvin York finding his religious faith (a comparable scene with York in a machine gun nest fighting off Germans takes place near the end of the film). Tarantino’s double flip on fiction and history, American and German, is echoed by an internal split in the characterization of Frederick, who at times seems very charming: when watching Pride of the Nation, he reacts like an ethically conflicted soldier out of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), while the rest of the audience laughs and cheers wildly as American G.I.s get quickly and brutally shot down. Yet Frederick also turns out to be a sadistic would-be rapist and murderer.
These divisions are corrosively ironic, in that they open up frames that double back on the film’s audiences. Heroic Sargeant York morphs into the demented killer Charles Whitman.13 Ethan (John Wayne) in The Searchers (1956) 13 That is to say, the plot of Pride of the Nation resembles Sargeant York less than it does Targets (1968), based the University of Texas student-turned-sniper Charles Whitman. Targets ends with a shoot-out in drive-in theater playing
morphs into the part Apache leader Lieutenant Aldo who demands soldiers meet a scalp count (taken from Nazi corpses), echoed in turn by the Nazis referring to German novelist Karl May’s character, Winnetou Chief of the Apaches. Goebbels is compared to Hollywood producer David O. Selznick. The story of King Kong, in chains in New York, opens up the story of “the negro in America.” Shosanna’s projected film image in the movie theater after Pride of the Nation ends recalls less Big Brother in 1984 (as the screenplay says it will) or even the Great Oz, than the end of Stephen Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) when the face a ghost released by a Nazi archeologist from the Ark looking like a beautiful woman turns into the face of a skeleton and then kills (by cremation) all the Nazis. In each case, the framing opens up a seeming exception, authorizing paralegal violence in the name of justice that turns out to be (or always already to have been) the norm.
The most controversial irony concerns Jews and Nazis. Unlike Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, Inglourious Basterds does have explicitly Jewish characters, and they too are divided. On the one hand, we have the G.I. “Jews,” as it were, some of whom are first-generation European immigrants, and all of whom act in Germany as terrorist guerrilla fighters; these are the characters promoted by the trailers for audiences expecting an “action” film. Yet on the other hand we have the French Shosanna, who is excepted from the mass murder of her Jewish family by Hans Landa, who laughs as he decides not to shoot her after aiming his pistol at her as she flees.14 “Operation Kino” (“Kino” means
Roger Corman’s horror film The Terror (1963); in the context of Targets, The Terror supposedly stars the recently retired actor “Byron Orlok” (played by Boris Karloff), yet Corman’s film actually starred Boris Karloff himself. Orlok stops the sniper, Bobby Thompson, who has become confused by the close proximity of a huge screen image of Karloff and the life-size actor Orlok.14 In Lubitsch’s film, the character named Greenberg wants to play Shylock, and twice recites the “Hath not a Jew” speech; yet the speech is carefully revised to omit
movie theater in German), the failed British plot to blow up the theater by having Allied soldiers dress as Nazi officers, echoes the plot of To Be or Not to Be (in which there are two actors playing Hitler, one impersonating him, one the “real” thing, and two almost identical photographs of Hitler and his impersonator; neither Hitler nor his impersonator is confused with the other by the audience).15
The least obvious parallel in the film (between a child and
Shosanna) is also the most destructive of political
oppositions between normal, lawful violence and
exceptional violence authorized in a time of war and a state
of emergency. When Shosanna explains to her lover and
projectionist how the nitrate films in the theater will serve
as the explosive, the screen splits in half and on the right
appears a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage
(1936), based on Conrad’s The Secret Agent. The sequence
involves the child Stevie getting on a bus with a film
canister that contains a bomb. Stevie, unaware that he is
references to Jews, and is instead delivered as “Have we not eyes?” Mel Brooks gave the Jewish characters yellow stars in his 1983 remake of Lubitch’s film. On the non-representation of Jews in 1940s Hollywood films, see Karpf’s 1943 essay.15 As Ryback has demonstrated, Hitler “owned the collected works of William Shakespeare, published in German translation in 1925 by Georg Müller . . . He appears to have imbibed his Hamlet. ‘To be or not to be’ was a favorite phrase, as was ‘It is Hecuba to me’” (Ryback xi–xii).
carrying a bomb, is delayed several times, and the rest of
the people are killed when the bomb explodes. The survivor
Shosanna at this point in the film appears to be an
exception since, unlike Stevie, she was spared being
murdered by Landa as a child. Yet the scene cancels her
exceptionalism in that we see that she has become a “sui-
decider,” so to speak, as an adult, a kin of “no Sho-ah.”
Saw Inglourious Basterds again yesterday. Enjoyed it and noticed some stuff I
hadn't the first me, mostly about the narrative exposition (the use of cameo insets
or sidebands--I don't know what to call them).
Another Brigitte star in a related berg film, in this case anti-Nazi.
I've ordered films referenced in the film including as well as Hitler: Dead or Alive
(1942) and a bunch of related trashy B war films from the same time that have
some bearing on IG, even if QT has never seen them. I also thoguht I had
ordered Targets, but apparently didn't. So I (re?)ordered it.
Thinking more about Metropolis as well--the actress in that film is Brigitte Helm--sort of like Brigitte von Hammersmark (who is fictional)--at the end of the "Revenge of the Great Face" chapter and how Lang / Harbou's quite conventional allegory works quite differently from Tarantino's which, in a short essay I am now writing, am comparing to the Trauerspiel as Walter Benjamain defines and his idiosyncratic concept of allegory. Good Maria a CHrisitan character who adapts an Old Testmanet story asa parable, with Jewish slaves building the building for the ?
ANd then, if Rowtang is a Jew (pentagram rather than Jewish star), andhis robot Maria, a witch, is also a Jewess, she is a double, alook-alike.
Just as the film can be regarded as anti-Nazi and pro-Nazi (or pro-capitalist).
In any case, teh allegorical strucutre of Metropolis, inclduingFreder's delusional dream of hte dance of death inspired by the goodMaria! takes a traditional, narrative form, of insets, or filmin thefilm, that does WB's allegory of Inglorurious Basterds, which ahssidebar narratives that aer coninuous in narartive logic (like anillustration in a book) but not temporally the same or even clearlymarked as past present and fuutre.aking of ht efilm inset happensafter they talk about making hte film. It hapens discontinuously.
I hope to get in a note on Pabst's To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Lang's
Manhunt (1942).
Hitler - Dead or Alive – 1942 film
about American gangsters from
Alcatraz prison on a mission to kill
Hitler.
Inglourious Basterds (2009) was
filmed at UFA/
Universum Film AG, better known as
Ufa or UFA, was the principal film studio
in Germany, home of the German film
industry during the Weimar Republic and
through World War II, and a major force in
world cinema from 1917 to 1945. UFA
was created during November 1917 in
Berlin as a government-owned producer
of World War I propaganda and public
service films.
UFA was also the studio of the bergfilm,
a uniquely German genre that glorified
and romanticized mountain climbing,
downhill skiing, and avalanche-dodging.
The bergfilm genre was primarily the
creation of director Arnold Fanck, and
examples like The Holy Mountain
(1926) and White Ecstasy (1931) are
notable for the appearance of Austrian
skiing legend Hannes Schneider and a
young Leni Riefenstahl.
the company became a producer of Nazi
propaganda films after Hitler became
gained power in 1933. Joseph Goebbels'
ministry of propaganda essentially
controlled the content of UFA films
through political threat.
In 1921, Decla Bioscop passed into
Universum Film AG (UFA) which had
been founded in 1917. This company built
the large studio (which is now known as
the "Marlene Dietrich Halle") in 1926 for
the major film production of Metropolis
by Fritz Lang. The first German sound
stage in Babelsberg, the Tonkreuz, was
built during 1929.
David O. Selznick 9also referenced in
Godard’s L’histoires de cinema
UFA included Fritz Lang Brigitte Helm ... Maria Rudolf
Klein-Rogge ... C. A. Rotwang, the inventor
Metropolis as an anti Nazi or as a reactionary film.
Sigfried Kracauer, The Mss Ornament Weimar Essays
Andres Husyen, “The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” in After
the Great Divide: Modernism, Mas Culture, Postmodernism Indiana, 1986) 65-81,
Metropolis BFI
character also has the biblical parallel of the Egyptian pharaoh enslaving the
Jews to build pyramids. .... Rotwang and Freder fight on the roof top of the
cathedral
. to the pentagram being confused with the Jewish Star of David, which has six
points. .
Dolgenos, Peter The star on C.A. Rotwang's Door: Turning Kracauer on its Head.
Journal of Popular Film & Television (Summer, 1997), 68-75
" The half-Jewish film director Fritz Lang rejected propaganda minister Joseph Goebbel's offer of a top position in the newly Nazified German film industry and left the country to be one of Hollywood's leading directors of leftism and anti-Nazi films instead. One of Lang's controversial films, 'Metropolis', is criticized as portraying an overly simplistic message when examined from a political point of view. The film's plot is compared with the confusing activities of the National Socialist Party. Rotwang, the film's villain, is observed to possess several Jewish traits." [Expanded Academic Index]"According to Joseph Goebbels, it was when he and Hitler went to see Metropolis
in a small-town cinema that Hitler declared that Fritz Lang "will make the Nazi
film." One can shed light on the ideology of Metropolis by comparing it with that
of the National Socialist Party. The Nazis offered a critique of the
industrial/capitalist civilization of their time, which bore roughly the same relation
to a standard socialist critique as Metropolis does to a standard leftist film.
Whereas the socialists spoke for those at the bottom of urban society, the Nazis,
and ultimately Lang in this one film, spoke for those who were altogether outside
society looking fearfully in. In the 1920s, the Nazis' support came
disproportionately from rural areas, especially from people who distrusted
modernization and urbanization and feared becoming proletarianized. To them,
Metropolis--filled with futuristic architecture that the party rejected along with all
modern art--might have seem ed real as a projection of their worst fears about
the city." [Art Index]
Leni Riefenstahl in G.W. Pabst’s ; film posters and marquees appear; the
German double-agent is a film actress; the German villain is the star of a film that
brings all the Nazi top brass to its premiere;. All of these are read largely through
the prism of 1960s and 1970s American films, however, most notably in Stoltz
der Nation (Pride of the Nation) and Targets (dir. Peter Bogndavich, 1968), and
the frequent Sergio Leone spaghetti Western soundtrack music (the music calling
up Leone’s Chapter one is titled “Once Upon a Time in . . . . Nazi Occupied
Rance, 1942), effectively alluding to Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and
Once Upon a Time in America). Plus some seventies Graphics for the Bear,
compared to The Golem, filmed three times in Weimar Germany, with
anachronistic rock music. And the division of the film into chapters and the white
lettering and white directional arrows for the Nazi chief of staff—Goering and
Borman.
Sargeant (Brad Pitt) says that watching the baseball bat is the only chance to go
the movies; the moreover, the Brit officer is a film critic who has written a book on
24 Frames;
still tends to read films as if they were texts ad in the same kinds of terms of
cultural studies (transgressive).2 I suggest by a greater knowledge of film
analysis, film history (paper, silver nitrate, celluloid, analogue (video and
laserdisc) and digital (DVDs and Blu-rays; digital downloads), a wider database
(knowledge of films having nothing to do with Shakespeare) and film and media
theory. By turning to Quentin Taranatino’s (2009), a film controversial for the way
some say it deconstructs American Jewish soldiers and Nazis, in relation to
Walter Benjamin’s book on the German Trauerspiel, or “Mourning Play,” we want
to show how film history and theory may engage other fields of Shakespeare
(historicism, especially Frederic Jameson’s account of allegory), philosophy
(Derrida’s Spectres of Marx), and cultural materialism, or the “New New
Historicism.”3 We may arrive a future of falling4
Linking Tarantino and Benjamin may seem odd, and in doing so I concede
that I am limited by considerations of chronology or influence (I doubt Taranatino
has read Benjamin or Schmitt) partly because of accidental time lags of
translation.5 Moreover, Hamlet occupies only a marginal place in both film and
WB’s book. The film star Brigitte von Hammsermark (Diane Kruger) mentions
2 For a recent example see SQ essay n Hotel.3 Hamlet without Hamlet (2006)
4 Richard Burt, "SShockspeare: (Nazi) Shakespeare Goes Heil-lywood," in A Companion to Shakespeare in Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen, (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2005), 437-56. See also Enemy of Women, which includes a scene of Joseph Goebbel’s auditioning an actress who performs lines from Juliet’s balcony scene.5 Telos published last chapter and the appendix, but skipped over the conclusion,
“Results.” An English translation was published in 2006. First chapter of Hamlet
or Hecuba published in
Hamlet during a game played at a bar to differentiate the character form the
author. Despite the fact that Germany is at war with the UK, it is acceptable to
pretend to be Hamlet because Hamlet the character is a Dane. The author’s
nationality does not matter. The film has vague connection to Hamlet in that it
about it concerns revenge and has many film within the film plot developments,
Similarly, Benjamin makes only passing reference to Hamlet and Shakespeare in
his Trauerpsiel book. And even Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba is an atypical
considered in relation to his overall output, focused on political theology, not
aesthetics. My aim is not a total synthesis of different silos, however, but to work
through the abjection of deconstruction (the repression of Paul de Man and the
sanctification of Derrida, the Holy Jew) work through some of the resistances
present in each silo in order to arrive through Hamlet, a reading go the film that
allegorizes film history as Trauerspiel, defined in part by weak sovereignty of the
tyrant, martyr, and intriguer to declare and resolve a state of emergency or
exception, rather than tragedy, which ends in a decision, however indecisive.
This means, implicitly, a brief for the persistence of metaphysics, for the
spectrality that remains imminent in Hamlet’s so-called materiality, and a
pushback on recent historicist efforts to “discover” the true early modern Hamlet,
linked to the earth, and exorcize the modern, interiorized Hamlet.
many allusions to specific films (an interior doorframe shot of Shoshanah
escaping in the distance is taken straight out of John Ford’s Western, The
Searchers (1956) and footage from Alfred Hitcock’s Sabotage (1936) being two
of the more notable) and moments of exposition involving film as a projected
medium. Like Jean Luc-Godard in L’histoire(s) de cinema, Tarantino thinks that
the history of the twentieth century cannot be separated from the history of film,
but Tarantino’s film goes in the direction of Trauerspiel in making the potentially
pedagogical aspects of his films ornamental and excessive
Death by Cinema
All of these scenes link, as Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler have shown, the
history of war and the history of cinema.
I take up
Reading Inglourious Basterds!, as a Trauerspiel, which I will do shortly, will
help us better understand the stake in the distinction between Tragedy and
Trauerspiel with regard to Hamlet, especially with regard to historical time and
eschatological or messianic time. Although Hamlet may be mentioned once in
the film, it was centrally important to Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s
account of tragedy and Trauerspiel. The fact that Marxist and mystic Benjamin
cites Catholic Nazi Schmitt’s Political Theology approvingly and even sent a copy
of the book with a flattering cover letter to Schmitt continues to be scandal, but
their agreement about the inadequacies of liberal democracy are less important,
for our purposes, that their different views on aesthetics matters and on Hamlet
as Trauerspiel. Benjamin claimed Hamlet was a Trauerspiel while Schmitt later
in Hamlet or Hecuba said the opposite and devoted an appendix to refuting
Benjamin. While both Benjamin and Schmitt agree that the Trauerspiel and
tragedy are concerned with what Schmitt calls the intrusion of time in play and
what Benjamin calls the stand still, they differ in thinking that the intrusion of time,
the disruption of what Benjamin calls clock time, or elsewhere empty
homogenous time means the end of play. Schmitt thinks that liberal democracy
is play, and that politics means stopping he theatrical performance and being
serious, thereby putting an end to one form of government and beginning a new
world order. By contrast, Walter Benjamin regards the Trauerspiel as incapable
of ending. If the state of exception for both men means a suspension, that
suspension allows for sovereignty, according to Schmitt, the making of decisions
and action, while for Benjamin, sovereignty in the Trauerspiel is always weak (the
capacity to rule is never adequate to the ruler), and while leading to downfalls
and deaths is also an allegorical pile up, a discontinuous succession in which
there is repetition without a goal. Both readings are paradoxical: Schmtt,
polioytial theorist of the state of exception who finds of states of exception
everywhere, turns to Hamlet, a play about the hero’s indecision he says is
tragedy precisely because historical time intrudes in it. Far from being an Old
Historicist, Schmit’s reading of Hamlet in relation to the pressure James I’s
succession exerted on the characterization of Gertrude (Mary, Queen of Scots) is
a post-structralist, symptomatic, paradoxical reading: Schmitt does not expect to
see James I on stage; rather, James I, or history itself, appears in spectral form.
Similarly, he views tragedy as imperfect, incomplete form. Moreover, he
distinguishes Hamlet as a hydrid from Don Quixote (“pure” Spanish Catholic) and
Doctor Faustus (“pure” German Protestant). At a moment in which tragedy is
identified with a “pure” national literature and race (Jews have disappeared from
Schmitt’s account of Cervantes’ Catholic Spain), this account of Hamlet is striking
to say the least, and it is perhaps unsurprising that the S.S. kept a file on Schmitt.
Rather than regard Benjamin and Schmitt as having opposed views of similar
problems, or see them as the same (Agamben and even Weber), we may more
productively see them as having an uncanny, spectral relation to each other.
Their difference lies between their sameness, especially their shared interest in
paradox.
We may best approach Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds! as an avatar of the
seventeenth century German baroque Trauerspiel by turning briefly first to
Benjamin’s second and last chapter “Allegory and Trauerspiel.” Benjamin’s
concept of allegory differs significantly from other historicists (like Frederic
Jameson) in that allegory is not a narrative for Benjamin; it is about a
paradoxical tension between collection and dispersion, falling and fixing, looking
up from below, the absorption of theater and performance by the book and by the
image. It’s emotionalism, bombast, violence, and ostenstation all mark its
imperfection.
G.I. Jew
Immediately upon its release, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds! was criticized in
some quarters for seeming to appear to turn American Jewish soldiers into Nazis
as they kill Nazis in merciless fashion and scalp the corpses. While I find his
reading simplistic for obvious reasons, it does get at something central to the
film, namely, the constant reversal of German and American, German and
French, collaborator and resistance fighter/ terrorist.6 The German version of
Sargeant York who then can’t watch the film he stars in as himself because the
violence is too disturbing. And he morphs in the film into Charles Whitman, the
film in he film like targets. The reversal keeps moving form film to extra film
6 In my view, the film is not anti-Semitic. It allegorizes the politics of film violence
in ways that puts intense pressure on an apparent distinction between the
diegetic Nazi audience viewing the war film within the film (Hitler loves it) and the
audience watching the Tarantino film (us). More interestingly, Tarentino indulges
and interrogates a fantasy about ending WWII by killing Hitler et al and Nazism in
toto through two scenes involving what Carl Schmitt (Nazi and Catholic political
theorist) called the "state of exception." During a "state of emergency," Schmitt
argues in The Concept of the Political, the state could suspends the laws and
treat a certain class of people as exceptions to the rule (trials and appeals were
done away with people the Nazis viewed as enemies of the state--non-persons,
actually). The first state of exception scene involves calculating the
odds.:"999.999" probability versus "fate" offering "a hand from the pages of
history." A story that seems too good to be true actually is true. The second
scene closes the film. The war is now over, yet Brad Pitt leaves his trademark on
the Nazi collaborator /traitor who allows Hitler et al to be killed; Pitt carves very
deeply a swastika into the SS villain's forehead and saying to the one surviving
American soldier, "I think this is my masterpiece." In this closing scene, the
exceptional part Apache practice--continues in peace time as a masterpiece--
(Pitt is part Apache and is linked early on to John Wayne through a door frame
history. Sargeant York was based on a real soldier, but Gary Cooper played him,
not the real Sargeant York.
STOP READING HERE
The 60s-70’ prism is the deep recesses, the underneath or behind the screen, like the floorboards.
shot straight out of John Ford's Searchers --that film's plot begins soon after the
Civil War has ended; Tarantino's opening scene is reminiscent of the Indian
attack near the beginning of The Searchers, minus the implied rapes). The war
is over, but art allows for more violence in a single case. This kind of artistic
ends the film but calls the status of ending through "good" violence versus "bad"
violence into question. In the scene in the movie theater when the French Jewish
heroine Shoshanah comes on screen and her boyfriend ignites the silver nitrate
film behind the screen, the screen image goes up in flames. The diegetic cinema
screen and her image seems to go up into flames as well, even as the heroine's
laughter starts to seem banshee like (her laughter makes her sound like a witch--
as if the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz hadn't melted.)The sequence recalls
the "bad" Maria robot of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, on the one hand, and her
destruction but also calls up the retaliatory fire bombing of German civilians
(planned by the British since 1940) by the British and American in Dresden and
other German cities. The tone of Inglourious Basterds is extremely well-
callibrated--the violence is surprisingly toned down in almost even case and is
done very quickly; suspense is created like in the usual (even good) war action
films, and Tarantino's humor comes through in the monologues he gives some
characters (the actors perform them wonderfully). But the humor is never so
The Searchers—former confederate soldier hunts down to kill a captured white girl become Indian squaw and one of the Chief’s wives.
Shot at the end is just like the shot at the end of chapter 2, only with Pitt on the left this time instead of on the right).
Quintessence of dust—a metaphysics of dust
great that you can do more than smile. There is really no release in the film. The
first violent film I found to be shockingly subdued. Tarantino has a character
invoke Hamlet at one point, and QT's film indeed seems like a revenge tragedy
(most of the "good" characters who die do so very abruptly). Justice and peace
are seemingly impossible to combine, as we cycle past violence into the violence
of the present, Nazi Germany having become much more than a specter that
more than haunts the United States.
A lot of the criticism on rounds its alleged anti-semitism (american Jewish GIs act
like Nazis) is based an failure to read the film's plot as well as it lessons in film
history (the sequence on silver nitrate footage as explosive) and their integration.
In terms of the plot, there are two conspiracies to kill Hitler and the audience.
Both succeed. One includes the Jewish survivor of hte SS murder at the start of
the film, who shoots the film's star (the German version of Sargeant York,
according to the German solider turned star of the Nazi opposite film number,
Pride of the Nation (a fictional film based Targets (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)
based on the true story of the Texas Tower sniper and that ends in a drive in
screening of a film starring Boris Karloff, who also stars in Targets) and then in
turn is shot and killed by him though can't possibly have survived the three shots
she gave him in the back, a sort of repetition of the brutal and surprisingly long
Overreactingout out and underreacting in
Schmitt and Benjamin on Hamlet and state of emergency / exception.7
Collection and dispersion as tension in WB
Hamlet with/in Hamlet—the traveling players—Priam; Murder of Gonzago
scene in which the German film star (Diane Kruger) is strangled by Hans Landa,
the SS villain. There's an overhead shot from the end of the climatic fight
sequence from Taxi Driver here as well. As you can see, a lot of the film runs
through late 60s into early 70s cinema--hence the spaghetti Western sound track
themes). Nevertheless, the heroine's black lover gets her signal because it
comes through her addition to the film. So her plot succeeds through film,
through her film of the conspiracy, not by simple "action," and that action, of
course, means using film footage as a bomb. And Hans Landa has left a bomb
under Goebbels' seat which explodes before the bombs on the legs of the two
GIs do. Moreover, it is Landa who lets the plot succeed. So there is a German-
Jewish tension at the heart of the film's multiple plotting that cannot be resolved
by equating of totally separating Nazis and Jewish civilian resistance fighters and
Jewish GIs with Nazis. Moreover, the film again and again points to the centrality
of film for the Nazis, much as it was central to the war effort in the U.S. Tarantino
just literalizes the film as weapon metaphor, turning film itself into the explosive.
Here Tarantino borrows a scene from Hitchcock's Sabotage--a film canister
carried by Stevie explodes while he is on a London bus; the beginning of htis
sequence appears in Tarentino's film). Just as Roosevelt had screenings of films
like Olivier's Henry V and supporting Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, so
DeGrazia, Hamlet without Hamlet as the ultimate materialist reading—interiroization is regared as modern; Renaissance Hamlet is all about the earth, ground, dust
WB on dust; formatting dist; Steadman on dust; bill Sherman on dust. Hamlet
Hitler viewed various films, including, according to the film the Lives of he Bengal
Lancers (in which Gary Cooper also stars, as he does in Sargeant York, as a
kind of take action, engage the enemy NOW officer). The film's references to
UFA, Leni Riefensthal,ad son all work to make the point that violence in film is
not separate from violence outside film either for liberal democracies or fascist
states; moreover, propaganda films made by the U.S. and by Germany aren't
that different. Tarantino keeps drawing parallels and doubles, but mixing things
up as well. The people in the two conspiracies don't know about each other and
act independently, and Hans Landa only knows about one of them. The logic of
action movies like the Eagle Has Landed or melodramas like Casablanca is
entirely subverted by vertiginous references to historical events that were filmed
and to films about history that refer to other films. So when Tarantino says that
the civilian french couple who run the French cinema are like suicide bombers, it
is naive to think he is drawing a simple comparison between real suicide
bombers and cinematic ones. We already know, don't we, that television, the
internet, and film are all central to Al-Queda? That they post videos of violence--
that the Americans engage in their own psy-ops and always have? That the
distinction between terrorist violence either by Israel (settlements, bulldozing,
bomb dropping, gun fire) or by occupied Palestinians is not to be reduced to the
No ground, no dust, just language, encryption, frames. No materilaization of the ghost.
Ghostlier demarcations Marxism without Marx
Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been
same or the totally opposite? IG doesn't deny a difference between "real" history
and film history but prevents any kind of interpretation in which one kind of
history is read as the master of the other: the specters of victims haunting the
present produced by traumas of the past can ever be exorcised or "re-
membered" because the trauma itself already included always already spectral
media (film, photography) which always route evidence through fantasy.
The mark of the Swastika at the end of IG is a remarking, a repetition of an
earlier scene. In the first scene, we see a the end that the soldier has a swastika
carved in his forehead. So we know the "masterpiece" at the end can be hidden
as well. What marks Naziism is not is not an open wound or scar, but a hidden
wound. Nazism did not know itself for what it is. Neither do Americans know their
liberal democracy for what it is, Tarantino implies, as we are mired in Iraq and
Afghanistan. We know but don't want to know about the extralegal violence the
government (even under Obama) commits in the name of "state security."
Daniel Mendelsohn's reading of the film as anti-semitic:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/212016/page/1 (My thanks to Jimmy Newlin for this
link).
7 Schmitt’s book translated in Telos, and also in Philosophers in Shakespeare.
Complete translation in 2006, but poor quality, and then in 2009. Attention to
untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head.166
Sgt. York: His Life, Legend & Legacy : The Remarkable Untold Story of Sergeant Alvin C. York (Hardcover)
by John Perry
As those who lose their footing turn somersaults in their fall, so would the
allegorical intention fall from emblem to emblem down into the dizziness of its
bottomless depths, were it not that, even in the most extreme of them, it had so
to turn-about that all its darkness, vainglory, and godlessness seems to be
nothing but self-delusion. Or it is to misunderstand the allegorical entirely if we
make a distinction between the store of images, in which this about-turn into
salvation and redemption takes place, and that grim store which signifies death
and damnation. For it is precisely visions of the frenzy of destruction, in which all
earthly things collapse into a heap of ruins, which reveal the limit set upon
allegorical contemplation, rather than its ideal quality. The bleak confusion of
Golgotha, which can be recognized as the schema underlying the engravings
and descriptions of the [Baroque] period, is not just a symbol of the desolation of
human existence. In it transitoriness is not signified or allegorically represented,
so much as, in its own significance, displayed as allegory. As the allegory of
resurrection. Ultimately in the death signs of the baroque the direction of
allegorical reflection is reversed; on the second part of its wide arc it returns, to
redeem. The seven years of its immersion are but a day. For even this time of
Bnejamn and Schmitt has only really begun in the 1990s, the foundational essay
being Sam Weber’s Taking exception, diacritics reprinted in Benjamin’s -abilities
(2009)
hell is secularized in space, and that world, which abandoned itself to the deep
spirit of Stan and betrayed itself, is God’s world. In God’s world the allegorist
awakens . . this solves the riddle of the most fragmented, the most defunct, the
most dispersed. Allegory, of course, thereby loses everything that was most
peculiar to it: the secret privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule in the realm of
dead objects, the supposed infinity of a world without hope. All this vanishes with
this one about-turn, in which the immersion of allegory has to clear away the final
phantasmagoria of the objective and, left entirely to its own devices, re-discovers
itself, not playfully in the earthly world of things, but seriously under the eyes of
heaven. And this is the essence of melancholy immersion: that its ultimate
objects, in which it believes it can most fully secure for itself that which is vile.
Turn into allegories, and that these allegories fill out and deny the void in which
they are represented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest in
the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly steps forward to the idea of
resurrection. (232-33
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 232
And the characters in the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus as corpses, that they can enter into the homeland of allegory. 217In the Trauerspiel of the seventeenth century the corpse becomes quite simply the pre-eminent emblematic property.
I will return to Paul De Man, Derrida, and Walter Benjamin to provide an account of the formal materiality of film (as living dead projected image, digital image, and apparatus) in order to leverage a critique of the new new historicism, material culture studies, new antiquarianism, thing theory, object studies (whatever you want to call it), on the one hand, and Shakespeare Film Studies, on the other, in their common resistance to continental philosophy and its spectres. I will discuss Hitchcock’s Murder!, which ends by turning into the mousetrap scene from Hamlet (the villain is a cross dressing half-caste actor who chooses not to be; he
hangs himself off screen after confessing by writing the final scene of the Hamlet adaptation). I will also discuss Powell and Pressburger’s Contraband, which includes a mousetrap scene set at a club called “The White Negro” in which a white woman dancer is surrounded by black male dancers.
The third Act of Murder!, about actors in a play, turns into Hamlet, Act 3.2. ,the mousetrap, with Sir John as Hamlet, and Markem (already a pun on Mark ‘em; remark, notice, mark them down,) as Horatio (with a wife). The final scene is missing, but the Claudius figure/ murderer does kill himself by hanging form a trapeze rope after he ties the noose, and ten Sir John reads the cross-dressing half-caste killer’s script cum confession which translates into the final shot of the play actually performed, with audience applause.
The shots of the rope not only anticipate Rope but also the shot of the rope before the church bells are rung in the Secret Agent just after Gielgud and Lorre discover the murdered organist.
The Rope as an attachment disorder. Overattachment in the case of gay couple and their teacher, as well as the other, and the underattachment in Murder! It’s a spectral rope.
Also blackface in To Catch a Thief!
Could get at the theology of secular thing studies by addressing film theory and investment immaterial and immatieral the way theologians contrast spirit to incarnation as immaterial to material, light as immaterial.
Look at Tom Cohen on cultural studies and theory.
Now cultural studies is over too.
Marquee is for Le corbeau ( Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. 1943) 8 and also for Germannight, Fritz Lang, Metropolis—good Maria is a Christian, Rowohlt, the inventor 8 A vicious series of poison-pen letters spreads rumours, suspicion and fear among the inhabitants of a small French town, and one after another, they turn on each other as their hidden secrets are unveiled - but the one secret that no-one can uncover is the identity of the letters' author... Written by Michael Brooke {[email protected]}
of the bad Maria robot, a Jew.
LENI RIEFENSTAHL , THE WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU (1929)
G.W. Pabst: The Austrian co-director of “ Pitz Palu,”Fritz Lang, Metropolis—good Maria is a Christian, Rowohlt, the inventor of the bad Maria robot, a Jew.
Louis B. Mayer: Winston Churchill (played by Rod Taylor) asks Hicox if Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, who supervised Germany’s film industry, can be compared with Mayer, a Russian-born Jew who ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, then Hollywood’s top studio, for a quarter-century. Hicox replies that a more apt comparison would be to Mayer’s son-in-law David O. Selznick, an independent producer famous for “Gone With the Wind.”
Oradour-Sur-Glane: French village where, in June 1944 German soldiers locked 642 men, women and children in a church and set it on fire. “Basterds,” whose fiery climax takes place that same month, is one of several films exploiting this historical incident. Others include last year’s “The Reader” — Kate Winslet is held responsible for a similar atrocity — and Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot,” in whi
References
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Anslem Halverkamp, " Richard II , Bracton, and the End of Political Theology" Law &
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Jacques Derrida, "Hostipitality" in Acts of Religion (2002), 356-420); Jacques Derrida, on
Hamlet or Hecuba in The Politics of Friendship, on Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba, p. 165
and endnote 32, pp. 169-70 (click on link above for the latter)
Andrew Stofer, "The Skull on the Renaissance Stage"
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis chapter "The Weary Prince" (UF course reserves) versus
Benjamin, Origin of GermanTragic Drama: secularization as the ghost scenes in Hamlet
versus Hamlet as a religious play; Schmitt says it is not a Christian play.
Carlo Galli Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete
Translated by Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze