1. sports
2. skating
3. figure skating

1
Touch yourself, touch me, you’ll ‘see’1:
exploring contact and intersubjectivity in Leontine Sagan’s
‘Mädchen in Uniform’ (1931)
Jasmine Maggiori
Unit: Languages, Literatures and Cultures- German Studies
McGill University, Montreal
August 2013
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements
of the degree of Master of Arts
© Jasmine Maggiori 2013
1
Irigaray, Luce and Burke, Carolyn. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Signs 6.1 (Part 2 Autumn
1980), 78.
2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to my program supervisor, Dr. Michael
Cowan, for all of his guidance and support. I would also like to thank my parents,
Tricia and Jerry, and my sister, Catherine, for their patience, in addition to Léa
Charbonnier, Louis Fortier, Flóra Horváth, Tom Große, and Bonnie Stanway for
their endless support, encouragement, and invaluable assistance throughout the
research, editing, and writing process of my thesis.
3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE ....................................................................................................................................1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................................2
TABLE OF CONTENTS ..................................................................................................................3
ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................................4
ABRÉGÉ ...........................................................................................................................................5
LIST OF FIGURES ...........................................................................................................................6
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................8
CHAPTER 1: HAPTIC CONVEYANCES- THE BODY
1.1 INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER 1 ......................................................................... 15
1.2 THE OPENING SCENE ............................................................................................ 19
1.3 THE BEDTIME SCENE ........................................................................................... 32
1.4 CONCLUSION TO CHAPTER 1 ............................................................................. 43
CHAPTER 2: ESTABLISHING AN AFFINITY- THE FACE
2.1 INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER 2 .......................................................................... 45
2.2 THE CLASSROOM SCENE AND THE RESCUE SCENE ...................................... 46
2.3 THE FACIAL SUPERIMPOSTIONS ........................................................................ 57
2.4 CONCLUSION TO CHAPTER 2............................................................................... 80
CHAPTER 3: RECIPROCITY AND LIMINALITY- THREATENING AUTHORITARIANISM
3.1 INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER 3 .......................................................................... 82
3.2 THE GIFT SCENE AND THE DECLARATION SCENE......................................... 84
3.3 PASSIONATE RECIPROCITY AND LIMINALITY................................................ 93
3.4 CONCLUSION TO CHAPTER 3 ............................................................................. 112
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................. 114
LIST OF REFERENCES .............................................................................................................. 118
4
ABSTRACT
Through a series of close readings, this thesis examines the role played by
intersubjectivity and contact in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931).
The goal of this discussion is to demonstrate this film’s rejection of hierarchal
relationships in favour of dynamic affinities between desiring subjects. Using
theories of haptic cinema, the first chapter conveys the possibility of ontological
dynamism between otherwise separate entities via tactile corporeal encounters.
The second chapter analyzes the cinematic facial superimposition, which codifies
the face as a revelatory site upon which the interiority of a subject’s mind (soul)
can be observed. By demonstrating an affinity between mind (soul) and body, the
face can be understood as anti-dualistic and, by extension, anti-hierarchal. Then,
finally, the third chapter examines the breaking-down of the authoritarianism
central to the film’s narrative by exploring the power of expressing reciprocal
desire and affinity in providing a structural critique.
5
ABRÉGÉ
Ce mémoire examine le rôle que jouent l’intersubjectivité et le contact dans le
film de Leontine Sagan Mädchen in Uniform (1931). Le but de cette discussion
est de démontrer que dans le film se révèle le rejet de relations hiérarchiques en
faveur d’affinités dynamiques. En s’appuyant sur les théories du cinéma haptique,
le premier chapitre traite de la possibilité d’un dynamisme ontologique entre des
entités, d’autre part séparées, au travers de rencontres corporelles. Le deuxième
chapitre se consacre à l’analyse de la superposition faciale cinématographique qui
codifie le visage en tant que site révélateur à travers duquel on peut
observer « l’interiorité » de l’esprit (âme) d’un sujet. En démontrant une affinité
entre l’esprit (l’âme) et le corps, le visage peut être compris comme antidualiste et
par conséquent antihiérarchique. Enfin, le troisième chapitre examine
l’effondrement de l'autoritarisme qui joue un rôle essentiel dans la trame
narratrice du film, en explorant la puissance de l’expression d’un désir ou d’une
affinité réciproque en fournissant une critique structurale.
6
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.1. Statue of Soldier Wearing Armour................................................................................ 21
Figure 1.2. Large Columns .............................................................................................................. 21
Figure 1.3. Soldiers Wrestling in Pairs ........................................................................................... 22
Figure 1.4. Soldier Holding Large Gun ......................................................................................... 23
Figure 1.5. First Image of Girls ...................................................................................................... 26
Figure 1.6.Ilse Warns Manuela ...................................................................................................... 33
Figure 1.7. Manuela Rises to Kneel ............................................................................................... 37
Figure 1.8. The Girls Kneel ............................................................................................................ 37
Figure 1.9. Manuela and Bernburg Gaze at One Another .............................................................. 38
Figure 1.10. Manuela Embraces Bernburg before the Kiss ............................................................ 39
Figure 1.11. Close-up of the Kiss ................................................................................................... 39
Figure 1.12. Medium-shot of the Kiss ............................................................................................ 40
Figure 1.13. Manuela Looks Into the Camera ................................................................................ 43
Figure 2.1.Edelgard Speaking ........................................................................................................ 47
Figure 2.2. Bernburg’s Face in Medium Close-up ......................................................................... 48
Figure 2.3. Manuela’s Face in Extreme Close-up .......................................................................... 49
Figure 2.4. Manuela’s Face Superimposed Over Bernburg’s ......................................................... 50
Figure 2.5. Second Extreme Close-up of Manuela’s Face .............................................................. 51
Figure 2.6. Bernburg Looks Nervous ............................................................................................. 52
Figure 2.7. Bernburg Faces the Headmistress ................................................................................ 53
Figure 2.8. Bernburg’s Emotional Disturbance .............................................................................. 55
Figure 2.9. Final Close-up of Manuela’s Face ............................................................................... 56
Figure 2.10. Second Image of Manuela and Bernburg’s Superimposed Faces .............................. 57
Figure 2.11.Ilse’s Shrine ................................................................................................................. 63
Figure 2.12. Girls Looking at a Magazine ...................................................................................... 64
Figure 2.13. Image of Man Assaulting his Wife ............................................................................. 66
Figure 2.14. ‘Masculine’ Woman ................................................................................................... 70
Figure 2.15. Intersex Individual ..................................................................................................... 71
Figure 2.16. Queer Gathering ......................................................................................................... 72
Figure 3.1. Manuela Stands Near the Staircase .............................................................................. 85
Figure 3.2. Bernburg Smirks .......................................................................................................... 87
Figure 3.3. Manuela Embraces Bernburg Holding the Chemise .................................................... 87
Figure 3.4. Manuela Weeps ............................................................................................................ 88
Figure 3.5. Bernburg Teary-Eyed ................................................................................................... 89
Figure 3.6. Bernburg Smiling as Manuela Exits ............................................................................. 89
Figure 3.7. Manuela Leaving with her Gift .................................................................................... 90
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Figure 3.8. Manuela Recites Her Lines .......................................................................................... 91
Figure 3.9. Bernburg’s Initials ........................................................................................................ 92
Figure 3.10. Manuela Defiant ......................................................................................................... 92
Figure 3.11.Ilse’s Toast .................................................................................................................. 95
Figure 3.12.Ilse Mocks Fräulein von Kesten .................................................................................. 96
Figure 3.13. Bernburg and Manuela laugh Together .................................................................... 102
Figure 3.14. Bernburg in the Audience ........................................................................................ 107
Figure 3.15.Ilse describes Bernburg’s Reaction ........................................................................... 107
Figure 3.16. The Defeated Headmistress ...................................................................................... 112
8
Touch yourself, touch me, you’ll ‘see’2: exploring contact and
intersubjectivity in Leontine Sagan’s ‘Mädchen in Uniform’ (1931)
Introduction
This thesis examines the central role played by suggestions and
representations of contact and intersubjectivity in Leontine Sagan’s 1931 film
Mädchen in Uniform.3 It consists of three chapters, all of which perform a closereading of two scenes. Overall, the goal of my discussion is to demonstrate this
film’s rejection of hierarchal or dichotomous relationships, whether literal or
abstract, in favour and by virtue of dynamic affinities between desiring
subjectivities. It is the specifically reciprocal love valorized in Mädchen in
Uniform that serves to criticize, and ultimately dismantle, the authoritarian
structure of the boarding school in which its plot unfolds. As I will show,
Mädchen in Uniform is deeply concerned with tactility, or suggestions thereof, in
the establishment of non-dichotomous and loving interconnectivities between
women. Consequently, my focus will rest primarily, but not exclusively, on the
love story depicted between the two main characters in Mädchen in Uniform,
Manuela von Meinhardis and, her teacher, Fräulein Elisabeth von Bernburg.4
My emphasis on reciprocal love and tactility in Mädchen in Uniform is
reflected in the title of my thesis, which is a quote taken from Luce Irigaray and
Caroline Burke’s phenomenological and feminist essay entitled “When Our Lips
Speak Together.”5 The citation refers to Irigaray and Burke’s notion that, via
erotic contact, the ontological positions of Self and Other are temporarily
suspended in favour of a dynamic interactivity. In their essay, Irigaray and Burke
engage in a discussion of feminine-centred eroticism, which they describe as a
non-dichotomous, non-hierarchal, and loving encounter. Thus, this encounter is
2
Irigaray, Luce and Burke, Carolyn. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Signs 6.1 (Part 2 Autumn
1980), 78.
3
Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia
Unda. Deutsche Film-Gemeinschaft, 1931. DVD, 2010.
4
For the sake of organization, Manuela von Meinhardis and Fräulein Elisabeth von Bernburg will
generally be referred to as “Manuela” and “Bernburg,” respectively.
5
Irigaray, Luce and Burke, Carolyn. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Signs 6.1 (Part 2 Autumn
1980).
9
characterized as dynamic, and thus understood as an alternative to the strict
hierarchal and dichotomous paradigms of male/female, subject/object, and
Self/Other. In coming together in an affinity, eroticism or love between feminine
subjectivities disrupts the traditional ontological divide between ‘I’ (Self) and
‘You’ (Other): “when you say I love you…you also say I love myself…when you
touch yourself, when you touch me: you touch yourself through me…This
currency of alternatives and oppositions, choices and negotiations, has no value
for us.”6 Thus, inspired by Irigaray and Burke, loving, dynamic, and reciprocal
encounters between feminine subjectivities are essential to my understanding of
Mädchen in Uniform.
Adapted from the stage play Gestern und Heute (Ritter Neréstan)7 by
writer Christa Winsloe and directed by Leontine Sagan, Mädchen in Uniform was
one of Germany’s earliest sound films, produced and released at the end of the
Weimar Republic.8 Extraordinarily, not only was this film directed by and its
story conceived of by a woman, the cast of Mädchen in Uniform is entirely female
and largely features unprofessional actresses. Debuting in 1931, Mädchen in
Uniform proved to be a national and international success, and was screened
worldwide.9 The narrative of Mädchen in Uniform centres on fourteen-year-old
Manuela von Meinhardis (Hertha Thiele), who is sent by her aunt to an all-girls
Prussian boarding school in Potsdam after her mother’s death. The girls at the
6
Please note that all citations are followed in accordance to MLA standard citation practices as
outlined by Charles Lipson in his book Lipson, Charles. Doing Honest Work in College: How to
Prepare Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success (Second Edition).
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008. For quote: Irigaray, Luce and Burke,
Carolyn. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Signs 6.1 (Part 2 Autumn 1980), 1980, 70.
7
Yesterday and Today (The Knight Neréstan) was written by Winsloe in 1930, premiering in
Leipzig; in 1931, it was shown in Berlin, and made into the film Mädchen in Uniform. In 1933,
while in exile in Amsterdam, Winsloe penned a novel based on the film, Das Mädchen Manuela.
Amrain, Susanne. “Christa Winsloe: Die behrühmte Unbekannte.” In Winsloe, Christa. Mädchen
in Unform. Göttingen: Daphne, 1999, 275, 276. For more detailed information on Winsloe please
see Hermanns, Doris. Meerkatzen, Meißel und das Mädchen Manuela: Die Schriftstellerin und
Tierbildhauerin Christa Winsloe. Berlin: AvivA Verlag, 2013.
8
Rich, Ruby B. “From Oppressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: Maedchen in Uniform.” In
Rich, Ruby B. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 1998, 180, and Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in
Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011, 142.
9
Amrain, Susanne. “Christa Winsloe: Die behrühmte Unbekannte.” In Winsloe, Christa. Mädchen
in Unform. Göttingen: Daphne, 1999, 275, 276.
10
school are denied physical and emotional nourishment, and are subjected to the
strict authoritarian rule of the school’s unyielding Headmistress (Emilia Unda)
and her unlikeable second-in-command, Fräulein von Kesten (Hedwig
Schlichter). However, the girls are not entirely deprived of joy, and are able to
derive some happiness for themselves in two particular ways. Firstly, the girls
openly form romantic or emotional (platonic) attachments to one another and,
secondly, Manuela and some of her more lucky companions are assigned to sleep
in the dormitory of the beautiful, and very affectionate, Fräulein Elisabeth von
Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck). The camaraderie depicted among the girls is
extraordinary, as is their seemingly unwavering affection for Bernburg, who is the
only teacher at the school even slightly interested in the girls’ well-being.
Before ‘her’ girls go to sleep each night, they wait with an air of sexuallycharged anticipation for the goodnight kiss bestowed on their foreheads by
Bernburg. The kiss Bernburg shares with Manuela, however, unfolds somewhat
differently than between Bernburg and the other girls: after Manuela throws her
arms around her teacher, Bernburg kisses her passionately on the lips. As the film
progresses, it becomes clear that the two women are in love with one another,
despite the impossibility of their situation. Their romance faces a sudden end,
however, when Manuela becomes intoxicated after the school’s rendition of
Schiller’s Don Carlos, wherein she plays the lead. Still dressed in her masculine
costume, Manuela publicly proclaims the love between herself and Bernburg. As
punishment, Manuela is quarantined and forbidden from interacting with her
schoolmates and Bernburg. Distraught at the notion of never again seeing her
beloved and her friends, Manuela attempts suicide by jumping off the school’s
staircase. Tragedy is averted, however, when Manuela’s school companions and
Bernburg intervene and she is pulled to safety. The Headmistress is horrified at
the prospect of her actions having nearly caused Manuela’s suicide. As a result,
the film ends with Bernburg and the girls triumphantly surrounding Manuela as
the Headmistress silently walks away, defeated.
11
It should be noted that my analysis draws principally from post-1970s film
scholarship concerned with an understanding of Mädchen in Uniform in reference
to both its ‘queer’10 and anti-authoritarian themes. Until the film’s mostly-feminist
‘rediscovery’ in the 1970s, the romantic attachment clearly established between
Bernburg and Manuela was perceived as a metaphoric anti-authoritarian plea or a
warning against ‘oncoming’ fascism. As a result, “its anti-authoritarian stance was
almost always emphasized, while its sexual politics were mostly ignored.”11
Therefore, post-1970s film criticism surrounding Mädchen in Uniform can be
understood as an attempt to re-define the film’s subject matter by pointing out that
its ‘queerness’ is more than simply an anti-authoritarian symbol. Drawing from
this, I seek to demonstrate that Mädchen in Uniform can be thematically construed
as both queer and anti-authoritarian without the reduction of one in service of the
other. These two themes are deeply and intricately related, but the nature of their
relationship should not be understood as hierarchal.12 Thus, this thesis seeks to
examine the positive and unabashed representations of the romantic or erotic
connectivity depicted between women in Mädchen in Uniform in association with
its anti-authoritarian stance, without reductively conceptualizing the film as either
categorically anti-authoritarian or pro-queer. I suggest that this can be
accomplished by demonstrating the film’s emphasis on the romantic
10
It is unlikely that the word ‘queer’ (“quer”) would have been widely used in postwar Germany
and, while it does exist in some German activist circles, the term does not have the same meaning
in the German language or for Germans who do not identify as heterosexual. Nevertheless, and
despite the risk of being (academically) anachronistic, I believe that the term’s connoted
‘otherness’ makes it particularly useful to this discussion as it includes all desire, activities, and
expressions that are impossible to define as strictly heterosexual and/or heteronormative. The term
‘queer,’ then, acts as an umbrella term for everything non-heterosexual, and “marks an eccentricity
common to gays, lesbians, bi-and transsexuals, a common protest against the hegemony and
legitimacy of the normal.” Nevertheless, because ‘queer’ is a gender-unspecific term, I will
sometimes use ‘lesbian’ in certain descriptions to avoid confusion. Kuzniar, Alice. The Queer
German Cinema. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, 6-7 and for quote Turner, William B.
A Genealogy of Queer Theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999, 3.
11
McCormick, Richard W. Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature and
“New Objectivity.” New York: Palgrave, 2001, 147. Two famous examples of pre-1970s film
criticism overlooking Mädchen in Uniform’s queer theme in favour of its anti-authoritarianism are
discussed by Lotte Eisner and Siegfried Kracauer in Eisner, Lotte. The Haunted Screen:
Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969 and Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: a Psychological History
of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.
12
Indeed, this reflects my ultimate discussion of the film’s valorization of non-hierarchal
interconnectivity.
12
interconnectivity between desiring subjects, which ultimately provides, and
empowers, its anti-authoritarian standpoint.
The sheer volume of scholarship concerning Mädchen in Uniform renders
an exhaustive literature review within the confines of this discussion impossible.
Nevertheless, it is integral to introduce B. Ruby Rich’s essay “From Repressive
Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: Maedchen in Uniform” (1981) and Richard Dyer’s
article “Less and More Than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in
Weimar Germany” (1990), because these pieces have been pivotal in the overall
inspiration of my investigation. Specifically, both pieces provide a rigorous
analysis of Mädchen in Uniform’s sexual politics in reference to its negative
representations of totalitarianism. Most importantly, however, is the similar
attempt made by Dyer and Rich to illustrate and emphasize the importance of the
explicit and erotic relationships between women depicted in the film. Even so, it
should be noted that scholarly analyses of Mädchen in Uniform are not
exclusively preoccupied with the ‘and/or’ debate surrounding its anti-authoritarian
and queer themes. There exists a diverse plethora of writing on Mädchen in
Uniform seeking to explore concepts such as the film’s aestheticism or narrative
construction. For example, in her book Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s
Films, Geetha Ramanathan examines Mädchen in Uniform’s aesthetic structure
and narrative strategies in a fascinating exploration of the establishment of
subjectivity via sexuality in this film, and Katie Sutton, in her book The
Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany, discusses Mädchen in Uniform in
reference to the varied representations of the masculinized female figure in
Weimar-German popular culture, such as the hosenrolle.13
Thus, I suggest that the explicitness of the representations of same-sex
love and desire in Mädchen in Uniform can, and should, be analyzed in
13
Ramanathan, Geetha. Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films. London: Wallflower Press,
2006, 168 and Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn
Books, 2011, 143, 144, 147. The hosenrolle refers to the so-called ‘trouser role,’ in which female
actresses perform in male dress; Manuela, for example, does so as the lead in the school’s
rendition of Don Carlos, as explored in Chapter 3.
13
connection with the film’s equally-explicit anti-authoritarianism. Returning to
Rich and Dyer, and the importance of understanding this film as sexual and
political, Rich purports that Mädchen in Uniform depicts a double coming-out
story: “that of Manuela, the adolescent who voices ‘the love which dare not speak
its name’14…and that of Fräulein von Bernburg, the teacher who repudiates her
own role as an agent of suppression and wins her own freedom by accepting her
attraction to other women.”15 Importantly, Rich asserts that an interpretation of
the film as queer does not reduce the centrality of its anti-authoritarianism but,
instead, contributes to it: “the film remains a profoundly antifascist drama, but
now its political significance becomes a direct consequence of the film’s properly
central subject, lesbianism, rather than a covert message wrapped up in an
attractive but irrelevant metaphor.”16
Thus, for Rich, an understanding of the queer and anti-authoritarian
themes as contradictory would be a gross oversimplification. Similarly, in his
article “Less and More Than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in
Weimar Germany,” Richard Dyer explores queer Weimar cinema by focusing on
Mädchen in Uniform and Richard Oswald’s enlightenment film, Anders als die
Andern (1919). Essentially, Dyer seeks to contextualize these films within broader
discourses on sexuality coming out of the Weimar Republic. Most important to
this discussion is Dyer’s reference to the explicit nature of the onscreen romantic
encounters between women in Mädchen in Uniform. The explicitness of the
film’s queerness suggests that “lesbianism is not incidental to the film’s antiauthoritarianism…in many ways, it is what makes [it] possible.”17 Like Rich,
Dyer understands the film’s queerness as central to the film’s narrative and in
14
This is in reference to Manuela’s public declaration of love for Bernburg, which will be
discussed in detail in Chapter 3.
15
Rich, Ruby B. “From Oppressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: Maedchen in Uniform.” In
Rich, Ruby B. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 1998, 181.
16
Ibid, 1998, 181. It is important to note that I am not suggesting Mädchen in Uniform’s antiauthoritarianism or anti-totalitarianism should be understood as a foreshadowing of the Third
Reich or of fascism in reference to Nazism, as I would perceive this to be an inaccurate, and
highly-anachronistic, projection.
17
Dyer, Richard D. “Less and More Than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar
Germany.” New German Critique 51 Special Issue on Weimar Mass Culture (Autumn 1990), 32.
14
connection to its broader political stance: “lesbianism is pivotal to the plot, and
the filmic treatment both intensifies its romantic-erotic quality and suggests its
subversive power.”18
With this in mind, my analysis will be carried out as follows. Using
‘haptic’ and feminist embodiment theories, in “Chapter 1: Haptic ConveyancesThe Body,” I examine the bedtime and opening scenes in Mädchen in Uniform to
discuss how representations or suggestions of bodily contact can be understood as
the temporary suspension of the respective ontological positions of ‘Self and
‘Other.’ Then, in “Chapter 2: The Facial Superimpositions- Establishing an
Affinity,” my focus shifts from the role of the body to that of the face in Mädchen
in Uniform. By looking at the classroom and rescue scenes, in this second chapter
I seek to contextualize Sagan’s extraordinary use of the facial superimposition in
Weimar-German and eighteenth-century understandings of corporeal and facial
surfaces as revelatory and anti-dualistic. I suggest that the facial superimpositions,
occurring exclusively between Manuela and Bernburg, visually connote their
dynamic and reciprocal affinity. Manuela’s and Bernburg’s affinity, which I
understand as fundamentally anti-hierarchal, leads to my analysis in “Chapter 3:
Reciprocity and Liminality- Threatening Authoritarianism.” Performing a close
reading of the gift and declaration scenes, in this final chapter I discuss the power
of the affinity between the two women in reference to the role it plays in
dismantling the strict authoritarian structure of the boarding school, in which the
film’s narrative unfolds.
18
Ibid, 1990, 33.
15
15
Chapter 1: Haptic Conveyances- The Body
1.1 Introduction to Chapter 1
This first chapter explores the phenomenological implications of haptic
corporeal depictions of the feminine body in the opening and bedtime scenes in
Mädchen in Uniform. As I have chosen to examine the role played by faces in my
second chapter, I am therefore choosing to restrict my discussion here to the body.
As my choices of scenes and/or sequences suggest, my intention is to examine
Mädchen in Uniform microcosmically; that is, to perform an intimate and detailed
reading of integral moments within the film. In the spirit of ‘haptic’ film theorists
like Laura U. Marks, I will closely examine the bedtime and opening scenes in
Mädchen in Uniform in order to emphasize how depictions or suggestions of
contact between bodies should be perceived as moments wherein the temporary
blurring of the respective ontological positions of Self and Other is possible.
I will begin by focusing on the opening sequence in Mädchen in Uniform
and, more specifically, on what is at stake in the disembodied cluster-organization
of the girls on screen and the significance of Sagan’s juxtaposition of static ‘male’
imagery, such as statues, with fluid and dynamic ‘female’ imagery, such as
disembodied moving legs. I propose that this ‘framing’ of female with male
imagery emphasizes two important concepts; firstly, a reconceptualization of
‘penetration’ or ‘entrance’ by privileging sensations of touch over sight; and,
secondly, a non-hierarchal connection between desiring subjects by rendering
dynamic the respective ontological positions of Self and Other. I will then move
onto an exploration of the bedtime scene, in order to discuss how, firstly, the kiss
shared by Bernburg and Manuela should be seen as a moment wherein the
boundaries between self and other are suspended; and, secondly, to examine how
Manuela’s fleeting glance at the camera temporarily interrupts the traditionally
voyeuristic relationship between viewer and image. Ultimately, it is my goal to
explore Mädchen in Uniform through the prism of theories of the haptic in order
to examine how this film, by privileging the sense of touch over that of sight,
succeeds in rendering dynamic the respective ontological positions of the Self and
the Other at particular moments when contact is depicted or suggested. As I will
16
elaborate, the direct effect of this ontological dynamism is the impartation of
knowledge. By ‘knowledge,’ I am referring to an intuitive connection between
otherwise separate subjectivities which allows the transfer of information. In the
case of Bernburg and Manuela, the information they receive is the desire they
harbour for one another. As a result, this is a type of knowledge that does not
require a mastery of a subject over an object; instead, it is a haptic sharing of
experience. In this guise ‘knowledge’ reveals itself as the desire of subjectivities
for mutual interaction and/or affinity. Furthermore, this privileging of touch over
vision, and the consequential disruption of boundaries which leads to the ability to
‘know,’ should be seen as an ethical statement in the sense that relationships
between women in this film are thereby conceptualized as non-hierarchal and
necessarily intersubjective. In Mädchen in Uniform, the act of touch ultimately
functions to suspend, at least temporarily, ontological dichotomies.
The haptic, particularly when considered in the context of cinematic
analyses, is a multi-faceted concept without any singular definition. Broadly, the
haptic is the ability to perceive, that is, to ‘see,’ in a manner which simultaneously
perpetuates and emphasizes a sensation of contact or physical connection between
two or more entities. For instance, this can occur between film-image and viewer,
between characters on screen, and so on. Consequently, I would also suggest that
haptic perception is deeply connected to the epistemological capability of the
‘Self’ to impart knowledge onto the ‘Other’ (which should be seen as that which
is outside of oneself) and vice-versa at a particular moment. This moment,
however fleeting, represents an opportunity for ontological liminality and the
ensuing suspension of ontological borders. In the context of haptic cinema, said
moments of ontological liminality occur precisely when it becomes impossible to
separate the sensations of touch and sight. In a haptic universe, therefore, the very
act of perception becomes a highly embodied and necessarily interactive
experience. Here, my understanding of haptic cinema draws principally upon the
works of Laura U. Marks and Jennifer Barker, who have made significant
contributions to theories of a haptic and/or tactile cinema. I have combined these
more cinematic theoretical inquiries with those of feminist phenomenologists,
17
such as Iris Marion Young and Luce Irigaray, who have written on the
philosophical implications of touch as a means of experiencing oneself and one’s
surroundings, particularly as a feminine and/or feminized subject. Bearing in
mind the connection I will be making between feminist and cinematic theory, I
am seeking to carve out a definition of cinematic tactility that is inextricable from
representations of feminine corporeality. Therefore, I am attempting to understand
corporeal depictions of women as “complex yet indivisible surface[s] of
communication and perception” in this film.1
As Laura U. Marks points out in her book, Touch: Sensuous Theory and
Multisensory Media, the term ‘haptic’ is an extremely dynamic concept that
simultaneously exhibits qualities of touch and vision, and thus inextricable from
the multisensory navigation of cinematic surfaces. Haptic analyses of any given
surface (cinematic, corporeal, and so on) require an intimate and/or physical
connection that extends upon visual perception in order to maintain constant
engagement with that which is being explored.2 Consequently, a haptic means of
analysis establishes a firm non-hierarchal and non-mastering means by which
surfaces, and other observable phenomena, might be explored via a specific
means of ‘perception’ that is both visual and tactile and, therefore, “dialectical.”3
By its very nature, haptic navigation renders attention to surface details
obligatory, and necessitates the existence of a haptic critic who “navigates
a…space by engaging immediately with objects and ideas and teasing out the
connections immanent to them.”4 Thus, haptic criticism, and by extension the
haptic critic, cannot be distant from his/her ‘object’ of inquiry but instead must
establish with it an intimate and reciprocal relationship. The reciprocity inherent
to the intimate connection established between analyzer and surface by virtue of
haptic exploration renders the experience erotic via its suggestion of closeness in
1
Elsaesser, Thomas and Hagener, Malte. Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. New
York and London: Routledge, 2010, 110.
2
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002, xii.
3
Ibid, 2002, 3.
4
Ibid, 2002, xiii.
18
a physical sense, which Marks sees comparable to a sexual experience. For
Marks, intimacy, reciprocity, and the ultimate dynamism inherent in both of these
qualities, suggests a means of analysis endowed with the constant “ability to
oscillate between near and far…what is erotic [in these moments] is the ability to
move between control and relinquishing, between being giver and receiver. It’s
the ability to have your sense of self, your self-control, taken away and restored—
and to do the same for another person…a lover’s promise is to take the beloved to
that point where he or she has no distance from the body—and then to let the
beloved come back.”5
The very eroticism inherent to Marks’ conceptualization of the haptic is
central to my own analysis of Mädchen in Uniform, as I suggest that not only does
this erotic oscillation occur between surface-analyzer and analyzed-surface, but
also within the (haptic) cinematic imagery itself—that is, in the images of the
women and girls interacting with one another on screen. With Marks’ concept of
haptic analyses and/or navigation in mind, I will now turn back to Mädchen in
Uniform and begin my discussion of this film by exploring two specific cinematic
details of the opening sequences—firstly, how the viewer enters or ‘penetrates’6
the filmic universe of Mädchen in Uniform and, secondly, how Sagan places the
girls on screen directly afterward. I propose that Sagan ‘haptically’ employs the
audience’s first entrance into the diegetic world of the film and the girls’
orientation in space within this scene invites a haptic analysis. Ultimately, this
haptic analysis can be used to examine these scenes in a way which connotes a
relationship of dynamic interactivity between not only the girls onscreen, but also
between viewer and film image.
5
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002, xvi.
6
In a context of haptic cinematic analysis, using the words ‘penetrate’ or ‘penetration’ might be
perceived as somewhat unconventional; however, my goal is to argue that the film invites
spectators to ‘penetrate’ the image in a manner that does not encourage a sense of (masculine)
control and/or objectification, but instead establishes a highly reciprocal (and indeed haptic)
relationship between film and/or film image and viewer.
19
1.2 The Opening Scene
In addition to being directed by a woman and based on a play written by a
woman, Mädchen in Uniform takes place in an all-girls boarding school and the
cast is entirely female—no men actually appear on screen at any point during the
film. For this reason, the film has often been perceived as an anomaly within the
study of Weimar cinema, in the sense that women were so central to its
realization.7 Despite the absence of male on-screen individuals, it would
nevertheless prove superficial to conclude that the film’s universe is exclusively
and unwaveringly coded as feminine.8 Upon closer inspection, Sagan consistently
makes viewers aware of the fact that its seemingly feminine universe cannot exist
totally apart from the masculine. In fact, viewers’ first entrance into the filmic
world of the boarding school takes places by virtue of their participation within a
masculine scopic economy. What is interesting about this is that, regarding
‘feminine’ imagery, Sagan’s cinematic technique requires a caressing or haptic, as
opposed to a mastering, gaze.
Sagan cinematically suggests this re-conception of the gaze via the
juxtaposition between the opening montage and how she chooses to arrange the
schoolgirls in their first onscreen appearance. At the film’s opening, Sagan
confronts viewers with large, static, and extremely masculine imagery in the form
of a short montage, presented immediately before the viewer sees the girls at
school for the first time.9 After the opening credits, the first onscreen figure is a
statue of a soldier wearing armour (Figure 1.1), which then is replaced by images
7
Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001,
142.
8
In her piece “From Oppressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: Maedchen in Uniform,” feminist
film critic B.Ruby Rich suggests that the atmosphere of the film should not be seen as exclusively
feminine because “the very first establishing shots of the film serve to inform us of the real power
of absent patriarchy and remind us that an all-woman school in no way represents a womandefined space.” Rich, Ruby B. “From Oppressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: Maedchen in
Uniform.” In Rich, Ruby B. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film
Movement. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998, 182, 183.
9
According to Rich, the very nature of the opening montage is “no doubt Soviet-influenced.”
Rich, Ruby B. “From Oppressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: Maedchen in Uniform.” In Rich,
Ruby B. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1998, 180.
20
of large columns (Figure 1.2). The columns are followed slowly downwards by
the camera to statues of four men wrestling one another in pairs (Figure 1.3). This
image cuts suddenly to that of a soldier holding a large gun (Figure 1.4), after
which the camera quickly cuts back to the wrestlers and columns. Although the
montage consists of only approximately one minute, the viewer is confronted with
oversized images of masculine power and domination in the form of violence and
military prowess. Additionally, these are cultural images which serve to connote a
sense of rationale. For example, athletics and the army are extremely organized
cultural entities. Despite the movement these images could potentially suggest
(military invasion, athleticism, and so on) if represented differently on camera, the
male figures nevertheless appear in the form of statues made from either stone or
steel. Consequently, they are static. Therefore, from a metaphysical standpoint the
statues connote a sense of masculine and ultimately phallic strength by virtue of
their material hardness.10 Furthermore, while the statues are outside, their
cinematic representation causes them to appear so large that they serve to obscure,
even oppose, the natural environment in which they are placed. For example, in
the scene wherein the columns and wrestlers are shown, the sky in the background
is only partly visible and obviously not the intended focus (Figure 1.2). Similarly,
to the left of the first image of the armoured soldier, we see a heavily shadowed
and obscured tree (Figure 1.1). Again, the tree is only partly visible and not the
scene’s intended focus. The obscuring of nature via the insertion of hard and
static masculine imagery is especially significant from a traditional western
philosophical standpoint. Nature is conceived as the negative, irrational, and
feminized counterpart to positive, rational, and masculine culture. Here, with this
paradigm in mind, irrational nature is dominated by rational culture.
10
It is also fascinating that Sagan’s choice to depict the statues with harsh backlighting makes
them appear silhouette-like; this further emphasizes the hard contours of the statues.
21
Figure 1.1: Statue of a soldier in armour; a shadowed tree is visible (far left).
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform11
Figure 1.2: Large columns behind which the sky is visible.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform12
11
“Statue of Solider Wearing Armour.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
22
Figure 1.3: Statues of soldiers wrestling in pairs
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform13
12
“Large Columns.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea
Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
13
“Soldiers Wrestling in Pairs.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
23
Figure 1.4: Statue of a soldier holding a large gun
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform14
Sagan’s choice to present this imagery in the form of a short montage,
which continuously accelerates until its conclusion, should too be understood as
an effort to connote a sense of masculinity. The montage, extremely choppy in its
progression, cuts sharply from image to image. Consequently, viewers’ focus rests
primarily on the largest and most prominent on-screen images: the soldiers, the
columns, and the wrestlers. The montage, by virtue of its speed and cutting,
prevents any close inspection of the onscreen imagery. Indeed, the interruptivequality seemingly inherent to the cinematic montage renders any visual ‘caress’ of
a filmic image, or attention to its details, practically impossible. As a result,
viewers come to ‘know’ this imagery starkly and quickly. From an
epistemological standpoint, viewers’ interaction with this sequence and the
imagery therein takes place without the possibility of any real consideration of the
imagery itself. For instance, to remark on the natural environment obscured
behind the statues, one must be either be granted (via technological means, etc.)
14
“Soldier Holding Large Gun.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
24
or take the time to do so (using film stills, and so on). Consequently, the viewer
enters into a highly voyeuristic and thereby one-sided relationship with these
images because they are viewed hurriedly and from a distance and, as non-living
statues, cannot look back.
Nevertheless, the inclusion of nature within these scenes cannot be
ignored. However obscured it may be or whether or not it is paid attention to, the
natural environment in these scenes are nonetheless present. To notice it,
however, requires something from the audience—namely, it requires that viewers
navigate the environment in which they visually find themselves. Therefore, the
potential to shift the voyeuristic tendency of the opening montage should be
perceived as immanent to the opening scene in and of itself. This not only sets up
the audience to approach the film from the perspective of a caressing visuality, it
also suggests the possibility of reconceiving how ‘penetration’ or entrance into a
given filmic universe by the viewer might function outside of a paradigm of
domination or dichotomous hierarchies. Furthermore, this is precisely why an
analysis of Mädchen in Uniform as taking place within an exclusively feminine
realm is one-dimensional: without the obscuring of the feminine by the masculine,
we would not otherwise be required to caress and thoughtfully examine these
scenes.15 We must, therefore, break through our participation within the masculine
paradigm in this film in order to reach that of the feminine.16 Even the transition
from the montage to the image of the girls serves to reflect this concept: there is a
15
It is important to mention that Rich discusses the ‘masculine,’ or what should be perceived as
‘coded-as-masculine’ imagery depicted in this montage as evidence of the girls’ environment as
incapable of ever being ‘free’ of the presence of patriarchy. I am instead suggesting that this
imagery functions as a means by which audiences must use a haptic sense of navigation in order to
break through the ‘masculine’ realm and enter that of the ‘feminine.’ I do not, however, mean to
imply that the school is completely devoid of masculine influence, but that the means by which
viewers enter into the world of the school takes place within a haptic paradigm that disrupts
hierarchal boundaries inherent to the voyeuristic audience-film image relationship. See: Rich,
Ruby B. “From Oppressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: Maedchen in Uniform.” In Rich, Ruby
B. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1998, 195, 196.
16
As Laura Mulvey suggests, it is not only possible but ultimately fruitful to seek immanent
alternatives: “There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can
begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides.” Mulvey, Laura. Visual
and Other Pleasures. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989, 15.
25
short but noticeable pause before the girls appear on screen. This implies that
while the image of the girls and those of the statues are related—they are, as
discussed earlier, juxtaposed by Sagan—the pause indicates that they should, to
some degree, also be viewed as separate.
Thus, the audience first ‘enters’ the diegetic world of the film by virtue of
a certain voyeurism containing the immanent potential to shift into a paradigm of
a caressing, and therefore haptic, gaze. Consequently, it is significant that the
accelerated montage in the opening sequence is followed by the viewers’ first
introduction to the unisex realm of the boarding school. After the sound of a bell
is diegetically linked with an on-screen image of a clock tower, the camera moves
downwards and the viewer literally enters, even penetrates, the world of the
school. Hence, and although only occurring momentarily, it is likely no
coincidence that the girls first appear on screen from the waist down as they walk,
two-by-two, along a pathway (Figure 1.5). Here, it is noteworthy to point out the
temptation to interpret the camera work, the disembodied body parts captured on
camera, and the viewers’ unseen entrance into the girls’ universe as a phallic,
voyeuristic and ultimately scopophilic intrusion into a private world. As
emphasized by Laura Mulvey in her key work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema,” cinematic ‘looking’ and the ensuing pleasure gleaned from said looking
occur through scopophilia and voyeurism, which exist along the binary of
active/male and passive/female.17 If understood in the context of Mulvey’s theory,
the passive and disembodied imagery of the girls’ legs should render them
objectified by the necessarily male and mastering gaze, and the image itself might
by seen as bringing only “flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon, rather than
verisimilitude, to the screen.”18
17
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1989, 16-19.
18
Ibid, 1989, 20.
26
Figure 1.5: First image of the girls walking closely together.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform19
I would propose an alternative reading of this scene. Undoubtedly the
girls—and more importantly their body parts—are the literal ‘object(s)’ of the
viewers’ gaze. However, upon closer inspection this scene encourages a haptic
and ‘caressing’ ‘seeing’ by suggesting fluidity and emphasizing the importance of
the detail which, in turn, stress the importance of a particularly haptic spatial
navigation in the analysis of this scene. Undeniably, Sagan’s juxtaposition of the
girls’ legs in motion with the accelerated montage of inert imagery places them in
stark contrast to the static images of rational male culture discussed previously.
This disrupts, and perhaps even undoes, the active-subject/passive-object or
voyeur/looked-at paradigm.20 For this reason, it is not possible to fully
characterize this scene as one of objectification because the girls and their moving
legs—disembodied as they may be—cannot be fully defined as objects. From a
19
“First Image of the Girls.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
20
According to Mulvey, the onscreen feminine epitomizing “to-be-looked-at-ness” or
exhibitionism contrasts masculine voyeurism. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989, 19.
27
Western phenomenological standpoint, ‘object’ and ‘subject’ are traditionally
contrasted by endowing each with opposing characteristics. According to Iris
Marion Young in her work Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling, the
subject is dynamic and self-perpetuating and the “object is determinate and
definable, with clear boundaries…the object is passive, inert matter, having no
self-moving capacity, its movement all externally and mechanically caused.”21
However, the image of the girls’ legs is pure movement, simply because the girls
are not depicted as static and move in and of themselves because, unlike the
images captured of the (male) statues, it is the image(s) of the girls moving and
not the camera. The girls, as they are shown walking, are completely dynamic:
their legs, although hidden underneath the school uniforms, can be seen in outline
underneath their dresses. Thus, the viewer knows that the legs are present by
virtue of their ability to move. This movement belies not only the presence of the
legs but also connotes the girls’ status as dynamic and self-perpetuating
subjectivities.
With this in mind, I will now turn to the significance of the girls’ legs as
depicted only partially and in close-up, which I see as re-conceiving viewers’
entrance into the diegetic world of the film from a hierarchical gazer/gazed at
relationship to a relationship characterized by haptic reciprocity. As a
consequence of their cinematic rendering, to remark on the movement of the girls’
legs requires a haptic sensibility because it is a hidden detail. The legs, as they
move, are simultaneously seen and unseen because they are visible only via
suggestion, as they are mere outlines beneath fabric (Figure 1.5). The close-up on
the detail of movement is both arresting and inviting: viewers must not only
remark on what is it being shown, but must actually ‘go in’ to the shot in order to
see what that might be. In this way, “an embodied view is encouraged, strangely
perhaps, by these disembodied and floating images, for they approach the viewer
21
Young, Iris Marion. “Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling.” In Young, Marion Iris.
On Female Body Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, 78.
28
not through the eyes alone but also through the skin.”22 Consequently, the
disembodied nature of the imagery paradoxically encourages an intimate viewing
experience based on connectivity and intimate contact with the on-screen image
rather than a voyeuristic and distant encounter with a passive and disembodied
object.23 Thus, this particular moment should be conceived as connoting a sense
of touch between image and viewer. It should, therefore, be understood as a haptic
encounter. Requiring viewers to closely examine or experience an image, even
imagery seemingly connoting a sense of disembodied femininity, renders the total
separation between gazer and gazed-at impossible, as the audience becomes
“drawn into a rapport with the other where [they] lose the sense of [their] own
boundaries.”24 Therefore, the haptic means by which viewers enter into the
diegetic world of Mädchen in Uniform suspends the gazer/gazed-at hierarchal
paradigm—albeit momentarily—by virtue of its suggestion of contact. Hence, in
this moment, there occurs an “intersubjective relation between…beholder and a
work of cinema.”25
It is also significant that this first image of the girls indicates a certain
‘incompleteness’: they are shown walking clustered together and from the waistdown. I suggest that the girls’ incompleteness of form, in tandem with the
suggested representation of their genitalia by virtue of the camera angle,
emphasize a certain plurality and fluidity integral to this discussion. As stated
previously, the girls’ incompleteness of form serves to draw the viewer into a
relationship of a caressing, intimate, and therefore haptic encounter with this
image. By surrendering a completeness of form, “the image gives up its optical
clarity to engulf the viewer in a flow of tactile impressions.”26 This incomplete
image, precisely because it requires a caressing gaze the focuses on the detail of
22
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002, 4.
23
Barker, Jennifer. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009, 2.
24
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002, 1.
25
Ibid, 2002, 13.
26
Ibid, 2002, 1.
29
the girls’ legs—images of which are highly-charged in traditional narrative
cinema—hints at a particular form of eroticism. While Mulvey-inspired film
criticism might interpret the disembodied legs and genitalia as a scopophilic
masculine gaze mastering and thereby ‘knowing’ the disembodied and distantly
observed feminine object, I suggest instead that performing a haptic ‘erotic’
reading of this scene offers an alternative perspective which empowers the
incomplete image. This eroticism, which requires the viewers to ‘touch’ the image
visually in order to experience it, is illustrated here specifically within a feminine
realm of incompleteness.27 This eroticism of incompleteness,28 as it were,
emphasizes the importance of fluidity and plurality with regards to momentary
dynamism between the respective ontological categories of Self and Other.
In order to delve further into the eroticism of incompleteness as
demonstrated by Sagan’s depiction of the girls’ legs, it would now be fruitful to
turn Luce Irigaray’s discussion of what she suggests are inherently positive
philosophical connotations of ‘incomplete’ female genitalia. More specifically,
Irigaray contrasts the physiology of female genitalia with that of the (masculine)
phallus in order to demonstrate the merits of alternative relationships between
desiring subjectivities. In The Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray emphasizes that
female sexuality has always been conceived within a phallic-masculine paradigm,
the operation of which requires the existence of an active-male/passive-female
27
Although this idea cannot be further expanded upon here, this ‘incompleteness of form,’
cinematically illustrated via the disembodied legs visually the nature of the girls’ position within
the school. According to the Headmistress, the girls are not only children of soldiers but will
hopefully be future mothers of soldiers. By naming a future goal, the headmistress places the girls
within a development process—they are moving towards a particular state of being (becoming
wives/mothers) but, presently, have not yet arrived. The point in time at which the film takes
place, therefore, is a moment of transition for the girls. Even the teachers, whose pedagogical
positions allow them to symbolically enter into a pseudo-maternal relationship with the girls, can
be seen as being in a state of incompleteness as they are unmarried and without children of their
own. This further serves to contrast the masculine images, through which viewers must ‘go’ in
order to enter into the feminine realm in which the film takes place, which are of adult men. Of
course, other aspects of the film also belie the school’s status as a transitory environment, such as
the used clothing given to Manuela, and presumably the other girls, upon arrival.
28
Marks writes about the “eroticism of incompleteness” in reference to her fascinating discussion
of the haptic properties of Pixelvision. See: Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and
Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 11.
30
binary.29 A similar comparison can be made when taking into account the opening
accelerated montage of the extra-large and static masculine imagery directly
before viewers are confronted with the image of the walking girls. The relative
tininess of the feminine imagery seems to reflect what Irigaray describes as the
so-called incomparability of female genitalia to “the noble phallic organ” and its
reduction to “a non-sex” in Western philosophical discourse.30 Within
predominant codes of (hetero) sexuality, according to Irigaray, feminine ‘non’sexuality is defined as incomplete or as lacking, which necessitates its
unrecognized value within a system privileging the singular, phallic organ.
Furthermore, the privileged active/singular masculine phallus underscores a
“predominance of the visual” by decidedly placing feminine sexuality within a
realm of the invisible.31 Again, Sagan’s choice to contrast the overbearing
masculine imagery with the feminine detail seems to reflect this. The ‘lacking’
feminine ‘non’-sexuality becomes the negative or opposite of the singular and
visible phallic organ within this paradigm because “woman’s genitals are simply
absent, masked, sewn up inside their ‘crack.’”32
Yet it is the very predominance and privileging of ‘masculine’ singularity
and visibility which allow for a positive re-reading of the opposing ‘feminine’
traits of plurality and touch.33 This concept is particularly significant with regards
to how, exactly, Sagan spatially presents the girls’ legs on screen. As previously
mentioned, a haptic reading of the girls’ disembodied and moving legs in this
scene connotes an eroticism of incompleteness based on intimacy and contact
between image and viewer. This is suggested in particular by Sagan’s use of the
close-up and static camera in this scene, both of which allow the disembodied legs
to move on and off screen, and in her choice to juxtapose this scene with the
previous montage of static male imagery. Drawing on this, I suggest that the
eroticism of incompleteness inherent to this scene exists in tandem with an
29
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 23.
Ibid, 1985, 23.
31
Ibid, 1985, 25.
32
Ibid, 1985, 26.
33
Ibid, 1985, 30, 31.
30
31
eroticism of plurality or multiplicity because the girls’ legs are clustered together,
almost touching, and consequentially rendered indistinct. Therefore, this single
image paradoxically becomes an image of multiplicity, wherein subjects’
physical, and by extension ontological, boundaries are blurred by virtue of their
close contact with one another. The plurality of this image, especially as it takes
place within the feminine realm of the school, can be explored via Irigaray’s
conceptualization of the phenomenological implications of feminine autoeroticism
which she sees as not only multiple, but dynamic. As she points out,
“woman…touches herself in and of herself...before there is any way to distinguish
activity from passivity. Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time…for her genitals are
formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already
two—but not divisible into one(s)—that caress each other.” Moreover, it is
precisely the “incompleteness of form” or lack of female genitalia “which allows
her organ to touch itself over and over again, indefinitely, by itself.”34 Bearing in
the depiction of the clustered-together legs, what is particularly important here is
Irigaray’s seemingly paradoxical suggestion that, firstly, the singular feminine
entity (and her sexuality) is already, in and of herself, plural; and, secondly, that
her plural sexuality exists in contrast to singular male phallic sexuality.35
Eroticism in a feminine realm, therefore, is plural, dynamic, and privileges touch
over sight. Consequently, feminine-centred eroticism cannot operate on the
(heterosexual) binary of active/passive, male/female, or Self/Other because it does
not function along hierarchal lines.
The juxtaposition made by Sagan between the two opening sequences in
combination with the depiction of the girls’ legs, which should be conceived as
incomplete, dynamic, and plural. This emphasizes Sagan’s efforts throughout the
film to reconceive interpersonal relationships as non-dichotomous and nonhierarchal by privileging sensations of touch over those of visuality during bodily
encounters. As a result, these encounters should be understood as haptic. As
34
35
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 26.
Ibid, 1985, 24.
32
already discussed, haptic encounters take place in Mädchen in Uniform between
both the girls on screen and between viewers and onscreen imagery by virtue of
Sagan’s ‘haptic’ cinematic style. I would suggest these haptic cinematic
encounters result in the impartation of knowledge taking place via touch; for
example viewers must go into the girls’ universe in order to ‘know’ it. However,
the way in which Sagan cinematically represents this entrance into the diegetic
world of the film requires a specifically haptic attention to detail and spatial
navigation. By using the close-up to first introduce the girls—that is, to enter into
their world—which is an erotic image by virtue of its suggestion of genitalia,
plurality, and incompleteness, Sagan illustrates not only how viewers come to
haptically ‘know’ the diegetic world of the film, but how the characters in the film
relate to and come to know one another.
1.3 The Bedtime Scene
I will now turn to the infamous bedtime scene in Mädchen in Uniform to
discuss how the existence of active and non-hierarchical romantic desire is
established by physical contact or, at the very least, the suggestion thereof.
Almost immediately after the film begins, the audience is made aware that
Bernburg kisses each girl before they go to sleep. Even the impartation of this
information—that Bernburg kisses her students—takes place in tandem with
physical closeness. On Manuela’s first day at the school, soon after her aunt
leaves her, she is confronted by several of the students on her way up the stairs.
After hearing that she is assigned to Bernburg’s sleeping dormitory, Ilse (Ellen
Schwannecke) jumps down two or three steps until she is only centimetres away
from Manuela’s face. Getting even closer, and holding an upturned index finger
close to Manuela’s nose, Ilse warns her not to fall in love with Bernburg (Figure
1.6).36 Backing away, it is Manuela’s turn to move forward and she simply asks,
“Warum denn?” Ilse, again putting her face extremely close to Manuela’s,
explains that girls always develop crushes on Bernburg. Furthermore, as the
exchange between Ilse and Manuela is taking place, the girls are standing behind
36
“Na, da verlieb dich mal nicht.”
33
Ilse and are so tightly clustered together that it is difficult to determine the
outlines of their individual bodies. Thus, in this sequence, pertinent information is
imparted from one individual (in this case, Ilse) to another (Manuela) as the girls
stand close together.
Figure 1.6: Ilse (right) warns Manuela (left) not to fall in love.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform37
Thus, the kiss shared by Manuela and Bernburg establishes their mutual
desire for one another. I suggest that in this moment of erotic contact ‘knowledge’
is imparted to and from desiring subjectivities via close erotic touch. More
specifically, in Mädchen in Uniform close erotic touch ultimately signifies the
existence of romantic desire between Bernburg and Manuela. Once the girls have
completed their bedtime routine and are about to go to sleep, Bernburg turns off
the lights and begins gliding throughout the darkened and heavily shadowed room
and kisses each over-excited kneeling girl on the forehead before pushing them,
quite roughly, away from her. However, this apparently long-established routine
unfolds somewhat differently between Manuela and Bernburg. As Bernburg
37
“Ilse Warns Manuela.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
34
approaches Manuela’s bed, Manuela rises up to a kneeling position (Figure 1.7)—
unlike the other girls, who have already been kneeling before Bernburg
approaches (Figure 1.8). Of particular significance here is that Manuela moves
towards Bernburg (she rises up to a kneeling position) as Bernburg moves
towards her (she walks to Manuela’s bed). Consequently, both women should be
understood as being dynamic and, referring back to Young’s aforementioned
definition of a subject, each woman can be seen—albeit fleetingly—as an active
and self-perpetuating subject. For less than a second, the two women gaze at one
another, with their faces nearly touching (Figure 1.9); Manuela then suddenly
wraps Bernburg into a tight embrace (Figure 1.10). Hence, as already discussed,
physical contact requires at least a temporary overcoming of the boundary
between the Self and Other. With this in mind, the embrace between Bernburg
and Manuela sets up the plurality-eroticism or eroticism of incompleteness which
reaches its climax in the kiss they share. The embrace, returned by Bernburg,
suggests that she also participates in the hug willingly, particularly as she allows
her fingers to spread out on Manuela’s back. Then, after the embrace is loosened
and the two women gaze into one another’s faces, depicted in soft focus,
Bernburg suddenly kisses Manuela on the lips (Figures 1.11 and 1.12) and both
women move, once again independently, away from one another. The significance
of the kiss is manifold, but particularly emphasizes the centrality of the caress in
this film—that is, a haptic navigation of, or interaction with, surfaces. This is
integral not only to the active expression of desire in this film, but to making that
desire ‘knowable.’ The kiss-sharing scene, which is extremely brief, is devoid of
audible linguistic interaction. After Bernburg kisses Manuela, she appears to
mouth the word “Nacht,” but it is not possible for viewers to hear this.38 I would
38
It is admittedly somewhat difficult to determine whether or not the inaudibility of Bernburg’s
dialogue at this moment has to do with technological difficulties stemming from the status of
Mädchen in Uniform as an early sound film, or with a conscious decision on Sagan’s part to
privilege corporeal over oral communication. I would suggest the latter, as there are other
moments in the film where Sagan depicts lips moving without audible speech. For instance, before
the girls get ready for bed one of the instructor’s mouths is shown in close up, moving; she is
perhaps reciting bedtime prayers or giving orders. I do not think it would make sense for Sagan to
make audible Bernburg’s speech at this moment because within this scene audiences become privy
35
suggest that the reason for this is to establish this moment as a realm wherein
contact is the only discernible means by which information can be imparted. The
epistemological result of the kiss is twofold: like Manuela and Bernburg, the kiss
renders viewers aware of the desire the two women harbour for one another. The
kiss, then, as an act of erotic contact, places them into a haptic relationship with
one another. As Marks points out, “in a haptic relationship our self rushes up to
the surface to interact with another surface—we become amoebalike, lacking a
center, changing as the surface to which we cling changes. [Therefore] we cannot
help but be changed in the process of interacting.”39
Erotic contact between two desiring subjects represents the transfer of
knowledge from one being to another. The kiss, which is indeed the climatic
tactile encounter between Bernburg and Manuela, communicates desire between
two otherwise separate subjectivities via contact. In the film, the kiss is the
ultimate physical expression of their love, and one the most obvious physical
representations of their romantic affinity. The kiss is the obvious focus of the
bedtime scene; for this reason, I propose that the kiss, and especially the women’s
lips, indicate not only a transfer of knowledge but also signify a temporary
suspension of the physical, and by extension ontological, borders between Self
and Other. This temporary suspension indicates that the kiss occurs between two
desiring subjectivities. While the importance of the kiss should not be
underestimated, it is important to note that I am choosing to characterize the
dynamism of this moment as temporary because fleeting intimate contact between
two subjects (Bernburg and Manuela) renders neither physical bodies nor
ontological subject positions permanently dynamic.40 How exactly, then, does
to the haptic/tactile nature of the relationship Bernburg has not only with Manuela, but with the
other girls as well (she kisses them all goodnight). Their bonds, and knowledge of these bonds and
how they function, are established via close, physical, and erotic sensations of contact.
39
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002, xvi.
40
As Marks points out: “Haptic criticism…invites the critic to have faith that these encounters
may be transformative but need not be shattering…a sexual act that breaks the boundaries of the
body…need not destroy the self.” Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory
Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, xv.
36
physical contact, in the form of the kiss shared by Manuela and Bernburg, serve to
blur the corporeal and ontological boundaries between them and, moreover, why
should their kiss—as a tactile moment—thereby be seen as an exchange between
two desiring subjectivities? To answer these questions, let us turn back to
Young.41 Contrasting tactility and visuality, Young characterizes sensations/acts
of touching as dynamic and multifaceted: “unlike the gazer, the one who touches
cannot be at a distance from what she knows in touch. While active, touch is
simultaneously passive…the toucher cannot touch the happenings she knows
without also being touched by them. The act of touching is also necessarily an
experience of being touched.”42 The obligatory intimacy of tactile exchanges
renders a hierarchal relationship between Self/Other and/or subject/object
impossible during the moment of contact: “touching cannot happen without a
touching back, and thus there can be no clear opposition between subject and
object, because the two positions constantly turn into each other.”43 The
temporary blurring of the corporeal boundaries, therefore, extends into the
suspension of ontological ones. As the women kiss, Bernburg is no longer the
authoritative subject asserting her will over Manuela. Instead the two women
move together in tandem and participate in this kiss as mutual subjects expressing
romantic desire.44 It is the act of touch which allows “two hierarchically related
elements,” Bernburg and Manuela, to temporarily interact as ontological equals.45
41
It should be pointed out that taken out of the philosophical context in which her piece is written,
Young does indeed come across and somewhat idealistic in her perception of tactility and how it
functions in opposition to visuality. As a case in point, in “Breasted Experience: The Look at the
Feeling,” Young does not deal with issues surrounding the very pertinent reality of violent or
invasive sensations and/or acts of physical contact. Instead, she focuses on tactility as a
philosophical means to articulate a potential for alternative conceptualizations of feminine
subjectivity and body experience. See: Young, Iris Marion. “Breasted Experience: The Look and
the Feeling.” In On Female Body Experience. Oxford University Press, 2005.
42
Young, Iris Marion. “Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling.” In On Female Body
Experience. Oxford University Press, 2005, 81.
43
Ibid, 2005, 81.
44
The overcoming of (authoritative) hierarchal distinctions, so central to the school’s atmosphere
and organization, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3 in connection with the antiauthoritarianism established by the film.
45
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002, xv.
37
Figure 1.7: Manuela rises to kneel as Bernburg moves towards her.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform46
Figure 1.8: The girls kneeling as Bernburg (far left) approaches.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform47
46
“Manuela Rises to Kneel.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
38
Figure 1.9: Manuela and Bernburg gaze at one another.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform48
47
“The Girls Kneel.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea
Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
48
“Manuela and Bernburg Gaze at One Another.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan.
Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931.
DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
39
Figure 1.10: Manuela wraps Bernburg in a sudden embrace.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform49
Figure 1.11: Close-up of the kiss shared by Manuela and Bernburg.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform50
49
“Manuela Embraces Bernburg before the Kiss.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan.
Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931.
DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
40
Figure 1.12: Medium-shot of the kiss.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform51
This temporary suspension of ontological positions similarly occurs
between viewers and onscreen image. As already discussion, plurality and
eroticism of incompleteness undermines the voyeuristic or mastering gaze by
virtue of requiring the viewer to visually ‘caress’ the surface image via haptic
means of analysis. Moreover, Sagan cinematically signifies active and mutual
(lesbian) desire by depicting physical contact and/or interactivity between bodies,
whether literal, in the form of skin-to-skin contact, or abstract, in the form of a
gaze, as I will now discuss. Requiring a haptic interactivity between looker and
image necessitates an alternative viewing experience based on tactility that
effectively disrupts or ‘undoes’ the voyeur or, more specifically, a mastering and
one-sided viewing experience. By interrupting or ‘undoing’ the voyeur, Sagan
50
“Close-up of the Kiss.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
51
“Medium-shot of the Kiss.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
41
necessitates “a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image.”52 This can be
witnessed just before Bernburg and Manuela share their kiss, when the film’s
audience appears to be directly addressed. As Manuela observes Bernburg move
around the room, kissing each girl on the forehead respectively, the camera moves
thoughtfully and images are generally taken as wide shots from the perspective of
the right hand corner of the room. The room is dark and the shadows are heavy,
but the atmosphere nevertheless remains in a soft focus. This gives the viewer the
impression of being hidden in the dark, unseen, which allows for the easy and
uninterrupted consumption of the women put on display. In this way, the
voyeuristic and necessarily ‘masculinized’ subject comes to know, through the
gaze, the necessarily feminine ‘objects’ within the spectacle. As this space is
extremely intimate in nature (the audience finds itself within the bedroom of
young girls), the voyeuristic gaze is somewhat unsettling upon reflection as it
suggests a violation of privacy wherein “through the male gaze…the female body
is being explored…[it is] the (male) gaze of power on the (female) body.” 53 The
voyeur, by virtue of its very definition, must remain unseen in order to act without
being acted upon. Its unseen nature “depends on forms of disembodiment, [and]
especially the idea of not having to take responsibility for one’s bodily presence in
a given space or at a given time.”54 The distanced and/or disembodied
construction of the voyeur symbolizes its (threatening) potential to master or
possess that which it sees.
However, Sagan successfully interrupts the full and exclusive subjectivity
of the voyeur by implicating the spectator in the bedtime scene. Specifically,
Manuela appears to glance directly into the camera and is thereby briefly rendered
capable of entering the voyeur’s realm (Figure 1.13). While Manuela’s fleeting
glance at the camera does not have the capacity to cause spectators to permanently
lose their ultimately voyeuristic subject-positions as watchers, it does highlight
52
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota University Press, 2002, 3.
53
Elsaesser, Thomas and Hagener, Malte. Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. New
York and London: Routledge, 2010, 86.
54
Ibid, 2010, 86, 85, 84.
42
the potential of the looker to become the looked-at. Moreover, the glance itself as
a means of looking is significant because “the notion of the glance suggests a way
of inhabiting the image without identifying [entirely] with a position of
mastery.”55 Moreover, the fleeting nature of this exchange suggests movement,
indicating that the boundaries between gazer/subject and gazed upon/object are
dynamic and have the potential to flow into one another. Furthermore, because
Manuela’s glance indicates the gazed upon/object’s capacity to actually occupy
the space of the gazer/subject, and vice-versa, Manuela might be perceived as
having entered, in this moment, into a critical mimetic exchange with the film’s
spectators. This exchange effectively ‘undoes’ the power of the distanced voyeur
by imitating its very ontological position. For a moment Manuela becomes a
“critical mime,” because she “inhabits—indeed penetrates, occupies, and
redeploys” the disembodied and distanced nature of voyeurism by entering into an
affinity with it.56 This momentary ‘affinity’ between looker and image suggests
an extreme (although fleeting) closeness between the two, the result of which is
that “the viewer gives up her own sense of separateness from the image.”57
55
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota University Press, 2002, 6.
56
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York and London:
Routledge, 1993, 47, 45.
57
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota University Press, 2002, 13.
43
Figure 1.13: Manuela looks directly into the camera.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform58
1.4 Conclusion to Chapter 1
In conclusion, I have performed a close reading of the opening and
bedtime scenes in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform through the prism of the
haptic and feminist theories of embodiment. To demonstrate the role of tactility in
establishing moments of intersubjectivity between otherwise separate beings, I
explored how Sagan’s juxtaposition of static male imagery in the opening
montage with the dynamic and erotic ‘incomplete’ imagery of the girls’ legs
connotes, even requires, a caressing or haptic gaze which ultimately suspends the
hierarchal relationship between looker and image. In my exploration of the
bedtime scene, I suggest that the act of touch, as represented by the kiss works to
temporarily disrupt the borders between Self and Other. Consequently, the kiss,
which should be seen as the pivotal erotic moment in this film, signifies a moment
wherein the impartation of knowledge—namely, the romantic desire between
Bernburg and Manuela have for one another—is rendered possible. For these
58
“Manuela Looks Into the Camera.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
44
reasons, I conceive Sagan’s cinematic style to be ultimately haptic in nature, as it
can be seen to privilege sensations of touch over that of vision or, at the very
least, a dialectical relationship between the two. As a result, Mädchen in Uniform
should be seen as a film that places tactility at its centre, not only between
onscreen imagery but, importantly, between viewers and film image. By
emphasizing the importance of contact, this film suggests the possibility of
disrupting tradition dichotomous pairs (subject/object, Self/Other) in favour of
dynamic intersubjectivity.
45
Chapter 2: The Facial Superimpositions- Establishing an Affinity
2.1 Introduction to Chapter 2
In “Chapter 1: Haptic Conveyances- The Body” I discussed the
epistemological and by extension phenomenological role played by corporeal
haptic encounters in Mädchen in Uniform. I have understood these encounters as
intersubjective and multisensory experiences occurring between, firstly, viewer
and film or film image and, secondly, between onscreen characters. I carried out
my analysis microcosmically by performing a close reading of the opening and
bedtime scenes using cinematic theories of the haptic and feminist philosophies of
embodiment. In keeping with my central theme of exploring contact and
intersubjectivity in Mädchen in Uniform, I will now turn to the two prominent
instances facial superimpositions between Manuela and Bernburg in this film. My
goal is to examine the facial superimpositions in order to move outward from the
diegetic universe of Mädchen in Uniform to broadly implicate this film in a
German historical and philosophical context.1 By providing a context for
Mädchen in Uniform, I will demonstrate that the face and/or the facial
superimpositions should be understood as readable, profound, and revelatory
surfaces by which the innermost contents of the subject’s mind (or soul) are
rendered visible. Conceived in this way, the surface of the face should be seen as
an anti-dualistic force that is indicative of this film’s wider anti-hierarchal stance,
which will be explored further in Chapter 3.
My analysis of the facial superimpositions will be carried out as follows.
Firstly, I will provide a description of the facial superimpositions and indicate
where they occur in the film. Secondly, I will endeavour to situate the face and its
status as a surface within a Weimar-German context. To do this, I engage in a
1
As Rich reminds us, this is not a film without a context: “If we are to understand Maedchen in
Uniform fully, then it is important to keep in view the society in which it was made.” Rich, Ruby
B. “From Oppressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: Maedchen in Uniform.” In Rich, Ruby B.
Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1998, 179.
46
reading of the significance of the surface in a post-WWI context marked by a
certain revaluation of values and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s categorization
and classification of the so-called ‘third sex.’ Then, lastly, I endeavour to
understand the facial superimposition’s revelatory qualities through the film’s
deep and fundamental connection to assessments of the human form stemming
from eighteenth century theories of physiognomy. This will be undertaken by
examining the facial superimposition in conjunction with the close-up in relation
to film theorist Béla Balázs and physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater.
2.2 The Classroom Scene and The Rescue Scene
The first onset of the facial superimposition occurs after a teachers’
conference in which Bernburg faces criticism due to Manuela’s poor performance
in her classes, and for her suggestion that pupils should share a connection with
and trust their instructors.2 After stating her belief in the importance of trust, the
screen fades to black; then, an image of the girls waiting in a classroom for
Bernburg’s arrival is depicted. Bernburg, who sits down at her desk, begins
teaching her lesson, which requires the girls to recite verbatim various lines, in
front of the class, from a biblical parable or hymn. The girls’ success or failure in
this lesson is measured by their ability or inability to recite these lines.
When an off-screen Bernburg asks her pupil Edelgard (Annemarie von
Rochhausen) to recite the first verse of the baroque hymn “O dass ich tausend
Zugen hätte,” viewers see a softy-smiling Manuela staring intensely in Bernburg’s
direction (Figure 2.1).3 As Edelgard stands up and begins reciting her lines,
Manuela continues to gaze at Bernburg; the camera then cuts abruptly to an image
of Bernburg’s face in medium close-up (Figure 2.2). Bernburg’s expression is
remarkably similar to Manuela’s—both women gaze softly, wide-eyed, and not
2
“Die Kinder mussen uns vertrauen!”
Mentzer, Johann. “ O dass ich tausend Zungen hätte.” 1704. Hymnary.org. n.d. Calvin College.
June 2013 http://www.virtuallybaroque.com/trak1012.htm.
3
47
blinking, which evokes a loving impression of emotional intensity existing
between them. With the exception of the moment when Bernburg enters the
classroom and nearly all the girls are visible onscreen, including Manuela at the
far left, it should be noted that Bernburg and Manuela do not otherwise appear
together on camera in this scene. Nevertheless, by virtue of the camera angle and
because the women’s eyes are focused on opposite sides of the screen whenever
their faces are shown, their connection is cinematically established. Seen in this
way, Sagan depicts the women’s connectivity in this moment as being exclusive
to one another. Their ‘togetherness’ or affinity is a moment of intensity occurring
exclusively between them.
Figure 2.1: Edelgard (standing) begins speaking as Manuela (right) stares.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform4
4
“Edelgard Speaking.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea
Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
48
Figure 2.2: Bernburg’s face in medium close-up.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform5
Edelgard continues speaking; then suddenly, Manuela’s face—in extreme
close-up—is delicately superimposed over Bernburg’s and, in a dissolve, replaces
it entirely (Figures 2.3 and 2.4). The extreme close-up of Manuela’s face renders
it twice the size of Bernburg’s and the obvious focus is on Manuela’s eyes, which
dominate the screen. After this, the camera cuts to Bernburg who appears
disturbed, and who moves her eyes nervously to the right of the screen, seemingly
in a gesture of avoidance. Nevertheless, she does not completely stop looking in
Manuela’s direction. Although this time without the use of the superimposition,
the camera cuts again to an image of Manuela’s face in extreme close-up. It is the
same image as was superimposed over Bernburg’s face originally, only greater in
size and depicting the face as more centered on camera (Figure 2.5). Once again,
there is a cut back to Bernburg’s face which again appears unnerved; her eyes dart
5
“Bernburg’s Face in Medium Close-up.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.:
Hertha Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD,
2010. Author’s screenshot.
49
back and forth, eventually resting on the right of the screen, until they shift to
screen left, appearing to meet Manuela’s off screen gaze (Figure 2.6). After
Edelgard concludes, the camera once again cuts back to a shot of the girls sitting,
with Manuela still gazing to the left of the screen at Bernburg. Bernburg then calls
Manuela by her name, which disrupts her stare and she jerkily stands. Bernburg
then asks Manuela to recite the second verse of the same hymn but, despite having
memorized it, cannot remember her lines. Bernburg then approaches Manuela,
disappointedly states that she is unprepared again, and the scene fades out.6
Figure 2.3: Extreme close-up of Manuela’s face.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform7
6
“Wieder nicht gelernt.”
“Manuela’s Face in Extreme Close-up.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
7
50
Figure 2.4: Manuela’s face superimposed over Bernburg’s.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform8
8
“Manuela’s Face Superimposed Over Bernburg’s.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan.
Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931.
DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
51
Figure 2.5: The second extreme close-up of Manuela’s face.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform9
9
“Second Extreme Close-up of Manuela’s Face.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan.
Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931.
DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
52
Figure 2.6: Bernburg looking nervous after the superimposition.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform10
The second facial superimposition occurs shortly after an intoxicated
Manuela proclaims her love for Bernburg publicly and directly preceding
Manuela’s suicide attempt. After Manuela’s public declaration of love, she is
shamed by the Headmistress, refused contact with Bernburg and her friends, and
placed in strict isolation so as presumably not to ‘infect’ the other girls with her
disobedience. Despite the best efforts of the girls and Bernburg to defend
Manuela’s character and protect her from her punishment, her almost complete
isolation—especially from Bernburg—causes her to fall into a deep depression.
After unsuccessfully attempting to defend Manuela to the Headmistress, and
despite being forbidden to do so, Bernburg sneaks Manuela into her office in
order to speak with her. When Bernburg answers ‘no’ after Manuela asks if they
will be able to see one another, Manuela states that she will not be capable of
10
“Bernburg Looks Nervous.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
53
surviving it.11 Bernburg responds somewhat panicked, stating that Manuela must
simply be ‘cured’ of her romantic feelings, which Manuela does not see as
problematic.12 Manuela then decides to take her leave of Bernburg, bidding her a
final farewell.13 Clearly unconvinced by her own speech, after Manuela’s exit
Bernburg runs after her and frantically shouts, “Manuela!” Instead of Manuela,
the Headmistress is outside the door and, hearing Bernburg call Manuela’s name,
begins to harangue Bernburg for speaking to Manuela. (Figure 2.7).
Figure 2.7: Bernburg comes face-to-face with the Headmistress.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform14
11
Manuela: “Werde ich…werde ich Sie besuchen dürfen?”
Bernburg: “Das nicht, Manuela.”
Manuela: “Aber…aber Sie werden mich doch nicht verlassen?”
Bernburg: “Es ist besser für dich.”
Manuela: “Ich soll Sie niemals wiedersehen? [...] Das überlebe ich nicht!”
12
“Geheilt”
13
“Adieu, liebes Fräulein von Bernburg.”
14
“Bernburg Faces the Headmistress.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
54
As the conversation between Bernburg and the Headmistress is taking
place, the school authorities and the other girls realize that they cannot find
Manuela, who is slowly climbing the school’s large staircase. The girls become
frantic and, mobilized, begin running throughout the school shouting Manuela’s
name in an effort to locate her. The camera cuts continuously from the girls
searching for Manuela and the conversation between the Headmistress and
Bernburg, during which Bernburg states that she will no longer stand for the
school’s authoritarianism and injustice. Here, a double rebellion against the
school’s rules occurs—the girls and Bernburg are simultaneously refusing to obey
the Headmistress’ wish to punish Manuela via isolation. Then suddenly, the
audience sees Bernburg, with her back to the Headmistress, in obvious distress:
her hands are up against her face, and her eyes are wide and unfocused (Figure
2.8). The camera cuts to close-up of Manuela’s face (Figure 2.9), upon which
Bernburg’s face is, once again, delicately superimposed (Figure 2.10).
Interestingly, in the former dissolve Manuela’s face is superimposed over
Bernburg’s, making the two instances of the superimpositions complementary.
Then, the audience sees Bernburg again with her hands against her face and she
shouts, “Manuela!”, and runs from the room. Bernburg and the girls are rightly
concerned: Manuela has positioned herself at the top of the school’s staircase,
about to leap to her death. However, the girls and Bernburg run to her aid and
quickly pull her to safety, preventing her suicide.
55
Figure 2.8: Bernburg’s obvious emotional disturbance.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform15
15
“Bernburg’s Emotional Disturbance.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
56
Figure 2.9: Final close-up of Manuela’s face.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform16
16
“Final Close-up of Manuela’s Face.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
57
Figure 2.10: Second Image of Manuela and Bernburg’s superimposed faces.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform17
2.3 The Facial Superimpositions
The two incidences of the facial superimposition should be interpreted as
visually signifying a dynamic affinity and/or interactivity between Bernburg and
Manuela. There is a communication which takes place, purely on a visual plane,
of the romantic desire and profound connection between the two women.
Therefore, the facial superimposition should be read as a moment of
mental/spiritual contact between two individuals that has been rendered filmic.
Going further, we could say that the superimposition, as a cinematic technique,
serves to literalize the mental and emotional interconnectivity occurring between
Bernburg and Manuela by rendering it visible. I suggest that Sagan uses the facial
superimposition—and, by extension, the surface of the face—to connote a sense
of other-worldly, even quasi-impossible, connection or contact between two
17
“Second Image of Manuela and Bernburg’s Superimposed Faces.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir.
Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film
Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
58
otherwise separate subjectivities or beings. The literalized representation of their
interconnectivity via the facial superimposition functions to suggest that the
interiority of the two women, which is their desire for one another, can actually be
witnessed on their faces. The invisible contents of the mind’s interiority are
thereby made visible on the surface of the face.
Here, a double and simultaneous interconnectivity takes place: firstly,
between Bernburg and Manuela and, secondly, between the surface of the body
and the interior of the mind. The emotional connection between the two women,
represented by the superimposed or dissolved images, is so overwhelming that it
is accompanied by some form of disruption of thought or action. In the first
instance, Manuela, despite having memorized the hymn suddenly forgets it and, in
the second instance, Bernburg is no longer able to concentrate on what the
Headmistress is saying and is compelled to run out of her office. This emotional
disruption, I would suggest, is related to the intensity of the feelings Bernburg and
Manuela harbour for one another. Indeed, the intensity of their emotional
connection is consistently emphasized throughout the film and is usually signified
by some form or suggestion of physical contact; for example, the kiss, embraces,
and looks they share between them.
Thus, by employing the facial superimpositions in Mädchen in Uniform,
Sagan cinematically illustrates the romantic connection and desire shared by the
two women, but this statement does not go far enough. To reiterate, the facial
superimposition should be seen as a particular mode of visual representation by
which the innermost feelings of the two women are rendered cinematically visible
and therefore literally perceivable. Thus, the superimpositions should be
understood as cinematic occurrences by which an individual’s inner self, which in
the case of Mädchen in Uniform are feelings of desire, is conveyed. The emotions
of the two women ‘come out’ (as it were), thereby becoming visible on the faces
of the two women. In this sense, the facial superimposition functions similarly to
touch or contact within the diegetic film universe of Mädchen in Uniform. That is,
59
it disrupts traditional epistemological dualism which separates mind from body,
Self from Other, and subject from object. This separation privileges the mind,
Self, and subject over the body, Other, and object. Dualism is dependent on
hierarchal paradigms and, as feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz attests, is
ultimately “the belief that there are two mutually exclusive types of ‘thing,’
physical and mental, body and mind.”18
However, why do the faces of the two women become the surfaces
whereupon this anti-dualistic moment of interconnectivity is signified and,
moreover, rendered visible? In order to attempt to answer this question, I suggest
that the facial superimpositions should be analyzed through the prism of how the
face, and the face as a surface, was conceived in Weimar and eighteenth-century
German contexts. Mädchen in Uniform should not be seen entirely apart from the
interwar context in which it was made. As Richard W. McCormick points out,
Mädchen in Uniform “is a film that is implicated within a number of progressive
and emancipatory discourses of the late Weimar Republic: the movement for
homosexual rights and the flourishing of urban, queer subcultures; “New
Objectivity” and other avant-garde tendencies in the arts and popular culture; and
the intersection of modernity, the movies, and democratic egalitarianism.”19 With
this in mind, it is of particular importance to understand how Mädchen in
Uniform’s subject matter is related to an atmosphere of post/interwar
‘revaluation.’ As David C. Durst points out, “a veritable Nietzschean Umwertung
aller Werte [revaluation of all values] engulfed German society, leaving no facet
18
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, vii.
19
McCormick, Richard W. Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature and
“New Objectivity.” New York: Palgrave, 2001, 147. “New Objectivity” (German: “Neue
Sachlichkeit”), also sometimes called “New Sobriety,” is a somewhat difficult term to define.
Rather broadly, it refers to a particular post-Expressionist and ‘disillusioned’ avant-garde aesthetic
associated with the stabilized (approximately onwards from 1924) Weimar Republic. For an
excellent definition of “New Objectivity” and its aesthetic role in Weimar Germany, see:
McCormick, Richard W. “Private Anxieties/Public Projections: “New Objectivity,” Male
Subjectivity, and Weimar Cinema.” Women in German Yearbook 10 (1994): 1-18.
60
of life immune to change.”20 Thus, after Imperial Germany’s defeat in the First
World War and the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919,21 the postwar
reality of extreme poverty, the uncertainty and terror ensuing from
(hyper)inflation, and the horrific visibility of psychologically and/or physically
war-maimed individuals had a profound impact on the entire way of life during
this period.22 Even after the stabilizing Dawes Plan (1924) and the onset of the socalled ‘Golden Twenties,’ which is the period in which Mädchen in Uniform was
filmed, the overall atmosphere of postwar Germany acted as a catalyst for massive
social disillusionment and a longing for change. As a result, a profound “sense of
transitoriness” and disillusionment seemed to permeate Weimar German society.23
It follows, then, that this so-called ‘revaluation of values’ included a reassessment
of sexuality and, indeed, of heterosexuality.
Certainly, in reference to the ‘revaluation’ of (hetero)sexuality that I am
discussing, I cannot do justice here to any detailed examination of the sociopolitical anxieties surrounding the so-called ‘New Woman’ or the postwar
masculinity-crisis, both of which are well-documented fixtures of Weimar
20
Durst, David C. Weimar Modernism: Philosophy, Politics and Culture in Germany 1918-1933.
Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004, 82.
21
The Weimar Republic’s constitution was drafted in Weimar in 1918 and put into effect a year
later. McCormick, Richard W. Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature and
“New Objectivity”. New York: Palgrave, 2001, 3.
22
Durst, David C. Weimar Modernism: Philosophy, Politics and Culture in Germany 1918-1933.
Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004, 82 and Gordon, Mel. Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of
Weimar Berlin. Port Townsend: Feral House, 2006, 19, 20.
23
Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.,
1989, 258-259. A wonderful literary example of this postwar sense of transition and/or loss is
Klaus Mann’s 1925 novel The Pious Dance (Der Fromme Tanz) which centres on Berlin’s
youthful queer scene. As James Robert Keller writes, while “the previous generation had
experienced the First World War as adults and bore responsibility for it, Mann’s generation only
knew its [social, political, and economic] after-effects.” In his foreword, Mann writes that his
novel comes from a distinctly postwar perspective, and is “one which issues from our younger
generation and ants to be nothing more than an interpretation, expression, description and
confession of that younger generation, its urgency, its perplexity—and perhaps its high hopes.”
Keller, James Robert. The Role of Political and Sexual Identity in the Works of Klaus Mann. New
York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2001, 13 and Mann, Klaus. The Pious Dance: The Adventure
Story of a Young Man. New York: PAJ Publications, 1987, 27.
61
Germany.24 Moreover, it would be superficial to suggest that Weimar culture as a
whole was characterized by a promotion of total sexual emancipation or
veneration of queer love. However, it is important to emphasize that
representations of desire between women in Mädchen in Uniform unfold in an
entirely different fashion than those depicting heterosexual relationships.
Returning to the facial superimpositions, and I have already indicated, both
occurrences signify a profound and romantic emotional connection between
Bernburg and Manuela. Additionally, the way in which their connectivity is
signified should be understood as dynamic; thus, the facial superimposition
should be seen as a cinematic technique that depicts movement in order to signify
a connection between individuals. What I mean by this is that in both instances,
the dissolve that momentarily superimposes Manuela’s face over Bernburg’s
appears as a literal movement of Manuela’s face into, out of, and through
Bernburg’s and, indeed, vice versa. I say ‘vice versa’ because, by virtue of the
superimposition, the otherwise separate images of the women’s faces appear to
‘touch’ one another. This, as per my discussion in Chapter 1 of haptic contact,
serves to connote a sense of reciprocity. Consequently, in these moments
Manuela’s face touches Bernburg’s as much as Bernburg’s face touches
Manuela’s.
With the Weimar-context of ‘revaluation’ in mind, a comparison between
these two dynamic visual representations of connectivity between women with
24
As McCormick and Ingrid Sharp have noted, postwar Germany was characterized by a crisis in
masculinity stemming from the traumatic loss (and affects thereof) of the First World War; and,
furthermore, by the ‘fear’ of the so-called (and difficult to define) ‘New Woman,’ characterized as
a sexually/politically/financially emancipated female figure posing extreme danger to Germany’s
social order. Additionally, the postwar crisis in masculinity is generally discussed in reference to
the social ‘trauma’ inflicted on masculinity and masculine virility as a result of the loss of the First
World War and its horrific after-effects. See: McCormick, Richard W. Gender and Sexuality in
Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature and “New Objectivity”. New York: Palgrave, 2001, 3 and
Sharp, Ingrid. “Gender Relations in Weimar Berlin.” In Practicing Modernity: Female Creativity
in the Weimar Republic. Eds., Christiane Schönfeld and Carmel Finnan. Würzburg: Königshausen
and Neumann GmbH, 2006, 2-3; and McCormick, Richard W. McCormick, Richard W. Gender
and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature and “New Objectivity”. New York:
Palgrave, 2001, 59.
62
those between men is warranted. For instance, take the scene in which Manuela is
brought by Marga (Ilse Winter) into the locker room to be introduced to the other
girls. Manuela is then called over to see Ilse’s (Ellen Schwannecke) locker, in
order to view her quasi-shrine to German actor Hans Albers (Figure 2.11). Hidden
underneath a larger piece of paper, Ilse has attached dozens of Albers’
photographs to the inside of her locker door. The centre of the shrine is a large
cut-out of Albers’ face, around which she has images of him in various film roles
and costumes. Kneeling in front of a standing Manuela, who politely leans in to
take a closer look at the photographs, Ilse points out that she has chosen to keep
Albers in her locker because he has such “sex appeal”—a term which of which
she is reminded by her friend. The friend is huddled together, and pictured in
close-up, with another girl looking at a magazine, in which a tiny picture of a
scantily-clad muscular man is visible at the left-hand corner of the screen (Figure
2.12). The image of the man is dwarfed by the faces if the two girls, who
dominate the right-hand side and middle of the screen. After “sex appeal” is
uttered, the two girls giggle and turn to one another, their faces so close that their
noses almost touch. These girls are frequently depicted in the film together,
talking quietly with their shoulders close together, or with their arms around one
another. In the same sequence, directly after Ilse’s shrine and the magazine-image
are depicted, Marga begins categorically rifling through Manuela’s belongings in
order to rid her of everything ‘forbidden.’ Manuela’s book is then discovered,
which she states that she took from her Uncle’s bookshelf for the journey, but
never read. Ilse takes the book and opens it, seemingly at random, to an
illustration of a man violently accosting a woman in what appears to be a
bedroom, and which the camera shows in close-up (Figure 2.13).
63
Figure 2.11: Ilse (left) shows off her shrine of Hans Albers to Manuela.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform25
25
“Ilse’s Shrine.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea
Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
64
Figure 2.12: Girls in close-up looking at male figure in a magazine.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform26
26
“Girls Looking at Magazine.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
65
Figure 2.13: Book-image of a man assaulting his (presumed) wife.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform27
To reiterate, the superimposed images of Bernburg and Manuela’s faces
signify a loving and dynamic romantic connection; it is therefore interesting to
compare these to imagery showing either men or men interacting with women.
Unlike the superimposed faces of Manuela and Bernburg, the images of Albers
and the scantily-clad man in the magazine are photographs and depicted as such.
These images are therefore not only static, but their boundaries are clear—they do
not move, and they have clear borders which are visible on screen. Additionally,
the way in which the images of the men are depicted in reference to the girls’
environment connotes a sense of separateness from the girls’ world because there
is never any true ‘interaction’ with the males present in the atmosphere of the
school. For example, the shrine to Albers is both carefully tucked away under a
large sheet of paper and inside Ilse’s locker. Similarly, the man in the magazine is
27
“Image of Man Assaulting his Wife.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
66
not only hidden inside of it, but is relegated to the far corner of the screen and
depicted as extremely tiny, particularly when compared to the girls in close up.
Consequently, there does not appear to be any immediacy that might be associated
with these images; they are something of a joke, to be laughed at, and to enjoy on
a very superficial level. The image in the book, which suggests a similar sense of
stasis and apartness by its status as a still image and being located inside a book,
actually shocks the girls. When they see it, their mouths are open and they stare
intently at the violence perpetrated by the man against a woman who appears to
be his wife.28
Coming back to my effort to explore Mädchen in Uniform in a Weimarcontext, it is also pertinent to emphasize that cinema was not the only artistic
medium coming out of the Weimar Republic to contrast heterosexual and queer
imagery in what I have suggested is a paradigm of ‘revaluation.’ As a case in
point, Weimar-artist and illustrator Jeanne Mammen’s varied depictions of lesbian
couples might be read as part of this postwar mentality of disillusionment and,
most importantly, of revaluation.29 As Annelie Lütgens points out, in Mammen’s
artistic renditions of urban heterosexual couples, she “depicted the hunger for
money and the representation of status symbols as a particular aspect of the
relationship between man and woman…[she] shows people desperately clinging
to each other in an effort to save themselves from ‘going to the dogs.’
Communication, understanding, tenderness, not to mention partnership, are
completely absent. These are things which Mammen reserves for relationships
between women.”30 For example, in her famous watercolour entitled “She
28
The couple are shown inside of what seems to be a bedroom; there is a bed shown at the right of
the image, and a child’s cradle visible at the left hand corner of the image.
29
Jeanne Mammen was a French-German visual artist famous for her depictions of the urban
underworld in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, and is especially remembered for her
representations of queer women. Lütgens, Annelie. “The Conspiracy of Women: Images and City
Life in the Work of Jeanne Mammen.” In Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in
Weimar Culture. Ed. Katharina von Ankum. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1997, 89-105.
30
Ibid, 1997, 97.
67
Represents” (1928), Mammen depicts two women, appearing to be a couple, as
they celebrate inside what appears to be a queer nightspot.31 The women are
smiling, the touch shared between them is tender, and the atmosphere appears to
be relaxed, comfortable, and welcoming.
Again, through the cinematic technique of the facial superimposition,
Mädchen in Uniform connotes the desire between Bernburg and Manuela via the
surface of their faces. This endowment of the corporeal surface with the capability
to ‘show’ a subject’s interiority might also be discussed in connection with
Weimar-era sexology. Weimar sexologists and sexual scientists sought to explain,
identify, and classify non-heteronormative sexual identities and behaviours
primarily by analyzing the surfaces of bodies. Although his work began years
before the establishment of the Weimar Republic, public images of gay men and
lesbians during this period were usually modeled after prominent sexologist
Magnus Hirschfeld’s notion of a so-called ‘third sex.’ Generally, the third sex was
“a category said to describe individuals whose sexual make-up falls somewhere in
the middle of the spectrum of “male” and “female.”32 In this sense, Hirschfeld’s
third sex theory stipulated that queer men and women existed between ‘man’ and
‘woman,’ as said individuals were conceived of as demonstrating physical and
psychological characteristics of both sexes.
Especially fascinating in the context of this discussion is Hirschfeld’s
tendency to use and study photographic imagery as evidence to bolster his
theories, which he published in various works and allowed to be shown in films so
as to educate the wider public about the existence, reality, and plight of third sex.
Hirschfeld’s work rallied around his efforts to perpetuate the third sex as an innate
31
This image is referred to by a number of different names including “Masked Ball” and “Carnival
Scene.” Heywood, Sophie. “Re-setting the Agenda: Jeanne Mammen’s repossession of female
agency and subjectivity.” PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, Department of Historical
Studies, 2012, 3.
32
Matysik, Tracie. “In the Name of the Law: The “Female Homosexual” and the Criminal Code in
Fin de Siècle Germany.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 13.1 (January 2004), 31.
68
sexual category, and “thus neither pathological nor criminal, neither immoral nor
sinful,” in order to aid in the abolishment of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code
that made sexual activity between men illegal.33 In his well-known article “Less
and More Than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar
Germany,” Richard Dyer explores a photographic sequence Hirschfeld published
in 1903 which, for the purposes of this discussion, deserves to be quoted at length:
“[depicted was] a very muscular youth holding a large fig leaf over his genitals represents
the heterosexual body type; a woman standing so as to accentuate the generous curve of
her hips...represents the heterosexual female body type; while the…third sex body is
represented by a flat-chested figure wearing a scarf over its head and a veil across its
face, standing so that its hip is less curved than the female type but still more pronounced
that the male type.”34
This description reveals Hirschfeld’s effort to explore third sex individuals by
examining their corporeality and comparing them to other bodies. The conclusion,
it would seem, is an essentialist conception that places androgynous physical
characteristics at the centre of how, exactly, third sex men and women appeared.
This conclusion, however, is based on the examination, even ‘reading,’ of
physical characteristics. Third sex individuals, then, were seen to have had visual
signifiers, located on their bodies, which identified them as such.
This can also be seen in the famous enlightenment film Anders als die
Andern (1919), the conception and development of which Hirschfeld was closely
associated, wherein androgynous—so, third sex—corporeal signifiers serve to
identify queer individuals, sometimes exclusively. Directed by Richard Oswald
and released in 1919, the goal of Anders als die Andern was to reveal the evils of
33
Schoppmann, Claudia. Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians During the Third Reich.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, 4, and Fenmore, Mark. “The Recent Historiography
of Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Germany.” The Historical Journal 52.3 (2009), 764.
34
Dyer, Richard D. “Less and More Than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar
Germany.” New German Critique 51 Special Issue on Weimar Mass Culture (Autumn 1990), 1920.
69
Paragraph 175 by emphasizing its encouragement of blackmail.35 The story
focuses on Paul Kröner (Conrad Veidt), a queer concert violinist who falls in love
with his pupil, Kurt Sivers (Fritz Schulz). As a result of their romantic liaisons
Paul is blackmailed and, when he takes the perpetrator to court in an effort to seek
justice, receives instead a prison sentence for violating Paragraph 175. Although
permitted to return home before his sentence begins, he is shunned on the street
and fired from his job. Consequently, Paul succumbs to depression and takes his
own life.
While the story itself is a fascinating example of efforts during the Weimar
Republic to condemn the unjust criminalization of sexual acts between consenting
adult men, the depiction of the third sex individuals in the film are of particular
interest to this discussion. Appearing in the film himself as a lecturer and third sex
expert, Hirschfeld is depicted showing photographs of butch lesbians and
effeminate gay men, who are described as men with female characteristics and
women with male characteristics (Figures 2.14 and 2.15). Moreover, the film’s
visual representation of its queer characters is distinctly ‘third sex’ or
androgynous. Paul’s clothing and gestures are notably feminine, and when Kurt
and Paul attend a gathering where other queer individuals are present, highly
androgynous lesbian couples are featured in the background, dancing with one
another (Figure 2.16). Of course, Hirschfeld’s theories did not invent this
androgynous style; the butch lesbian and effeminate gay man certainly existed.
However, what I am trying to suggest is that representations of third sex
intermediate ‘types’ identified gay men or lesbians by using physical signifiers to
determine same-sex sexual attractions. In this sense, it is the surface of the body
35
Anders als die Andern was a so-called ‘enlightenment film.’ Enlightenment films were often
controversial. These films were mostly produced and released before the return of film censorship
in the Weimar Republic, after which Anders als die Andern was banned for obscenity. Dyer,
Richard D. “Less and More Than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar
Germany.” New German Critique 51 Special Issue on Weimar Mass Culture (Autumn 1990), 1920, and Steakley, James D. “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders
als Die Andern.” Film History 11.2 (1999), 189-191, 188.
70
which connotes an individual’s interiority; that is, their emotions and/or desire for
members of the same sex.
Figure 2.14: A Third-sex woman with ‘masculine’ physical traits.
Screenshot: Anders als die Andern36
36
“‘Masculine’ Woman.” Anders als die Andern. Dir. Richard Oswald. Perf. Conrad Veidt, Fritz
Schultz, Magnus Hirschfeld. Screenplay Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald. Reconstruction:
Filmmuseum München, 1919. DVD 2004. Author’s Screenshot.
71
Figure 2.15: Individual with ‘a female upper body’ and ‘male lower body.’
Screenshot: Anders als die Andern37
Figure 2.16: In the background, androgynous lesbian couples are dancing.
Screenshot: Anders als die Andern38
37
“Intersex Individual.” Anders als die Andern. Dir. Richard Oswald. Perf. Conrad Veidt, Fritz
Schultz, Magnus Hirschfeld. Screenplay Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald. Reconstruction:
Filmmuseum München, 1919. DVD 2004. Author’s Screenshot.
72
Of course, it is important to point out that Hirschfeld and his
contemporaries mainly approached corporeality from a medical and scientific
perspective, by which they sought to uncover and examine innate physical
characteristics in order to explain certain behaviours via essentialism. I am not
suggesting that Manuela or Bernburg exhibit particular corporeal signifiers which
mark them as lesbians. However, I am arguing that the same-sex desire and love
between Manuela and Bernburg is signified by Sagan via her depiction of their
bodies onscreen. Using the dissolve and the facial superimposition, Sagan codifies
the surface of the face as the means by which the women’s same-sex desire is
communicated to one another and, furthermore, to the audience. While both
Sagan in Mädchen in Uniform and Weimar-era sexologists might be construed as
having ‘read’ corporeality as a means by which an individual’s interior informs
his or her exterior, their respective understandings of how this functions is
somewhat different. Sagan’s use of the facial superimposition should be
conceived of as a kind of spiritual, not scientific, physiognomy, as it is employed
a means of “aesthetic signification,” stemming from eighteenth-century
physiognomic thought, seeking to interpret “the mysterious inner world through
bodily signs.”39 Therefore, Sagan’s utilization of the facial superimposition cannot
be conceived as purely ‘scientific’ because it is dependent upon a fleeting moment
wherein desire becomes evident on the surface of the face, as opposed to a focus
on innate and unchanging physical characteristics.
In a Weimar context the corporeal surface should ultimately be understood
as a privileged site of information. I propose that the corporeal surface was
codified as revelatory because of its conceptualization as having the capacity to
render the interiority of a subject visible on the surface of the body. As a result, if
38
“Queer Gathering.” Anders als die Andern. Dir. Richard Oswald. Perf. Conrad Veidt, Fritz
Schultz, Magnus Hirschfeld. Screenplay Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald. Reconstruction:
Filmmuseum München, 1919. DVD 2004. Author’s Screenshot.
39
Gunning, Tom. “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early
Film.” Modernism/Modernity 4.1 (1997), 3,4.
73
the corporeal surface has the ability to reveal, it should therefore be understood as
being profound, not superficial. This is indeed a paradoxical concept. How,
exactly, might a surface be conceived as other than superficial? I will attempt to
show that the revelatory and therefore profound quality of the surface, especially
the surface of the face, is intrinsically related to its capability to reveal the mind
and/or soul. More specifically, the surface of the face becomes the means by
which the interiority—so, the depth of an individual—is connoted. To explore the
revelatory and/or profound quality of the facial surface in Mädchen in Uniform
and its ability to show the mind and/or soul more closely, I will turn now to an
exploration of the facial superimpositions through the prism of the work of
Weimar cinema theorist Béla Balázs. Balázs, who is remembered primarily for his
aesthetic theories of the close-up in silent film, was concerned with and fascinated
by what he perceived to be the inherently revelatory quality of cinema
technology’s representations of human corporeality. Balázs understood the
cinematic technique of the close-up and the role of the face in cinema as a means
by which an individual’s innermost thoughts and/or emotions—that is, their
soul—was revealed to cinema audiences.40
In order to comprehend this so-called ‘revelatory’ quality of the (sur)face,
we must inquire as to how, exactly, the surface of the face can be codified both by
Balázs and within the diegetic world of Mädchen in Uniform as the site upon
which the ‘soul’ reveals itself. In his book The Visible Man (1924), Balázs seeks
to tease out an aesthetic cinematic theory that conceptualizes film as a
40
To modern readers, it is sometimes difficult to take Balázs’ extremely poetic writing style and
overall aesthetic perception seriously, especially with regards to his constant references to the
‘soul’ as being revealed via the faces of actors and actresses who, obviously, have been hired to
play a role in a film. Nevertheless, his aesthetic theory is fascinating in its attempt to discuss and
thereby discover the result of (new) filmic technology with regards to its depiction of the human
body and explore not only what is revealed to audiences as a result, but also what is at stake in this
revelation. Also, Balázs’ use of the word ‘soul’ is problematic for obvious reasons; nevertheless, I
would suggest that, to get around its clear religious connotations, the ‘soul’ should be taken as a
term employed to refer to the interior, or unseen, aspects of an individual. Hake, Sabine. The
Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907-1933. Lincoln: The University of
Nebraska Press, 1993, 224-225.
74
“fundamentally new revelation of humanity.”41 In his understanding, any aesthetic
theory is a mere attempt to joyfully experience “the hidden product of an inner
life.”42 Indeed, as “the popular art of our century,” Balázs makes certain to
emphasize that cinema’s ability to connote interiority should be viewed “not…in
the sense that it [film] arises from the spirit of the people, but in the sense that it is
out of film that the spirit of the people arises.”43 With film conceived as a new,
relevant, and ultimately revolutionary art form at the centre of his aesthetic
theory, Balázs emphasizes the importance of a theoretical focus on cinema by
perceiving cinema and cinematic techniques as the means by which an important
shift occurs from the written word to the image or, more specifically, the gesture.
He states that, as a result of printing and the ensuing societal focus on the written
word, human expression has been relegated to the realm of writing.44 As a result,
Balázs affirms that man’s “visual spirit was transformed into a legible spirit, and a
visual culture was changed into a conceptual one. It is universally acknowledged
that this change has radically altered the face of life in general.”45 More
specifically, Balázs cites the appearance of the printing press as the locatable
historical moment causing man’s over-dependency on the written word.
As a result of this shift, “the word has become the principal bridge joining
human beings to one another. The soul has migrated to the word and become
crystalized there. The body, however, has been stripped of the soul and
emptied.”46 While no less radical than the onset of the printing press in terms of
its socio-cultural effects, film’s expressivity of human emotion is centred on
bodily movement and gesticulation.47, Balázs, therefore, understands film as a
41
Balázs, Béla. “The Visible Man.” In Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The
Spirit of Film. Ed. Erica Carter. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, 5.
42
Ibid, 2010, 7.
43
Ibid, 2010, 4. Emphasis mine.
44
Ibid, 2010, 9.
45
Balázs, Béla. “The Visible Man.” In Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The
Spirit of Film. Ed. Erica Carter. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, 9.
46
Ibid, 2010, 10.
47
Ibid, 2010, 9.
75
means by which the body, hitherto emptied of the ‘soul’ by the over-prevalence of
the written word, finds it once again. This is possible because the revelatory
quality of cinematic technology—particularly the close-up—exposes the soul on
the surface of a dynamic and expressive body. Hence, cinematically-rendered
corporeal dynamism construes the human body as “unmediated spirit, [or] spirit
rendered visible.”48 Therefore, Balázs purports that it is through the cinematically
represented dynamism of the human corporeal form that man’s ‘spirit’—a term he
uses to describe an individual’s interior thoughts and emotions—becomes visible
or perceivable to the human eye. Consequently, with this concept Balázs posits a
revaluation of the body’s expressive capabilities which, in keeping with his
thought process, had been previously rendered invisible as a consequence of
society’s focus on the static written word. By citing gestures as “the true mother
tongue of mankind,” Balázs suggests that words are somehow apart from
revelatory human expressivity. For Balázs the development and very existence of
cinema and cinematic technology represents a new form of expressive language as
a consequence of “our painful yearning to be human beings with our entire
bodies…from our yearning for the embodied human being who has fallen silent,
who has been forgotten as has become invisible.”49
It is precisely the visual expressivity of cinema which provides a medium
through which the ‘forgotten’ corporeal, non-verbal ‘language’ of the embodied
human being can be effectively expressed and witnessed. Seen in this way,
Balázs’ attempt to re-discover the ‘lost’ embodied expressive capabilities of
humanity squarely places dynamic corporeality—that is, a body that moves—at
the centre of his theory. Thus, the visual expressivity of the cinema—achieved by
depicting the body ‘in action’— can be understood as reflecting Balázs’ emphasis
on the ability of dynamic corporeal surfaces to reveal an individual’s interiority.
48
Ibid, 2010, 9.
Balázs, Béla. “The Visible Man.” In Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The
Spirit of Film. Ed. Erica Carter. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, 67, 19.Ibid, 2010,
11.
49
76
Balázs’ focus on the revelatory qualities of the surface serves as a theoretical
starting point for an analysis of how film as a “surface art” might be read as an
anti-dualistic force.50 Film, and by extension the visual expressiveness of the
corporeal surfaces depicted therein, can be read as anti-dualistic due to Balázs’
suggestions that “linkage is the living breath of film and everything in it” and that
film, as a “surface art,” necessarily connotes the fact that “whatever is inside in
outside.”51
The reciprocal relationships and linkages between the exteriority and
interiority of an onscreen individual are of particular importance when discussing
the facial superimpositions in Mädchen in Uniform. Again, both the
superimpositions are moments wherein the connectivity (the linkage) between
Bernburg and Manuela is established. Furthermore, this connection is made on the
surface of the face, meaning that the women’s feelings for one another (what is on
the inside) become viewable on the surface of their faces. Thus, “in film,
everything internal becomes visible in something external; it follows that
everything external testifies to an internal reality.”52 Here, Balázs attests to the
possibility to two separate entities—the inside and outside—being connected via
the dynamic expressivity of the human form represented cinematically. This
places traditional dualistic thinking—which, in principle, maintains a strict
separation of mind and matter or, as Balázs would likely put it, soul and body—
into question. Additionally, if a given individual’s mind (soul) can be literally
expressed on the surface of matter (body), the individual’s mind (soul) is therefore
visible—at the very least—in the moment of its expression. This suggests that
whoever ‘views’ this phenomenon—that is, the mind rendered visible via the
corporeal surface—is therefore receiving information about a given subject’s
50
Ibid, 2010, 11.
Ibid, 2010, 67, 19.
52
Balázs, Béla. “The Visible Man.” In Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The
Spirit of Film. Ed. Erica Carter. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, 67, 19.Ibid, 2010,
29.
51
77
interiority. Through the sending and receiving of such information, a connection
is established between two otherwise independent subjectivities via the
expressivity of the corporeal surface.
Yet, why does Sagan use the technique of the facial superimposition to
signify the romantic connection between Bernburg and Manuela, instead of
choosing to superimpose images of another body part? I suggest that Sagan’s
choice to focus on the faces of the two women can be read as a quasiphysiognomic project that references eighteenth century notions of the revelatory
qualities of the human face as a site of dynamic “hypersignification.”53 To tease
out what can be read as Sagan’s reference to physiognomy via her use of the
facial superimposition, I would like to first to refer back to Balázs’ own
physiognomic thought, which centres on the expressivity and dynamism of human
face. While he does understand the body as fundamental to his attempt to develop
an aesthetic theory of cinema, Balázs’ focus rests primarily on the revelatory role
of the face and of the close-up, which he believes is cinema’s “true terrain.”54 As
he attests in his chapter dedicated exclusively to what he conceives of as the
gnostic qualities of facial expressivity,55 it is the surface of the human face in
close-up wherein “the film’s real drama, its essential content, is played out.”56 For
Balázs, cinematic depictions of facial expressivity are the most revealing
cinematic images and, furthermore, the face in close-up allows onlookers to
witness “not just the individual states of the soul but also the mysterious process
of development itself.”57 In this sense, Balázs codifies the expressivity of the
face—which, as already emphasized, he sees as signifying the contents of a
subject’s interiority (their soul)—as highly dynamic and simultaneous.
53
Rivers, Christopher. Face Value: Physiognomical Thought and the Legible Body in Marivaux,
Lavater, Balzac, Gautier, and Zola. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994, 6.
54
Balázs, Béla. “The Visible Man.” In Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The
Spirit of Film. Ed. Erica Carter. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, 38.
55
Entitled “The Play of Facial Expressions.”
56
Balázs, Béla. “The Visible Man.” In Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The
Spirit of Film. Ed. Erica Carter. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, 33.
57
Ibid, 2010, 34.
78
Balázs’ understanding of the role of the face in cinema can be interpreted
as a certain refutation of traditional mind/body dualism. This, in turn, should be
perceived as deeply connected to eighteenth-century physiognomical thought.
Broadly, eighteenth-century physiognomy is the practice of “discovering” an
individual’s authentic personality and emotions via an interpretation or ‘reading’
of their corporeal characteristics or gestures, particularly those of the face.58
Therefore, as Christopher Rivers points out, the physiognomical project
presupposes an intimate connection between the physical and metaphysical which
codifies the body as a complex semiotic system by virtue of its capability to
‘show’ the interior contents of the human soul.59 Consequently, all individuals
necessarily express the connection between interior and exterior via the surface of
their bodies.60 In particular, Balázs’ work shares a profound connection to the
theories of famed physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater. Lavater, whose body of
work on the “divine science” of physiognomy is unparalleled in sheer volume,
was (and remains) famous for the overall theory that the soul is visible on the
surface of the body, especially the face.61 As Lavater points out, the mysteries of
the very nature of the soul are “written and impressed on the face of man, and on
the whole of his exterior.”62 Lavater—like Balázs—therefore conceives of the
surface of the body as somehow legible, whereupon not only can the soul be seen
but whereupon the contents of the soul can actually be read and/or interpreted by
the ‘trained’ physiognomist.
58
Craig, Charlotte M. “A Rigid Issue: Lichtenberg versus Lavater.” In Anthropology and the
German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity. Ed., Katherine M. Faull. Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1995, 58.
59
Rivers, Christopher. Face Value: Physiognomical Thought and the Legible Body in Marivaux,
Lavater, Balzac, Gautier, and Zola. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994, 3.
60
Shookman, Ellis. “Psuedo-Science, Social Fad, Literary Wonder: Johann Caspar Lavater and the
Art of Physiognomy.” In The Faces f Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann
Caspar Lavater.” Ed., Ellis Shookman. Columbia: Camden House, 1993, 4.
61
Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy: calculated to extend The Knowledge and the
Love of Mankind (volume 1). London: H.D. Symonds, 1797, iv, vi.
62
Ibid, 1797, vi.
79
Sagan’s project via the facial superimpositions in Mädchen in Uniform,
then, should be read as referencing physiognomic thought because she ultimately
endows the facial surfaces of the two women with certain gnostic and revelatory
qualities. Also, as both Balázs and Lavater attest in their respective works, the
surface of the face should also be interpreted in their dynamic and simultaneous
movements; that is, during moments of gesticulation.63 If, as this suggests, facial
expressivity is dynamic, then it attests to the body’s constant connection with the
soul—that is, mind’s constant reference to matter, and vice versa. Undoubtedly,
gesticulation and facial expressivity are central to the superimpositions in this
film. For instance, and as described previously, during the classroom scene
superimposition Manuela is depicted as softly smiling and Bernburg’s eyes
constantly dart back and forth, and so on. If facial expressivity in this context is
understood as the externalization of the women’s internal emotions, the
superimposed images themselves should be codified as a cinematic expression
that literalizes the affinity between the two women. So, in this sense, not only is
mind connected to matter in this moment, but so are two otherwise separate
subjectivities. To borrow from Grosz, in this moment the two women become “a
unified plurality.”64
This double-connectivity and communication taking place between
mind/matter and subject/subject via the facial superimposition, especially when
seen in reference to Balázs and Lavater’s physiognomical theories, is remarkable
because it suggests the possibility of the impartation of information from one
entity to another. The surface of the face, as readable, can be learned from. Within
the moments of the facial superimpositions in Mädchen in Uniform, a subject’s
interiority is revealed and can be interpreted via their exteriority. In essence,
therefore, “the effects of depth and interiority can be explained in terms of
63
Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy: calculated to extend The Knowledge and the
Love of Mankind (volume 1). London: H.D. Symonds, 1797, 15, 17.
64
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994, 12.
80
the…subject’s corporeal surface.”65 As a result, conceiving the mind and body as
entirely separate entities in these moments no longer makes sense by virtue of the
bilateral communication taking place between them. This communication, I
suggest, is indicated by the facial surface`s ability to show, and therefore render
interpretable, what Balázs and Lavater term the subject’s ‘soul.’
By privileging the surface of the face and endowing it with gnostic
capabilities, corporeality thereby should be construed as central to Sagan’s
representations of desire between women in this film. In her emphasis on the
centrality of corporeality in conjunction with the double-connectivity she
demonstrates via the facial superimposition, I would suggest a reading of the
facial surface in Mädchen in Uniform as highly resistive of traditional, and indeed
somatophobic, Western dualistic thought because it renders the respective
ontological and metaphysical positions of mind/matter and Self/Other ambiguous.
An ambiguity of position-hood, as it were, is fascinating in the wider context of
the film as a story of a lesbian relationship between a teacher and her student in a
highly regimented and authoritarian school environment. As I will endeavour to
explore in Chapter 3, it is the anti-dualism in this film which ultimately provides
the jumping-off point for a discussion of the anti-authoritarianism demonstrated in
Mädchen in Uniform.
2.4 Conclusion to Chapter 2
In conclusion, I have sought to provide a historical context for Mädchen in
Uniform by engaging in a discussion and analysis of the facial superimpositions
occurring between Manuela and Bernburg in the classroom and rescue scenes. I
have examined the role of the facial surface in this film as revelatory by
examining it in reference to a postwar German context of revaluation, Magnus
Hirschfeld’s analyses of the third sex, the veneration of the face and of the close-
65
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994, vii.
81
up perpetuated by cinema theorist Béla Balázs, and, lastly, the eighteenth-century
physiognomical thought of Johann Caspar Lavater. Ultimately, I suggest that the
facial superimpositions should be codified as moments that resist traditional and
body-phobic dualistic thinking, which separates and hierarchizes mind and matter,
by indicating a double-connectivity between subject/subject and interior/exterior.
It is this resistance which renders ambiguous the ontological and metaphysical
positions between Bernburg and Manuela, whose romantic affinity and passion
for one another are both signified and literalized by the cinematically-achieved
overlap of the surfaces of their faces. What this does, I purport, is provide a
starting point for a discussion of the anti-totalitarian implications of the love story
between Manuela and Bernburg within the boarding school, as I will now discuss
in Chapter 3.
82
Chapter 3: Reciprocity and Liminality- Threatening Authoritarianism
3.1 Introduction to Chapter 3
In “Chapter 2: The Facial Superimpositions- Establishing an Affinity” I
discussed the cinematic technique of the facial superimposition as revelatory and
anti-dualistic in reference to Weimar-German and eighteenth-century
conceptualizations of corporeal surfaces. I have understood the facial
superimpositions in Mädchen in Uniform, which occur exclusively between
Manuela and Bernburg, as signifying moments of dynamic interactivity or contact
between two otherwise separate entities, such as Self/Other, subject/object, and
body/mind (soul). The anti-dualistic, and therefore anti-hierarchal, connotations of
the facial superimpositions in this film represent an opportunity to discuss the
construction of the film’s anti-authoritarian ethics. More specifically, I argue that
the anti-authoritarian ethical standpoint in Mädchen in Uniform should be seen as
centred on the passionate interconnection between Bernburg and Manuela, which
serves as the catalyst for the successful and immanent rebellion against the
school’s totalitarian structure.
The reciprocal nature of the relationship between Bernburg and Manuela,
which I have emphasized in my previous chapters, successfully undermines the
authoritarian structure of the boarding school because it represents a loving and
passionate alternative to the school’s perpetual insistence on interpersonal
hierarchies. Seen in this way, Bernburg and Manuela’s affinity poses an immanent
and immediate threat to the school’s totalitarianism by virtue of its very existence.
Consequently, in an effort to safeguard the school’s structure from further
jeopardy, the Headmistress isolates Manuela. However, this proves ineffective:
despite being forbidden to do so, Bernburg and the girls attempt to speak with or
see Manuela. Moreover, they successfully prevent Manuela’s suicide, which
would have been her ultimate expulsion from the system. The refusal to comply
with the Headmistress connotes the collective ethical stance taken by Bernburg
and the girls against the injustice of Manuela’s punishment. Therefore, by
‘ethics,’ I am referring to the critical standpoint taken by Bernburg and the girls in
reaction to the extremeness and cruelty of Manuela’s isolation. By virtue of their
83
perception of Manuela’s punishment as unjust, the girls and Bernburg refuse to
accept it and, as a result, disobey the Headmistress in their efforts to rescue her.
The fact that they are successful—Manuela’s is saved—suggests that a profound
shift has occurred within the system. The prevention of Manuela’s suicide,
understood as a rejection of the injustice of her punishment, indicates that the
totalitarian structure on which the school is founded no longer able to function as
such. Instead, Manuela’s rescue—which, importantly, occurs in the film’s final
sequence—serves to demonstrate that non-hierarchal interpersonal relationships,
based on affinity and reciprocal love, can not only wield immense critical power
but survive within the system.
With this in mind, my analysis will be carried out as follows. As in the
previous chapters, I perform a close reading of two scenes: the gift scene, in
which Manuela receives a chemise from Bernburg, and the declaration scene, in
which Manuela proclaims her love for Bernburg. My analysis will be carried out
as follows. Firstly, I provide a detailed description of the gift and declaration
scenes. Secondly, I argue that the chemise-gift should be perceived as tangible
evidence of the reciprocal love and desire between the two women. As a result, I
understand the chemise-gift as a catalyst because it should be seen as the
inspiration for Manuela’s love-speech. To explore this further, I compare
Manuela’s act of rebellion with those of the other girls, such as Mia and Ilse.
Thirdly, I discuss the importance of the tangible interconnectivity represented by
the chemise-gift in reference to cinema theorist Vivian Sobchack’s conception of
passion and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh. Then,
I examine Manuela’s rebellious love-speech as an inside-threat to the school’s
authoritarian structure due to the liminal qualities of the moment in which it takes
place. This will be undertaken by looking at Frankfurt-School theorist Theodor
Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics and the power of the indeterminate, or
marginalized, state. Lastly, I discuss Manuela’s punishment-by-quarantine, which
I perceive as relegating her to a status of marginalization, simultaneously existing
both inside and outside of the school’s totalitarian system. I purport that the
severity of Manuela’s punishment is related to her critique of the school’s
84
hierarchal system. Manuela’s criticism, which I suggest is her reciprocal and
loving relationship with Bernburg, jeopardizes the hierarchal structure on which
the functioning of the school depends. In order to explore this, I discuss
Manuela’s behaviour and punishment through the prism of feminist philosopher
Julia Kristeva’s conception of the ‘abject’ figure, whose ontological border-state
represents a systemic threat.
3.2 The Gift Scene and The Declaration Scene
During the classroom scene, and as discussed in Chapter 2, Manuela is
reprimanded by a disappointed Bernburg for not being able to successfully
demonstrate her preparedness during Bernburg’s lesson. After the screen fades to
black, the film shows a solitary Manuela tip-toeing towards the school’s staircase;
she then presses herself against the wall as Bernburg and two other girls approach
(Figure 3.1). Manuela makes an attempt to move towards Bernburg, seemingly in
an attempt to speak to her, but Bernburg ignores her completely and Manuela
shrinks back and lets the women silently pass her. The women climb the stairs as
Manuela looks on, forlornly. The scene then cuts to Bernburg entering her office
and back to Manuela, still standing alone on the staircase. Manuela is then
approached by Edelgard, who embraces her in an effort to provide comfort after
her inability to perform in Bernburg’s lesson.
85
Figure 3.1: Manuela (left) standing as Bernburg approaches after the lesson.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform1
Manuela admits to Edelgard that she simply cannot remember anything in
Bernburg’s presence; then, she is informed by another pupil that she is wanted in
Bernburg’s office. Terrified, Manuela enters the office, and is beckoned by a
smirking Bernburg to her desk in order to examine Manuela’s worn-out chemise
(Figure 3.2). Bernburg, chemise in hand, smiles playfully at Manuela and makes
jokes about the ragged state of the undergarment. Manuela states that, when her
aunt sent her to the school, she did so without providing Manuela with any new
items of clothing. The women then laughingly agree that the chemise needs to be
replaced. Still grinning widely, Bernburg brushes past Manuela and opens her
bureau, from which she takes out a new chemise and presents it to Manuela.
Overwhelmed, Manuela happily throws the chemise over her shoulder and wraps
Bernburg in a tight embrace (Figure 3.3).
1
“Manuela Stands near the Staircase.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
86
Suddenly, without warning, Manuela begins to cry in Bernburg’s arms
(Figure 3.4). Bernburg, whose eyes also glisten with tears, asks Manuela if she is
homesick, which she denies (Figure 3.5). Manuela, still crying and appearing
confused, cannot provide any explanation for her tears. Then, launching into a
frenzied semi-monologue, Manuela admits her excruciating desire to follow
Bernburg into her bedroom at night after the ritualistic goodnight kiss Bernburg
shares with the girls. Becoming increasingly feverish in her speech, Manuela also
confesses that she experiences overwhelming feelings of jealousy whenever she
imagines Bernburg kissing other girls after Manuela has left the boarding school.
Abruptly interrupting her, Bernburg merely asks Manuela to be a good comrade
and to understand that exceptions cannot be made in her treatment of Manuela, as
the other girls would become envious. Bernburg does, however, concede that she
thinks often of Manuela and, smiling, sends Manuela with her chemise-gift back
to her classmates. Bernburg, grinning contentedly, looks on as Manuela exits the
office (Figure 3.6). Manuela too is smiling ecstatically and, teary-eyed, walks
away (Figure 3.7).
87
Figure 3.2: Bernburg, smirking, seated at her desk when Manuela enters.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform2
Figure 3.3: Manuela happily hugs Bernburg, the chemise visible over her
shoulder.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform3
2
“Bernburg Smirks.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea
Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
88
Figure 3.4: Manuela weeping in Bernburg’s arms after she receives the gift.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform4
3
“Manuela Embraces Bernburg holding the Chemise.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan.
Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931.
DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
4
“Manuela Weeps.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea
Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
89
Figure 3.5: Bernburg teary-eyed asks Manuela if she is homesick
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform5
Figure 3.6: Bernburg smiling to herself as Manuela leaves
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform6
5
“Bernburg Teary-Eyed.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
90
Figure 3.7: Manuela leaving Bernburg’s office with her chemise, smiling.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform7
The proceeding day the girls learn that they will be performing Schiller’s
Don Carlos in celebration of the Headmistress’ birthday. The camera then cuts to
the evening of the performance, depicting the girls in full costume. Dressed as
thelead, Manuela rehearses her lines as Don Carlos as her kneeling companion
listens and strokes her legs. Happily, Manuela exclaims that Bernburg will not be
able to help but notice her in the play and, unlike in their classes together,
Manuela will remember her lines (Figure 3.8). Following the girls’ triumphant
performance is a celebration in which the girls are allowed to take part without
supervision. There is singing, dancing, and a great deal of heavily spiked punch—
which Manuela drinks copiously. When dancing with her classmate Mia (Barbara
Pirk), Manuela unexpectedly seizes Mia by the arms and declares how happy she
is. Mia, wincing in obvious pain, rolls up the sleeve of her dress and proudly
6
“Bernburg Smiling as Manuela Exits.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
7
“Manuela Leaving with her Gift.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
91
flaunts the initials ‘E.v.B’—Elisabeth von Bernburg—carved into her skin (Figure
3.9). After somewhat disbelievingly reading the initials aloud, Manuela suddenly
declares that she wants to divulge something to her classmates. Standing before
them and quivering with excitement, Manuela starts off by telling the girls how
much she loves them, and then asks if they want to hear a secret. The girls lean
forward in anticipation, eagerly awaiting Manuela’s secret, which is that Bernburg
has given her a chemise and that she is wearing it under her costume. At this
moment Fräulein von Kesten enters the room and, hearing this, fetches the
Headmistress. Then, fervent and impassioned, Manuela looks directly at the
Headmistress and proclaims her love for Bernburg and states that everyone should
know, and recognize, it (Figure 3.10). Manuela then faints, after which the
Headmistress declares Manuela’s behaviour to be a scandal. The screen then fades
to black.
Figure 3.8: As Don Carlos, Manuela practices her lines.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform8
8
“Manuela Recites her Lines.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
92
Figure 3.9: Mia (left) shows Manuela the “E v. B” carved into her arm.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform9
Figure 3.10: Manuela defiant in front of the Headmistress.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform10
9
“Bernburg’s Initials.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea
Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
93
3.3 Passionate Reciprocity and Liminality
Manuela’s rebellious declaration of love wields an immediate power to
effectively undo, or at the very least interrupt, the authoritarian structure of the
school. I understand Manuela’s act of rebellion as an effective systematic threat
because it results in the Headmistress’ swift and immediate reaction. Manuela is
instantaneously quarantined, waking up the next morning in the school’s sick bay.
This belies the threatening nature of Manuela’s act and, by extension, its
potentially-disruptive power: Manuela is isolated from the other students due to
the likely fear that she will ‘infect’ the others with her disobedience. This power
should be discussed in reference to the intimate—even erotic—chemise-gift given
to her by Bernburg. When analyzed together, the chemise-gift and lovedeclaration should be understood as spurring the breaking-down of the
authoritarianism of the school in favour of a non-hierarchal interactivity between
desiring subjects, which I understand as the establishment of a non-hierarchal
ethical standpoint. Of course, this begs the question: why, and how, does
Manuela’s act of rebellion—that is, her love-declaration—disrupt the school’s
authoritarianism while other disobedient acts are simply absorbed back into the
dominant power structure? To answer this question, we must explore how
Manuela’s—and by extension Bernburg’s—effective and realized revolutionary
act of passion serves as the foundation for change in the ethical structure of the
boarding school.
There are several acts of rebellion undertaken by the girls against the
school’s authoritarianism that are highlighted in Mädchen in Uniform—
Manuela’s declaration of love for Bernburg is not the only one. However, the
ensuing consequences of Ilse or Mia’s disobedience, for example, are either not
very severe or the potential threat contained within the acts themselves are not
realized, as the girls’ behaviour does not appear to cause any permanent damage
10
“Manuela Defiant.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea
Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
94
to the overall totalitarian structure of the boarding school. Ilse, for example,
consistently either makes fun of the school’s authority figures or unabashedly
refuses to comply with its rules. Ilse’s defiance, taking place within the school,
therefore contains the potential to seriously undermine its authoritarianism.
Nevertheless, Ilse’s actions never truly have this effect. For instance, she writes
and attempts to smuggle a letter to her parents in which she complains of
starvation and boredom, even though the Headmistress and the instructors
emphasize ad nauseam that letter writing is forbidden. In a somewhat vitriolic
diatribe against rumours of letter writing, the Headmistress promises that any girl
caught exchanging letters will be severely disciplined. Even during this ominous
speech, Ilse smirks and tells the other girls to imagine the Headmistress naked.
Thus, obviously undeterred by the Headmistress’ threat, Ilse engages the
help of Johanna, a kind-hearted school employee, to secretly mail her letter.
Astoundingly, Johanna needs no convincing and, as she exits the school on her
Sunday outing, permits Ilse to place the letter down the front of her dress.
Johanna, in this way, can be understood as an inside threat. While working for the
school she nevertheless seeks to help the girls, whom she sees as oppressed and
suffering. For example, as Johanna prepares a meal with the other cooks and
servants, she openly disagrees with the school’s perpetual focus on discipline,
order, and frugality, which she believes are superfluous and cause the girls’
unhappiness. Unfortunately, Ilse’s letter is falsely addressed and returned to the
school, thereby falling into the hands of the Headmistress. The Headmistress is
not the only individual who is aware of the letters’ contents; before giving the
letter to Johanna, Ilse read it to some of her schoolmates. Even so, Ilse’s
punishment is relatively mild. Although excluded from participating in Don
Carlos, Ilse is nonetheless permitted to sit in the audience and even take part in
the post-performance celebration, where she happily toasts her fellow pupils for a
job well done (Figure 3.11).
95
Figure 3.11: Ilse attends the after party and toasts her friends.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform11
A similar act of disobedience is undertaken by Mia when she receives a
letter from a love-struck girl named Josie, begging to sit near Mia at mealtime.
Mia, scoffing at the letter’s melodramatic contents, is reading the letter aloud to a
friend when she is interrupted by a very stern-looking Bernburg. Bernburg
demands that the letter be handed over and Mia, although panicked, does so. Not
only does the school proscribe letter-writing, the Headmistress also made a point
of emphasizing that romantic affairs between the girls should be, at the very least,
discouraged by the school authorities. However, instead of reading Mia’s letter to
expose its contents or sending her directly to the Headmistress for punishment,
Bernburg tears up the letter simply recites the school’s interdiction against letterwriting. Indeed, Mia is one of the film’s most fascinating characters, as her sexual
attraction to women is quite apparent, and openly depicted as such on screen. For
instance, the letter she receives from Josie is neither surprising to Mia nor the
classmate to whom she reads it. Mia is not confused or flattered by the letter’s
11
“Ilse’s Toast.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea
Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s screenshot.
96
contents, which suggests that they are nothing extraordinary—Mia is merely
shown mocking Josie’s sentimentality. Moreover, when Ilse shows Manuela her
shrine to Hans Albers, as discussed in Chapter 2, Ilse makes an off-handed remark
that in Mia’s locker there is a similar shrine to actress Henny Porten. Thus, while
Mia’s same-sex attractions are relatively glaring, sometimes even taking place in
tandem with the disobedience of the school’s official rules, Mia’s recalcitrance
never seems to undermine the authoritarianism of the school. At the same time,
both Mia and Ilse frequently routinely rebel against the school’s emotionallyrepressive atmosphere. For example, Mia actually carves the initials ‘E.v.B’ into
her arm to give voice to her obvious affection for the young teacher, and Ilse
frequently parodies the school’s songs and the soldier-like behaviour of the
teachers (Figure 3.12).
Figure 3.12: Ilse (centre) mocks Fräulein von Kesten behind her back.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform12
12
“Ilse Mocks Fräulein von Kesten.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
97
Thus, Ilse and Mia engage in acts of disobedience which could potentially
disrupt the totalitarian atmosphere of the school. Yet why do Ilse and Mia not
seem to be severely punished—if at all—for their recalcitrance, particularly when
compared to the repercussions faced by Manuela after she declares her love for
Bernburg? The most obvious explanation is that Manuela’s defiance was public,
while Mia and Ilse were far more clandestine in their disobedience. Going further,
I suggest that Manuela’s public declaration of love undermines the school’s
authoritarianism specifically because of Manuela’s reference to the reciprocal
desire between the two women, which is physically represented by the chemisegift. Furthermore, Manuela makes her declaration during a moment of
liminality—that is, a moment wherein reality can be understood as being
temporarily suspended. As a case in point, when compared to the usually strict
and orderly depictions of the school’s atmosphere, the post-Don Carlos
celebration seems unlikely to the point of being surreal: the girls have access to an
abundance of alcohol, they are unsupervised, and many—including Manuela in
her gender-bending Don Carlos attire—are no longer in uniform but remain in
their costumes.
The bond as represented by the chemise-gift is extremely powerful by
virtue of its very tangibility: it is a literal and present force representative of
Manuela and Bernburg’s affinity. My characterization of the chemise-gift as a
powerful force is due to the fact that Manuela actually cites the chemise in her
love-declaration as proof that Bernburg’s romantic feelings for Manuela mirror
Manuela’s own. Manuela does not cite, for example, the kiss or embraces she
shares with Bernburg. In fact, Manuela begins her love-declaration by stating that
“she”—meaning Bernburg—gave her a gift, a chemise, and she is wearing it
now.13 Continuing, Manuela states that Bernburg opened her bureau, brought out
a chemise, and presented it to her to wear and think of her.14 Then she corrects
herself: no, Bernburg did not say that, but she did not have to because Manuela
13
14
“Sie hat mir was geschenkt. Ein Hemd. Und ich hab es an.”
“Ich soll es tragen und an die denken.”
98
knows it is what she meant. Manuela “knows” (wissen) for certain that the
chemise-gift is a tangible expression of Bernburg’s feelings for her; through the
gift, Manuela comes to know that Bernburg loves her.15 After proclaiming what
she knows via the chemise-gift, Manuela’s speech gathers strength and she
becomes so self-assured that she proclaims her love, stating that everyone should
know the truth about the feelings she has and, evidently, understands as receiving
back from Bernburg.16 The chemise-gift becomes a catalyst, spurring Manuela to
defy the hierarchal structure of the school by continuing her speech even in front
of the Headmistress. Thus, the chemise-gift is codified in this moment as literal,
citable, and therefore powerful evidence of the connection between the two
women.
If the chemise-gift can be codified as tangible evidence of the women’s
interconnectivity and mutual desire, then it should be conceived as something
which exists in a phenomenological border-state, somewhere between the
respective ontological ‘subject-hoods’ of Manuela and Bernburg, both connoting
and reflecting their bond. Therefore, the chemise-gift, in its very existence and in
the proclamation of its existence, serves as a means by which a non-hierarchal,
non-dualistic affinity between the two women is simultaneously symbolized and
expressed. The egalitarianism symbolized by the term ‘affinity’ is extremely
important when bearing in mind that the love affair occurs between teacher and
student. Clearly, the teachers are unequivocally the representatives of the school’s
authoritarian rules and regulations; the harsh treatment to which the girls are
subjected has to do with the Headmistress’ ultimate goal of returning Prussia to its
former state of greatness. Hence, there is a clear and hierarchal line drawn
between the teachers and students, continually emphasized by the Headmistress’
focus on order, discipline, and frugality in the school’s treatment and view of the
15
“Aber das muss sie auch gar nicht sagen, das weiß ich doch... Und ich weiß es ganz genau:
sie…sie hat mich lieb!”
16
“Mir ist alles andere gleich. Jawohl! Sie ist da! Sie hat mich lieb! Ich fürchte mich vor nichts.
Ja! Alle sollen es wissen!”
99
girls.17 The mere existence of an affinity, let alone one that is romantic and
reciprocal in nature, threatens the strict hierarchy of the school on which its very
existence seems to depend. Otherwise, the threat to this hierarchy undertaken by
Manuela in her love-speech would certainly not have garnered such a strong
reaction from the school’s authorities.
To reiterate, it is the existence of the chemise-gift which Manuela uses to
accentuate her point: that she loves Bernburg, and Bernburg loves her in return.
Hence, the reciprocity of feeling symbolized by the chemise-gift, particularly
when bearing in mind the anti-hierarchal stance that the affinity between the two
women represents, should be perceived as thrusting Bernburg and Manuela into
an ontological structure of reversibility founded upon the intense passion the
women share.18 In her work Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image
Culture, Sobchack utilizes the term “reversibility” to describe the phenomenon
wherein two distinct ontological beings, particularly subject/object or Self/Other,
enter into a non-oppositional interrelationship via an experience of passion.19
Importantly, Sobchack asserts that this passionate encounter be envisaged as antihierarchal and anti-dichotomous because it necessitates an exchange between
beings that is powerful enough to, at least temporarily, dissolve ontological
boundaries.
Thus, in Mädchen in Uniform, the affinity between Bernburg and Manuela
symbolizes a rejection of hierarchal relationships, and thereby provides the
foundation of its anti-authoritarian ethical standpoint. It is, I suggest, an encounter
of passion which results in the establishment of an affinity between, or
intertwining of, otherwise separate beings, as this allows for the mutual
experiencing of opposing ontological characteristics. Thus, by virtue of an
17
“Hunger? Wir Preußen haben uns groß gehungert...Was uns Not tut, ist Zucht und Ordnung,
nicht Wohlleben und Luxus. Armut schändet nicht. Sie ehrt. Das ist wieder der Sinn des wahren
Preußentums geworden, wie es früher gewesen ist...Durch Zucht und Hunger. Durch Hunger und
Zucht werden wir wider groß werden. Oder gar nicht.”
18
Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004, 286.
19
Ibid, 2004, 286, 288.
100
affinity, a subject might experience passivity and an object, activity.20 Sobchack
conceives of passion as, somewhat paradoxically, consisting of suffering and
devotion. The simultaneous occurrence of suffering and devotion in the passionate
experience blurs the boundaries between the hierarchal and dualistic
subject/object relationship, because it dismantles the philosophically taken-forgranted borders of the ‘self-contained’ subject and object. This border-confusion
suggests that an intersubjective interconnection is possible outside a hierarchal
paradigm. Firstly, the subject’s experience of passionate suffering “names a
certain condition of passive existence in which a body-subject or an embodied
object is subjected to the will of others or the action of external forces.”21
Consequently, “the passion of suffering brings subjective being into intimate
contact with its brute materiality and links it…to the passive, mute, and inanimate
objects of the world.”22 Through the passionate experience of suffering, the
subject faces the reality of its incomplete subjectivity. The subject—in spite of its
subjectivity—can be acted upon by that which is exterior to it and independent of
its own agency, as might be an ontological object. Secondly, passion-as-devotion
is “defined as an active devotion to others and the objective world.”23 Thus, the
ontological subject experiences passion-as-devotion “as an intense, driving, and
overmastering feeling that emerges and expands beyond our conscious will yet
acts on us, nonetheless, from within.”24 Seen in this way, “like suffering,
passionate devotion is in excess of our volition; but, unlike suffering, it is within
our agency…it is our desire to enfold other subjects and objects (often the world
itself), to know their materiality and objectivity intimately and, indeed, to
embrace their alterity as our own.”25
20
Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004, 287.
21
Ibid, 2004, 287.
22
Ibid, 2004, 287.
23
Ibid, 2004, 288.
24
Ibid, 2004, 288.
25
Ibid, 2004, 288-289.
101
The respective and rigid ontological categories of active subject and
passive object, and the hierarchy their paring traditionally connotes, are thrown
into question by the passionate encounter. In Mädchen in Uniform, interactions
between Bernburg and Manuela often appear to signify opposing ontological
positions within the school: Bernburg is the active and authoritative subject, and
Manuela is the passive and acted-upon object. For instance, the first meeting
between the two women occurs when Bernburg surprises Manuela on the
staircase. Bernburg, who had been watching Manuela without her knowledge,
positions herself on the staircase so that Manuela comes face-to-face with her. A
stern Bernburg authoritatively demands that Manuela turn around, so that her
entire physical appearance can be judged according to the school’s dress code.
Then, Bernburg places her hands on Manuela’s hair, roughly feeling for the
position of her hairpins, and determines that Manuela’s hair must be more
rigorously held in place. Bernburg then turns Manuela back to face her, and
emphasizes that she, as the authority figure, requires total order and unquestioning
obedience of the school’s rules. Manuela, replying quietly that she understands, is
then sent away without another word. Perhaps further emphasizing their
respective ontological roles as subject and object, Bernburg walks up the
staircase, and Manuela walks down.
The relative coldness and formality connoted by this scene gives the
impression that, like the other girls, Manuela’s relationship to the school
authorities will be hierarchal; simply, her role will be to do, and say, what she is
told. With this in mind, while the gift scene also occurs exclusively between
Manuela and Bernburg, it is fascinating because it unfolds so differently. In fact, I
suggest that the usual hierarchal teacher/pupil interaction is suspended in the gift
scene. As described above, the women interact with a friendly easiness not
depicted anywhere else in Mädchen in Uniform. Bernburg and Manuela seem to
behave as equals, not as student and teacher. Bernburg’s attitude is lighthearted—
she even makes a few jokes—and lacks the authoritative demeanour with which
she normally conducts herself. For instance Johanna, who is present in the office
before Manuela enters, is treated with a cold politeness. Conversely, Bernburg’s
102
behaviour changes completely when she sees Manuela. For example, she is
smiling, treats Manuela with kindness and friendliness, and the two women share
several moments of laughter (Figure 3.13). Additionally, after receiving the
chemise-gift, Manuela wraps Bernburg in an embrace which, importantly, is
returned. Moreover, the exchange taking place between the two women in this
scene is emotionally intense—both women are depicted teary-eyed and, in the
next moment, are smiling ecstatically.
Figure 3.13: Bernburg and Manuela laughing together.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform26
As already stated, I suggest that the passion represented by the chemisegift signifies an affinity between the two women and, moreover, the reversibility
of their respective ontological states. This can be further explored in connection
with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh, a term which he used to describe the
means by which the Self (subject) is rendered capable of interacting with the
world (Other/object). Merleau-Ponty’s subject—or, more specifically, the
26
“Bernburg and Manuela laugh together.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.:
Hertha Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD,
2010. Author’s screenshot.
103
embodied or lived subject-in-the-world—grasps everything external to its own
subjectivity via its “bodily situation.”27 This concept provides a jumping-off point
for the exploration of the power of the chemise-gift, and more importantly its
citation, during Manuela’s love-declaration. Merleau-Ponty was fascinated with
how the relationship between the Self and the outside world functions; this
reflects to his broader ambition to disrupt traditional phenomenological adherence
to dichotomous pairings in his attempt to understand embodied perception.28
Thus, Merleau-Ponty places corporeality and the concept of the lived body at the
centre of his analyses. For example, he states: “I have tried, first of all, to reestablish the roots of the mind in its body and in its world, going against doctrines
which…commonly forget—in favor of a pure exteriority or of a pure interiority—
the insertion of the mind in corporeality.”29 The body, then, becomes central in his
attempt to uncover how the subject ultimately experiences the world in which it is
situated. The body should therefore not be perceived as a thing-like envelope for
the mind: “it is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in
the world, a visible form of our intentions.”30 In this way, the body is active,
dynamic, and is paradoxically capable of not only gleaning significance from the
world, but imparting meaning onto it.31 With this in mind, the subjectivity of the
subject becomes ambivalent, as its borders are no longer entirely clear and its
agency upon the outside world no longer unquestionable.
For Merleau-Ponty, corporeality helps to explain the subject’s interaction
with that which is outside of itself. He attempts to further this discussion by using
his concept of the flesh. As Thomas Baldwin points out in his introduction to
Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and The Invisible: The Intertwining- The Chiasm,
the term flesh conceives the body as endowed with the capacity to provide “access
27
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994, 90.
28
Ibid, 1994, 93.
29
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Primacy of Perception.” In Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. Ed.,
Thomas Baldwin. London and New York: Routledge, 2003, 34.
30
Ibid, 2003, 36.
31
Ibid, 2003, 38.
104
to both subjective experience and objective existence.”32 Flesh connotes a doublemeaning for Merleau-Ponty, because “it is both a form of experience (tactile
experience) and something that can be touched. It is both ‘touching’ and
‘tangible.’”33 What this suggests is that flesh—so, the body—can touch, be
touched, and paradoxically have these experiences simultaneously. For instance,
when my hand touches the other, there is a “crisscrossing” of the experiences of
touching and being touched.34 Consequently, the fleshy experience is one of
simultaneous and, most importantly, of reversible objectivity and subjectivity,
because “the ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched.”35 It is the
flesh, understood as the subject’s status as embodied-being, which allows the
subject to experience the world both subjectively and objectively. Ultimately, the
flesh becomes the means by which the subject interacts with objects external to it
but which, at the same time, is what allows the subject to experience a sense of its
own objectivity. With this in mind, I suggest that as a result of their mutual desire,
Bernburg and Manuela become implicated in a passionate structure which, as
symbolized by the chemise gift, renders them ontologically reversible. The
chemise-gift, therefore, should be seen as a tangible representation of the fleshyreversibility that takes place between the two women virtue of their passionate
encounter in the gift scene.
Reversibility, which also suggests ambiguity, is incredibly powerful
within the diegetic universe of Mädchen in Uniform because of its disruptive
potential. A position of ambiguity, as interruptive, provides a starting point for a
discussion as to why Manuela chooses the post-performance celebration to
declare her love for Bernburg. I suggest that it is the ambiguity or liminality of the
celebration which allowed Manuela to make her love declaration. After the girls
32
Baldwin, Thomas. “Introduction to Part 5.” In Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. Ed., Thomas
Baldwin. London and New York: Routledge, 2004, 247.
33
Ibid, 2004, 248.
34
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Visible and The Invisible: The Intertwining- The Chiasm.” In
Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. Ed., Thomas Baldwin. London and New York: Routledge, 2004,
251.
35
Ibid, 251, 2004.
105
learn they will be putting on Don Carlos, the camera cuts to an image of Manuela,
in full costume the lead (Figure 3.8). A giggling Manuela asks her companion if
“she”—meaning Bernburg—will be pleased with her performance and decides
that yes, she certainly will, and her companion readily agrees.36 Manuela, dressed
as Don Carlos, is performing a hosenrolle, or trouser role, which was a fixture in
Weimar popular culture—most famously, perhaps, is Marlene Dietrich as Lola
Lola in The Blue Angel.37 Katie Sutton, in her book The Masculine Woman in
Weimar German, analyzes the hosenrolle as “a nonthreatening and
familiar…masculinization of woman.”38 Thus, as Sutton points out, “by situating
the masculine woman within the strict spatial and temporal constraints of an
overtly fictional theatrical performance, audiences were provided with a safe—
and simultaneously titillating—brand of female masculinity that only rarely
challenged the dominant social order.”39 However, for Sutton, the very
appropriation—albeit theatrical—of male dress by women represented an
opportunity to question and even challenge paradigms of gender, meaning that
this act immanently contained “transgressive potential.”40
The ‘transgressive potential’ of Manuela’s hosenrolle in Mädchen in
Uniform is located not in the mimicry of maleness, by which male privilege might
be accessed, but in the indeterminate figure Manuela represents as Don Carlos. It
is not necessarily a question of being neither male, nor female, nor somewhere in
between. Instead, Manuela might be perceived as simultaneously Manuela, and
not-Manuela. Certainly, Manuela plays Don Carlos as an actress; however, even
as a performer Manuela is herself and, furthermore, never seems to completely
immerse herself in her role. She is deeply attached, even while on stage, to
Bernburg and the experiences they share. For example, as Manuela recites her
lines, she is preoccupied with thoughts of whether or not Bernburg will like her as
36
Manuela: “Glaubst du, dass ich ihr gefallen werde? Ich muss ihr doch gefallen.”
Most famously, perhaps, is Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola in Der Blaue Engel (1930). Sutton,
Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011, 130.
38
Ibid, 2011, 127.
39
Ibid, 2011, 127.
40
Ibid, 2011, 128.
37
106
Don Carlos. Then, after the play concludes, Manuela’s exclusive concern is
Bernburg’s reaction to her performance. Ilse, who had been sitting in the
audience, divulges that Bernburg’s only reaction to Manuela as Don Carlos was to
stare at her, and only her, with an unimaginable intensity (Figure 3.15).41 In fact,
Sagan visually connotes Bernburg as the most important member of the audience
for Manuela, by placing her in the front row, centre, whenever Manuela is
depicted on stage (Figure 3.14). Additionally, despite being in costume and
removing the rest of her uniform, Manuela nevertheless wears the chemise-gift
throughout her performance. Thus, Bernburg is Manuela’s undeniable focus and
vice-versa, even when Manuela is on stage. Furthermore, during the postperformance celebration Manuela remains in her costume and, during her
declaration, stands slightly above the other school girls as if they were audience
members during her love-speech.
41
Ilse: “Du, das war merkwürdig. Die Bernburgerin, die hat die ganze Zeit überhaupt kein einziges
Wort gesagt. Aber du, Augen hat die gemacht, sag ich dir! Augen hat die gemacht! Das kannst du
gar nicht vorstellen, war für welche!”
107
Figure 3.14: Bernburg front and centre, watching Manuela as Don Carlos.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform42
Figure 3.15: Ilse (left) describes Bernburg watching Manuela’s performance.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform43
42
“Bernburg in the Audience.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
108
The indeterminate figure represented by Manuela in her hosenrolle as Don
Carlos suggests that the performance and post-performance celebration are
moments of extreme ambiguity, existing somewhere between fiction and reality.
These moments, therefore, should be understood as liminal or negative. I suggest
that it is precisely the liminality or negativity of these moments which empower
Manuela to make her critique of the authoritarianism of the school’s structure via
her love speech. To explore this, I will now turn to Theodor Adorno’s valorization
of negativity, which he perceives to be a powerful agent of systematic criticism.
In his unfinished opus Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s overarching project is to use
negation or negativity in order to achieve a positive result; that is, it is in the
negative moment, which should not exist in a phenomenological sense, which
becomes the most fruitful for philosophical inquiry.44 Adorno seeks to counter
what he sees as the untruthfulness of traditional Hegelian-based identity thinking
with what he refers to as a theory of non-identity. He states: “the name of
dialectics says no more…than that objects do not go into their concepts without
leaving a remainder…it indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept
does not exhaust the thing conceived.”45
I am not arguing for a salvaging of difference understood as preserving the
separation between oppositional pairs. Instead, I purport that the ‘untruth of
identity’ be perceived in relation to the boarding school’s authoritarian structure
as evidence of a crack in the overall system. By virtue of Manuela’s
indeterminacy as Don Carlos and the liminal reality of the performance and after
party, the ultimate ineffectiveness of the school’s totalitarianism is revealed.
Hence, totality, according to Adorno, is impossible: any ‘existence’ of totality is
mere appearance, achieved by what Adorno refers to as “the principle of the
43
“Ilse describes Bernburg’s Reaction.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha
Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010.
Author’s screenshot.
44
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. New York: The Continuum International Publishing
Group, 1973, xix.
45
Ibid, 1973, 5.
109
excluded middle.”46 In essence, that which does not support the conceptual
totality is either outright rejected or ignored as the negative of philosophy. It is
precisely the negative or non-term, which in its very existence points to the
untruthfulness of any totality or whole, that Adorno sees as containing the
potential for critical, even revolutionary, thought. The night of the performance
and the post-performance celebration, when seen as a non-moments somewhere
between fantasy and reality, become negative moments wherein the (supposed)
total authoritarianism and hierarchal structure of the school splits apart, opening
up the potential for criticism.
The power of the excluded or marginalized entity can be seen in Mädchen
in Uniform in reference to Manuela’s immediate quarantine after she declares her
love for Bernburg. Manuela is punished because her relationship with Bernburg,
as reciprocal and therefore non-hierarchal, effectively criticizes the school’s
totalitarianism. Manuela’s quarantine is fascinating because it suggests that she is
conceived of as ‘diseased,’ or ‘dirty’. Manuela’s ‘dirtiness’ is so powerful that she
must be separated from other girls, as if they are at risk of being ‘infected’ with
her disobedience. However, I do not conceptualize Manuela as ‘dirty’ in the sense
of being unclean, but in the sense that she seems to represent a disorderliness that
disrupts the functioning of the school’s structure. This is the reason for Manuela’s
quarantine: the ‘dirtiness’ of her disobedience, in criticism of the school’s
totalitarianism, points to the ‘untruth’ of its systematic totality. Moreover, the
very existence of her affinity with Bernburg points to the possibility of an ethical
re-structuring of the school based on reciprocity and intersubjectivity. Manuela’s
critique, therefore, reveals the school’s authoritarian structure as fractured and
incapable of indefinitely repressing undesirable behaviour or relationships.
Furthermore, the Headmistress reacts to Manuela’s declaration with
horror, exclaiming that her behaviour is scandalous. The horror of the
Headmistress’ response, in addition to Manuela’s quarantine in the school’s sick
46
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. New York: The Continuum International Publishing
Group, 1973, 5.
110
bay, suggests that Manuela engaged in an immanent and ‘abject’ critique of the
school. As Julia Kristeva emphasizes in her work Powers of Horror: An Essay On
Abjection, “there looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of
being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside
or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It
lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.”47 Here, Kristeva describes the
horror-reaction to the border-state, which can be neither clearly categorized nor
unquestionably located in the subject’s, or system’s, interior or exterior. The
abject reaction, therefore, occurs as a result of the ontological position of
objectivity, and by extension subjectivity, being thrown into question.48 Manuela
is quarantined because, by virtue of her declaration, she becomes a figure of
abjection within the system by criticizing it. Manuela’s abjection-status, which
should also be seen as a status of ambivalence, is feared by the school’s
authorities because, as Kristeva points out, “it is not lack of cleanliness or health
that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not
respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the
composite…any crime which draws attention to the fragility of the law, is
abject…[it is] a terror that disassembles.”49 Thus, the goal of Manuela’s
quarantine might be understood in relation to what Mary Douglas describes as an
effort to re-order a given environment making it free of ‘dirt,’ thereby creating the
semblance of a “unity of experience” by marginalizing threatening elements so
that the system can continue to function as a whole.50
Due to their refusal to accept Manuela’s exclusion, or expulsion, from the
system, the girls and Bernburg prevent Manuela’s suicide. The prevention of
Manuela’s death should be understood as a triumph over the Headmistress by
Manuela, Bernburg, and the other girls: justice prevailed over injustice, and the
47
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982, 1.
48
Ibid, 1982, 1.
49
Ibid, 1982, 4.
50
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.
London and New York: Routledge, 2002, 2.
111
totalitarianism of the system was fractured irrevocably. This, I argue, is the film’s
climactic ethical moment because it emphasizes the existence of the critiquepotential within the predominant order. For an effective critique of the school’s
totalitarianism to take place, active resistance must occur against efforts to expel
the negative, abject, or ‘dirty’ aspects existing within the system, as they pose the
largest danger to the totality of its structure. Mädchen in Uniform suggests that
ethical potential is actually located at the borders and within the ambivalent
aspects of the school’s oppressive structure. In the film, the ethical potential stems
from the passion between Bernburg and Manuela which, when codified as
reciprocal, is rendered capable of breaking down the strict hierarchal structure of
the school by providing an alternative based on intersubjectivity. Moreover, the
passion existing between the two women is tangibly represented by the chemisegift, which Manuela uses as proof of the feelings she and Bernburg share. The
Headmistress thereby sees Manuela as dangerous, and quarantines her in an effort
to expel her from the system. The injustice of this expulsion—which can only be
fully realized by Manuela’s death—is inacceptable for the school girls and
Bernburg who finally rebel. Breaking the Headmistress’ interdiction against any
interaction with Manuela, the girls and Bernburg seek her out in order to rescue
her from throwing herself off the staircase. The Headmistress, faced with the
reality that the girls and Bernburg will no longer bear the oppression she inflicts
upon them, is forced to admit her defeat and stalks away in the film’s final scene
(Figure 3.16).
112
Figure 3.16: Defeated, the Headmistress walks away.
Screenshot: Mädchen in Uniform51
3.4 Conclusion to Chapter 3
In conclusion, I have discussed the reciprocal desire between Bernburg
and Manuela as the critique of the authoritarian and hierarchal structure of the
boarding school in Mädchen in Uniform. I have understood the chemise-gift, a
personal token presented to Manuela by Bernburg, as a tangible representation of
their mutual feelings of desire and passion. Consequently, the chemise-gift is
extremely powerful within the diegetic universe of the film, as it is used by
Manuela in her love speech as proof that, not only does she love Bernburg, but
that Bernburg loves her in return. Passion establishes the women’s affinity by
thrusting them into a relationship of ontological reversibility, which characterizes
their relationship as egalitarian and non-hierarchal. The affinity between the two
women is expressed publicly, and should be understood in reference to the liminal
or negative moments of the performance and post-performance celebration. Once
51
“The Defeated Headmistress.” Mädchen in Uniform. Dir. Leontine Sagan. Perf.: Hertha Thiele,
Dorothea Wieck, and Emilia Unda. Deutsche-Film Gemeinschaft. 1931. DVD, 2010. Author’s
screenshot.
113
Manuela makes her relationship with Bernburg known, she is punished and
therefore forbidden from interacting with Bernburg and her friends. Manuela, I
have suggested, is punished because her affinity with Bernburg points to the
impossibility of the totality of the school’s authoritarian structure, which is based
on hierarchies. Manuela, therefore, performs an immanent and ‘abject’ systematic
critique, which is reaches its climax when the girls and Bernburg prevent
Manuela’s suicide. Thus, as the final scene in the Mädchen in Uniform, the
prevention of Manuela’s suicide points to the establishment of an alternative
ethical system that rejects hierarchal encounters in favour of passionate
interconnectivity.
114
Touch yourself, touch me, you’ll ‘see’1: exploring contact and
intersubjectivity in Leontine Sagan’s ‘Mädchen in Uniform’ (1931)
Conclusion
In “Chapter 1: Haptic Conveyances- The Body,” I utilized feminist
embodiment and haptic cinematic theories to perform a phenomenological reading
of representations and suggestions of tactile encounters between bodies in
Mädchen in Uniform. I demonstrated the central role performed by contact in the
establishment of intersubjective moments between otherwise separate entities by
exploring the opening and bedtime scenes. I compared and contrasted Sagan’s
juxtaposition of ‘static’ masculine imagery in the opening montage with the erotic
‘incompleteness’ and dynamism depicted by the imagery of the girls’ legs. I
concluded that this juxtaposition should be understood as privileging, even
requiring, a haptic gaze, which momentarily suspends the traditionally-hierarchal
bond between cinema-image and cinema-viewer. In the bedtime scene, I focused
on the kiss shared by Bernburg and Manuela to show that the act of touch
functions in Mädchen in Uniform as a means by which the borders between Self
and Other are fleetingly suspended. Thus, the tactile and therefore intersubjective
nature of the kiss should be perceived as epistemological, as it symbolizes a
moment wherein the impartation of knowledge—which I understand as the desire
Bernburg and Manuela harbour for one another—occurs. By emphasizing the
importance of contact in the establishment of interconnectivity, the disruption and
re-conceptualization of traditional dichotomous pairs, such as subject/object or
Self/Other, is rendered possible.
In “Chapter 2: The Facial Superimpositions- Establishing an Affinity,” I
sought to historically contextualize Mädchen in Uniform through an examination
of the extraordinary cinematic technique of the facial superimposition, which
Sagan employs exclusively to illustrate the affinity shared by Manuela and
Bernburg. The facial superimpositions occur twice, once in the classroom scene
1
Irigaray, Luce and Burke, Carolyn. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Signs 6.1 (Part 2 Autumn
1980), 78.
115
and then again in the rescue scene. To be more precise, I discuss the facial surface
in Mädchen in Uniform as revelatory and, therefore, as an anti-dualistic force. The
facial superimposition simultaneously illustrates the connection between the two
women and the bond mind and body, by making their love for one another visible
on the surfaces of their faces. Firstly, I explored the surface of the face as
revelatory through the prism of postwar-‘revaluation’ and theories of the so-called
‘third sex.’ Then, secondly, I analyzed it in connection with Weimar cinema
theorist Béla Balázs’ veneration of the face, especially the facial close-up, and the
eighteenth-century physiognomic writings of Johann Caspar Lavater. Ultimately,
I have demonstrated that the facial superimpositions, in their symbolic
connotation of the affinity between Bernburg and Manuela, can be perceived as
moments resisting traditional dualism by refuting the hierarchal separation of
mind and matter.
My characterization of the affinity between Manuela and Bernburg as
necessarily anti-hierarchal is central to “Chapter 3: Reciprocity and LiminalityThreatening Authoritarianism.” By analyzing the gift and declaration scenes I
demonstrate that the reciprocity fundamental to the women’s bond functions as a
systemic critique. More specifically, their interconnectivity provides an immanent
and loving alternative to the strict authoritarianism on which the functioning of
the boarding school depends. I have demonstrated that the chemise-gift, as the
tangible representation of Bernburg and Manuela’s passionate interconnectivity,
acts as a catalyst in Manuela’s public declaration of love for her teacher.
Moreover, Manuela’s declaration of love is rendered possible, as I have shown,
due to the liminal qualities of the moment in which it takes place. Manuela’s
punishment—via quarantine—connotes her status as a systemic threat. Her
affinity with Bernburg jeopardizes the school’s authoritarianism by representing
an alternative to it. The prevention of Manuela’s suicide points to a triumph over
the school’s authoritarianism—the Headmistress is defied, and neither Manuela
nor Bernburg are ever expelled from the system. It is precisely the affinity shared
by the two women which represents an alternative ethical system which rejects
hierarchies in favour of passionate interconnectivity.
116
With this in mind, my analysis of Mädchen in Uniform should be
understood as related to scholarly endeavours, such as those undertaken by Dyer
and Rich, to emphasize the importance of the film’s central themes of queerness
and anti-authoritarianism, without favouring one over the other.2 Nevertheless,
while inspired by Dyer and Rich, I have also sought to distinguish my work from
theirs by examining Mädchen in Uniform from a primarily phenomenological
perspective, without sacrificing the historical contextualization of the film. In all
three chapters, my principal focus has been on the analysis of what is at stake in
the depictions of interconnectivity and contact in this film. I understand this
perspective as representative of an original approach to Mädchen in Uniform, and
therefore as a means of contributing an original and thought-provoking reading to
the vast body of scholarship already in existence on this film. Nevertheless, there
are many other possible approaches to this film related to my discussion, which
hopefully will be undertaken in the future. For example, the film’s positive
thematization of taboo love as a threat to anti-authoritarianism, symbolized by
Bernburg as a liminal mother-lover figure, might be examined specifically in
connection to Sagan’s invocation of the German classical tradition in her choice
to have the girls perform Schiller’s Don Carlos.
Overall, and as the preceding chapters demonstrate, contact and
intersubjectivity are pivotal to Mädchen in Uniform and have therefore been
central to my phenomenological and historical reading of this film. This film’s
depictions of erotic encounters between women, which I understand as founded
on dynamic connectivity, provide an alternative to hierarchal encounters by
privileging and exemplifying loving bonds experienced by desiring subjectivities.
Ultimately, it is the affinity existing between Manuela and Bernburg that
effectively dismantles the authoritarian structure of the boarding school, as the
2
Dyer, Richard D. “Less and More Than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar
Germany.” New German Critique 51 Special Issue on Weimar Mass Culture (Autumn 1990), 5-60
and Rich, Ruby B. “From Oppressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: Maedchen in Uniform.” In
Rich, Ruby B. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 1998, 179-206.
117
bond shared by the two women represents a powerful—and realized—immanent
systemic critique.
118
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