11 - Aerial Aesthetics, Queer Intimacy, and the Politics of Repose in the Cinema of Nils Bökamp and Monika Treut

Summary

Queer German cinema in the aftermath of the 1960s and 70s cultural revolutions espoused what Alice A. Kuzniar describes as a cinematic “counterpolitics,” variously deployed against what today might be called cisheterocapitalist violence burdening queer life. Queer filmmakers of this era practiced a type of political cinema that turned to the documentation of structural violence against queer people and the expression of various forms of queer life in order to challenge dominant narratives about how to be in the world. On the basis of interviews with Stefanie Jordan, Bärbel Neubauer, and Matthias Müller, among others, Kuzniar established how the work of these filmmakers pursued a type of transformative spectatorship. Their queer cinematic practices position viewers to “reframe [their] desires and transform [themselves].” Kuzniar turns to Jörg Fockele to expound this claim. Fockele, expressing a dislike of queer feel-good romances with a low threshold for political transformation, calls for a cinema featuring “outrageously queer characters who do totally abnormal things and make the audience wonder.” Such cinematic techniques of excess would stimulate among viewers reflection about their investment in the status quo and prompt them to consider other ways of being in the world.

Nils Bökamp’s You & I (2014) and Monika Treut’s Von Mädchen und Pferden (Of Girls and Horses, 2014) might at first sight appear to be restrained rearticulations of the earlier counterpolitical queer German cinema. The aesthetic-political principle underpinning their films is indeed less characterized by queer suffering and audience provocation than by rest and repose. The queer characters in these films turn away from their daily lives in the city to embrace the countryside, where they overcome obstacles that burden queer relations. This is not to say, however, that Bökamp’s and Treut’s films are devoid of political transformation. Rather, they turn to a different configuration of political commitment than that familiar to the queer German cinema of the postwar generations. Favoring relational bonds that emerge from an opting out of normative rhythms of daily life, Bökamp and Treut pursue a cinematic mediation tactic that acknowledges queer struggle while also generating new strategies to overcome the burdens endemic to queer life under neoliberalism.