4 - “Risse, hinter denen man einen Kern entdeckt, der so ähnlich ist wie die Herzen von uns allen”: The Tender Gaze in Umut Dağ’s Risse im Beton

Summary

UMUT DAǦ'S SECOND FILM, Risse im Beton (Cracks in Concrete, 2014) is set among small-time criminals in a largely second-generation migrant environment in Vienna. The title's reference to breaking a rough, hard surface has to do with a father's attempt, after ten years in prison, to connect with the son who has never met him, a son poised to repeat his father's mistakes. While not abandoning the unflinching social realism prevailing in Austrian art cinema since the mid-1990s, Risse decidedly appeals to the viewer's affective response, especially with its protagonist. Describing actor Murathan Muslu's portrayal, one reviewer claims, “the way Muslu plays his character's reactions rings so true it's hard not to feel for the man.” Through a figurative cracking of the cinematic mean streets the father inhabits, Risse illustrates what Muriel Cormican calls the tender gaze. After elaborating the concept of the tender gaze and introducing Dağ's work, I will examine how the film elicits a tender gaze from the viewer. Isolating how Risse privileges acts of looking and being seen elucidates the tender gaze and offers insights into the protagonist's depiction of the father's return to society and to his son, which registers the director's sensitivities to the representation of characters with a migration background.

Cormican's conception of a tender gaze offers a qualification to, among other things, the notion of cinema's inherent “male gaze” as elaborated by Laura Mulvey. Mainstream film, Mulvey argues, positions the spectator to assume the male hero's gaze, which is structured around the control and objectification of the female figure as spectacle for the male gaze. A tender gaze upon a character, as Cormican defines it, undermines the gendered structuring of power, eroticization, and objectification and offers a compassionate perspective that appeals to viewers’ recognition of a shared human condition. A further hallmark of a tender gaze resides in the extended temporal dimensions and complexity of narrative contextualization. Through the richer portrayal of the spaces and situations characters inhabit, the tender gaze penetrates beyond the spectacle of a surface image to enable the viewer's deeper reading of a figure, one that draws on the viewer's intellectual and emotional facilities.