5 - Play It Again, Traude: The Transgenerational Transfer ofWounds in Chris Kraus's Vier Minuten

Summary

CHRIS KRAUS's VIER MINUTEN (2006; Four Minutes) begins with the sound of birds against a black background, followed by a low-angle shot that depicts birds passing overhead. The camera then pans down, revealing barbed wire stretched along the length of a prison wall. This contrast between the freedom associated with the open sky and an image of confinement recalls the opening shot of Alain Resnais's Holocaust documentary Nuit et brouillard (1956; Night and Fog), which first depicts the sky and then the barbed wire surrounding a concentration camp. Resnais's film is a landmark in Holocaust cinema, and many subsequent directors composed their own frames in dialogue with that film's images. Although Kraus nowhere draws the connection explicitly, associations are inevitable for those familiar with the earlier work. Kraus's shot even reintroduces the V-formation of birds that can be found in the painting said to have inspired Resnais, Vincent Van Gogh's Cornfield with Crows (1890). Once these elements — the painting and its birds — have again been made part of the picture, it becomes difficult to deny the resonance.

Vier Minuten takes place at a time contemporaneous with its production, but it also, at intervals, stages moments from one of its character's memories of her experience on the home front at the end of the Second World War. The kinship with Resnais's film is only one among many formal means through which Kraus's film connects with the past. Vier Minuten is distinct from the wave of so-called German heritage films such as Comedian Harmonists (1997) or Aimée & Jaguar (1998), which artfully construct the milieus of the 1930s or early 1940s as though they were presenting stages or even theme parks of the past into which contemporary viewers could wander. Kraus's film, by contrast, presents those years as the scene of trauma, encountered now only through a glass darkly. Most of the film's action transpires sixty years after the war, and the past is presented as remote and hardly accessible. Despite this inaccessibility the film makes every effort to construct connections between yesterday and today, to link one of its figures, a member of the wartime generation, with someone young enough to be her granddaughter.