8 - Remediations of Cinefeminism in Contemporary German Film

Summary

In the opening scene of Susanne Heinrich’s 2019 film Das melancholische Mädchen (The melancholy girl; released in the Anglosphere as Aren’t You Happy?), a young woman is framed in profile against a patently artificial backdrop, a tropical scene of palm trees, sandy beach, and turquoise-blue ocean. Naked under a fluffy white coat, she stands in a rigid pose, smoking a cigarette, as she begins to recite a monologue. A cut frames the woman in medium close-up, and she rotates to look directly into the camera as her metacommentary turns to questions of cinematic representation:

Wenn dies zum Beispiel ein Film wäre, würden wir schon alle die verlieren, die sich mit einer Hauptfigur identifizieren wollen. Im Film muss immer etwas passieren. Melancholischen Mädchen passiert nichts… . Es gibt keine Höhepunkte, keine Entwicklung, keine Katharsis… . Man kann von ihnen nichts lernen. Außer über die Zeit und den Ort, die sich in ihnen spiegeln.

[For example, if this were a film, we’d already lose all those who need to identify with the protagonist. In a film, something always has to happen. Nothing ever happens to melancholic girls… . There are no climaxes, no development, no catharsis… . One can learn nothing from them, except about the time and place mirrored within them.]

As her monologue concludes, the woman suddenly asks, “Schläfst du?” (Are you asleep?), and a reverse shot reveals the diegetic audience of her speech in the form of a naked man. Filmed from a high angle, he lies in repose on a futon, occupying a position typically reserved for women in western visual culture. Underscoring the sequence’s exaggerated attention to gendered cinematic conventions, he proceeds to pick up a Polaroid camera, train its lens directly on the eye of the film camera, and snap a picture, creating a relay of images and looks between the diegetic characters and the audience of the film.

An apt prologue to the episodic narrative that follows, this scene introduces the film’s remediation of feminist film theory and women’s cinema as well as its engagement with the ideologies and effects of neoliberal culture. Das melancholische Mädchen self-reflexively attends to the perennial questions taken up by cinefeminism, including the disruption of viewer identification; the subversion of classical narrative; and the critique of woman’s status as image and object of the male gaze.