Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics: Temporality, Relationality, and Intimacy in the Cinema of the Berlin School 9780228019138

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Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics

Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics Temporality, Relationality, and Intimacy in the Cinema of the Berlin School

Simone Pfleger

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISBN 978-0-2280-1884-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1913-8 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-1914-5 (ePUB) Legal deposit third quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Untimely bodies, untimely aesthetics : temporality, relationality, and intimacy in the cinema of the Berlin School / Simone Pfleger. Names: Pfleger, Simone, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230195482 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230195539 | ISBN 9780228018841 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228019145 (ePUB) | ISBN 9780228019138 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures – Germany – Berlin – History – 21st century. | LCSH: Intimacy (Psychology) in motion pictures. | LCSH: Interpersonal relations in motion pictures. | LCSH: Time in motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.G3 P45 2023 | DDC 791.430943/155 – dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents

Figures vii Acknowledgments ix A Note on Translation xi Introduction: Temporality and the Cinema of the Berlin School 3 1 Of Becoming Untimely

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2 Tenuous Relations and Fleeting Connections: Dismantling the Normative Couple 42 3 Of Homes and Families: Stifled Construction Projects and the Crumbling of the Normative Family 92 4 Queer Affinities and Fantasies of Relationality Conclusion: Championing the Now and/or Moving Onward towards a Then? 176 Notes 193 Filmography

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Bibliography 215 Index 225

129

Figures

0.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

Markus pinning down Ella and pulling her hair. Longing, Peter Rommel Productions, 2006. 4 Gitti is taking a break while Chris is ready to move on. Everyone Else, Komplizen Film GmbH, 2009. 58 Chris and Gitti walking back towards th e car. Everyone Else, Komplizen Film GmbH, 2009. 59 Svenja and Roland walking down the hotel hallway. The City Below, Heimatfilm GmbH + Co Kg, 2010. 73 Roland and Svenja sleeping in the hotel bed. The City Below, Heimatfilm GmbH + Co Kg, 2010. 78 Rose and Markus lying in bed together. Longing, Peter Rommel Productions, 2006. 86 Frieder and Nina scraping wallpaper off the hallway walls. Windows on Monday, Ö-Filmproduktion Löprich and Schlösser GmbH, 2006. 100 Frieder returning to the tiles at night after sleeping with Marie. Windows on Monday, Ö-Filmproduktion Löprich and Schlösser GmbH, 2006. 105 Frieder working on the pattern of the tiles. Windows on Monday, Ö-Filmproduktion Löprich and Schlösser GmbH, 2006. 105 Frieder on the couch when Nina is talking to him. Windows on Monday, Ö-Filmproduktion Löprich and Schlösser GmbH, 2006. 106 Lea and Konsti in the sideview mirror. This Very Moment, fieberfilm, 2003. 115 Josef, naked, is on top of Sylvia on their bed. The latter is still fully clothed. This Very Moment, fieberfilm, 2003. 118

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3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16 4.17 4.18

Figures

Sylvia looking at Konsti. This Very Moment, fieberfilm, 2003. 126 Armin looking at the motorcyclist’s pelvic region. I Am Guilty, Heimatfilm GmbH, 2005. 138 Armin starting to perform oral sex. I Am Guilty, Heimatfilm GmbH, 2005. 138 Armin performing oral sex while looking up. I Am Guilty, Heimatfilm GmbH, 2005. 138 Armin facing the motorcyclist. I Am Guilty, Heimatfilm GmbH, 2005. 139 Armin’s changed facial expression. I Am Guilty, Heimatfilm GmbH, 2005. 139 Armin bent over the sink, spitting out milk. I Am Guilty, Heimatfilm GmbH, 2005. 141 Armin bent over with the motorcyclist standing on the left side of the frame. I Am Guilty, Heimatfilm GmbH, 2005. 142 Armin’s hand appears from behind the motorcyclist’s body. I Am Guilty, Heimatfilm GmbH, 2005. 142 Nina standing at a crossroads. Ghosts, Schramm Film Koerner and Weber, 2005. 147 Cg images of Marie. Ghosts, Schramm Film Koerner and Weber, 2005. 149 Nina looking at the images of Marie. Ghosts, Schramm Film Koerner and Weber, 2005. 149 The view of Nina’s body is obstructed by the branches of the shrubs and trees. Ghosts, Schramm Film Koerner and Weber, 2005. 152 Nina naked and alone on the couch in Oliver’s house. Ghosts, Schramm Film Koerner and Weber, 2005. 155 Nina and Toni kissing while Toni looks at Oliver. Ghosts, Schramm Film Koerner and Weber, 2005. 158 David naked on the bed and Lynn standing to the far left of the frame. The Days Between, November Film GmbH, 2001. 163 Lynn kissing David. The Days Between, November Film GmbH, 2001. 169 Lynn kissing Marie. The Days Between, November Film GmbH, 2001. 169 Koji sitting in Lynn’s bathroom while she is in the tub, taking a bath. The Days Between, November Film GmbH, 2001. 174

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the support of numerous people and institutions. I would like to thank Richard Ratzlaff, my editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, for his enthusiasm, patience, and support of my first book project. Thanks to the team at McGill-Queen’s University Press and, in particular, the managing editor, Kathleen Fraser, and copy-editor, Joanne Richardson, for sheparding the  manuscript through the production process. I am also grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers for McGill-Queen’s University Press, who offered excellent comments on the manuscript and encouraged me to make some important changes to the first draft to make the book a much stronger one. This book emerged partially from the support and mentorship during my graduate studies as well as my time as a postdoctoral fellow and my first two years on the tenure track. I would like to thank my mentors during my mA and PhD: Kurt Beals, Marianne Dzuback, Erin McGlothlin, Amber Musser, and Gerhild Williams. Special thanks go to Faye Stewart, my mA supervisor and friend; to Lynne Tatlock, who has been a wonderful mentor and for whose ongoing support I am truly grateful; and, of course, to Jennifer Kapczynski, who was an amazing PhD supervisor and had a tremendous impact on my time during graduate school. Her thoughtfulness, patience, genuine interest, and her open ear pushed me to become a better scholar, teacher, and person. Since finishing my PhD, many others have affected my thinking and growth as a scholar. Special thanks go to Katie Sutton, who has generously offered her time, mentorship, and support, despite the distance and time difference between Canberra and Edmonton, and Maria Roca Lizarazu, who has been a wonderful collaborator and co-conspirator on new yet related research projects. I appreciate their steady (virtual) presence in my life.

x

Acknowledgments

My colleagues and friends at the University of Alberta have offered both intellectual and personal insights throughout the years, and I have greatly appreciated their support. I would like to thank particularly Nat Hurley, Reisa Klein, Susanne Luhmann, Michelle Meagher, Liza Piper, Zac Robinson, and Vicky Ruetalo. Furthermore, fellow academics across the globe – Hester Baer, Kyle Frackman, Ervin Malakaj, Mareike Herrmann, and Allie Stewart – have provided many words of advice and encouraged me to pursue my goals unapologetically. All of them cared deeply about my personal well-being and success in the profession. Special thanks are in order to my parents, Sylvia and Robert Pfleger, without whom I cannot imagine the successful completion of this book. They have been my greatest supporters and always encouraged me to keep going and find my path. Finally, I cannot express in words how thankful I am to my wife, Carrie Smith, and our children, Leopold and Adeline, to whom this book is dedicated. The majority of this book was written during the CoViD-19 pandemic, and I am forever grateful to my wonderful family, who kept me grounded. It was a difficult time of navigating constantly shifting grounds over the course of many months, but it somehow all came together.

A Note on Translation

Unless otherwise stated, I use the official subtitles from the films’ DVD releases for quotations. For everything else, I provide my own translations.

Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics

Introduction

Temporality and the Cinema of the Berlin School

“Sleep with me.” This comment, uttered not only once but twice by Ella (Ilka Welz), is an attempt to restore her closeness to and marital happiness with her husband Markus (Andreas Müller) in Valeska Grisebach’s Longing (2006) [Sehnsucht]. Her direction is voiced after he returns from a training weekend as a volunteer firefighter, during which he slept with Rose (Anett Dornbusch), the waitress from the restaurant where he was drinking with his colleagues. Ella articulates a longing for (physical) intimacy in the hope of reanimating their loving bond. However, the suggested sex act that ensues does not portray two bodies who are renewing their connection through heterosexual coitus; instead, the almost three-minute-long sequence of close-up shots of Markus’s and Ella’s torsos and heads suggest that they are unable to bond. This lack of affirmation of their love and connection is emphasized through Markus’s repeated attempts to hold Ella’s head down by pulling her hair as if to avoid her kisses (see figure 0.1). Moreover, he pushes her hands and arms away repeatedly or pins her down in ways that underscore a rupture between the two.1 While Ella longs for a close physical and emotional connection with her husband, Markus is unable or unwilling to reciprocate her advances and wants to keep her at a distance. The particular type of relationality on display here gives viewers a sense of the cinema of the Berlin School and is emblematic of Longing as a tale of intimacy, betrayal, and the elusive nature of desire.2 There is a clear disconnect or, better yet, a lack of connection between the two bodies on screen: they represent anything but a loving and harmonious couple or two passionate lovers. The sequence forces the audience to stay with the two protagonists before the film moves on and drastically changes the mise-en-scène: that is, before it switches from inside to outside, from a close-up of bodies to a long shot of

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Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics

Figure 0.1 Markus pinning down Ella and pulling her hair.

buildings, and from dynamic movement to static structure. Indeed, viewers have to bear witness to the ways in which Markus attempts to escape Ella’s kisses and advances through the lengthy sequence until the film cuts abruptly to a long shot of a large mound of wood arranged in the centre and foreground of the frame with a few of the village’s houses in the background. In lieu of including a number of cuts or offering a shot-and-countershot sequence that would offer viewers relief from watching the acts on display, Longing confronts the audience with the uninterrupted sights and sounds of a struggling couple and their inability to relate to one another, one of the topics at the heart of this book. The (failing) sexual encounter is evidence of a marriage that is disintegrating because Markus cannot live with his infidelity and Ella is unable to connect with him physically and emotionally. As his behaviour changes following the two one-night stands with Rose, Ella’s world gradually falls apart. Longing dramatizes the theoretical questions that are at the heart of Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics through its depictions of (failed) relational encounters between Markus and Ella and the slow disintegration of their bond. Extrapolating from Grisebach’s film, I approach questions of relationality and intimacy through queer temporality (primarily using the works of Elizabeth Freeman and José Esteban Muñoz) and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies (theorizations of subjectivity and relationality by scholars such as Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant) in order to consider how some subjects in the cinema of the Berlin School desire a linear temporal organization of life according

Introduction

5

to mainstream, traditional rhythms and milestones while others do not, which affects their interpersonal connections. As the protagonists navigate the intricacies of their respective lifeworlds, they struggle to make themselves legible within normative structures while also experiencing belonging to these very same temporal patterns of dominant culture that shape and regulate their every step. These linkages among time, relationality, and intimacy in the cinema of the Berlin School are the focus of Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics. Adding to existing secondary research on the cinema of the Berlin School,3 this book takes a transdisciplinary approach and foregrounds how queer-theoretical conceptualizations of temporality can engage notions of subjectivity, relationality, and intimacy in visual representations. Analyzing a number of films that feature both queer and normative characters, this book differs distinctly from approaches to queer (German) cinema that focus on queer eroticism and physical expressions of desire or genderqueerness as well as most of the scholarship in (German) film studies that does not employ queer-theoretical methodologies. Dialoguing with queer theory and German film studies, I chart moments of temporal fluidity that underscore a subject’s desire for normative as well as nonnormative structures. I do this by introducing the terms “timely” and “untimely,” theorizing how they can be thought together in the merged version “untimely,” with an italicized prefix.4 More specifically, I trace moments and momentums in which individuals are in-sync and aligned with the dominant cultural system. I also carefully examine those times when figures are out-of-sync and thus resist structures of linear time and conventional life narratives. I show how the works uncover a temporary promise of breaking free from restrictive social structures, even as the filmic texts make clear that this schism cannot and should not be permanent, by paying close attention to how performative acts and discursive strategies of breaking free offer the prospect of developing and refining new strategies of world-making.5 This notion of the coexistence and co-constitutive nature of ostensibly dichotomous segments of time also extends to the characters’ understanding of their own positionality and their relationships with others. In this sense, the films that form the visual corpus of this book portray what I call untimely bodies: individuals who are embedded within the dominant socio-cultural system (timely) and who embrace the potential of a detachment from regulatory schedules and coercive routines (untimely). Attending to the fluidity of time in the cinema of the Berlin School, I propose a new model of and interpretative methodology for viewing

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Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics

(non)normative relationality and intimacies by attending to processes of cinematic narration, composition, and reception. Utilizing untimeliness throughout as an analytical framework for examining content and aesthetic, I attend to the complexities of eight Berlin School films to examine portrayals of hegemonic normative socio-cultural structures as well as alternative imaginations in contemporary cinema. Untimeliness is a temporal descriptor that I employ here and throughout this book to refer to filmic texts made in the current millennium to serve as a diagnostic and representational tool of the socio-cultural fabric and historical shift in the twenty-first century. Using Longing as a springboard, a film to which I return in chapter 2, I claim to approach the cinema of the Berlin School from a different angle than has much previous scholarship. The film has primarily been addressed as a portrayal of a crumbling interpersonal relationship through the microcosm of Markus and Ella’s world or Markus’s emotional and psychological struggle after his affair with Rose.6 Hester Baer foregrounds the “inchoate desire for clarity and simplicity of emotion in the face of changing norms and expectations” and points to the film’s depiction of a “crisis of heterosexuality and changing norms of masculinity,”7 which are at the heart of Longing, but she does not draw explicit theoretical connections to gender and sexuality studies as a way to further ground her readings. In a related yet different vein, Olivia Landry emphasizes the Muñozian potential of “queer world-making” both in Longing specifically and in the Berlin School more broadly, which is a concept that is crucial to this project but Landry links it to space rather than to time.8 Adding to Baer’s and Landry’s readings that engage with some of the scholarship on Berlin School films and theorists that are crucial for my conceptualization of untimeliness, I suggest that Grisebach’s film also visualizes one of my central avenues of inquiry – namely, it grapples with the stakes of critically interrogating and thereby both reifying and dismantling the hegemonic status of the monogamous, heterosexual, loving couple and its investment in an organization of life that perpetuates normative events and timelines such as marriage, the foundation of a biological family, and the care of a child and the state’s investment in that hegemony. In other words, it raises the question of being in-sync with normative timelines in conjunction with notions of monogamy and heteronormativity in the context of the twenty-first century. Attending to similar topics but not from a queer-theoretical perspective, Michael D. Richardson argues that Longing evinces a strained relationship, tension, and affective detachment as well as a yearning for

Introduction

7

physical and emotional closeness and that it offers depictions of bad sex, which underscore, as the filmic title indicates, the desire to engage with others and to experience a sense of closeness that the figures, however, are not being granted.9 While I agree with this assessment of the film’s focus, I am less interested in whether the depiction qualifies as “bad” sex since such a characterization relies on and upholds a particular narrative about which corporeal acts constitute “good” sex and which behaviours do not. Framing Markus and Ella’s encounter as bad sex reinforces a narrowly defined conceptualization of coitus, which romanticizes a version of heterosexual sex that dominates mainstream (Hollywood) films and, I argue further, maintains the dominant position of heterosexual penetrative sex accompanied by foreplay as “proper” sex.10 Furthermore, it reinscribes “good” sex within the coupled form of two oppositegendered, consenting adults who are in pursuit of an ostensible “good life” when considered from the vantage point of mainstream society. This book, with Longing as its entry point, critically analyzes a selection of post-2000 films that are categorized as cinematic expressions of those directors belonging to the cinema of the Berlin School in order to demonstrate how, on the level of plot, untimeliness offers ways to hypothesize how the films present the intersection of temporality and the construction, expression, and operation of subjectivities with the formation of relational social worlds. On the level of form, I address the films’ unique aesthetic qualities, which I term untimely aesthetics. This type of aesthetics challenges the traditional cinematographic and editing choices of mainstream cinema and thus encourages active viewer participation. In this sense, the untimely bodies that I describe, together with the untimely aesthetics of the Berlin School, exemplify how films permit negotiations and questions of subjectivity and relationality that allow for the forging of alternative bonds alongside normative dyadic, familial, and social constellations.

The Cinema of the Berlin School and Its Affinity to Time Post-2000 German-language films in general and Berlin School films in particular reveal how social spaces register as sites for the commodification and precaritization of subjects and emphasize that economic and social hegemonic structures affect and regulate subjects, encouraging them to invest in self-optimization and individuation in the present moment.11 Many of these processes of discipline and control transform the filmic characters into ghostly presences – spectres who populate

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Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics

the now, yet are disappearing over time or at a certain point in time. As these figures wander through the modern-day cityscapes that provide them with opportunities for bonding with others or moments of self-recognition that anchor them in the present, their existence is also rejected by and ejected from the now. In this regard, the examples of these subjects show that a liberation from the dominant social order is often accompanied by a further subjection to the very same.12 In privileging temporality with its attendant moments of speeding up, slowing down, and even getting stuck, I seek to depart from existing analyses of Berlin School films that gesture towards time as an important category for the analysis of various figures but that, in the end, foreground space when interrogating the position and spectral existence of the films’ characters.13 Space as an analytical approach can certainly be a productive concept, and not only in the context of contemporary German-language films (and literature):14 it also proves to be a useful conceptual framework in the theorizing of (political) subjectivities more broadly and in conjunction with disciplines such as architecture, geography, anthropology, political science, and gender and queer theory.15 For instance, Judith Butler’s work is concerned with coming together as a form of asserting popular sovereignty. Butler regards claiming space and appearing together with other bodies as a way to “form networks of resistance” and support.16 In its theorizing of space through the notion of home, Bonnie Honig’s “politics of home” calls for understanding difference and conflicts as promising possibilities for the formation of (feminist) coalitions rather than as a threat to the home, which is typically understood as a place of safety. In this sense, both Butler and Honig share an investment in conceptualizing how the position and orientation of bodies in space shapes not only the construction of their subjectivities but also the ways in which they are able to connect to others. Indeed, space can be a highly productive concept when theorizing subjectivity. As Butler argues, it is important to show up in public spaces as a way to speak up and out, for instance against coercive mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism, economic inequality, and precarity. Similarly, Honig points out the need for “decentered subjects”17 as an alternative conception of subjectivity that resists “th[e] fantasy of safety and impermeability”18 of a place of home in favour of fluidity and openness to “posit alternative, and perhaps broader, sites of potential empowerment … animate[d] [by] more coalitional varieties of social democratic organization and affiliation.”19 Honig seems to suggest an act of turning away from and thus resituating oneself vis-à-vis a space

Introduction

9

(in her case the home) as a possibility of shattering a romanticized and hegemonic notion of possessing and needing a home – much in the same vein that Sara Ahmed’s queer-phenomenological theorization of the kitchen table rests on the orientation and reorientation of bodies.20 Ahmed underscores the importance of one’s situatedness in the world due to how some things are erased in order for others to appear and to be seen, pointing to the central roles that materiality and positionality play in knowledge production and power relations. Despite its merits as a category of analysis, space can have its pitfalls. First and foremost, the concept of space often relies on the establishment of a centre/margin dichotomy. This binary tends to align individuals who are part of the dominant culture with the centre and those who oppose mainstream standards and values with the margins. As a consequence, scholarly writing in a variety of fields with which this book dialogues in one way or another – such as US-based German studies, film studies, and feminist, gender, and queer studies – understands the ability to transgress (geographical) borders as superior expressions of a modern sovereign subject and the only means to oppose dominant hierarchies and fixed essentialized identities.21 Given this turn away from a place and space of safety, I want to focus on Honig’s call for “coalitional” formations and “affiliations” and their implied notion of process in order to offer different analyses of Berlin School films that move beyond locatedness in space and places as locales that bestow and affirm a sense of one’s subjectivity. Thus, I propose an approach that is inspired by Butler’s and Honig’s arguments but, instead, seeks to theorize the construction of subjectivity and relationality from a different angle: that is, the idea that bodies also show up at and for a specific time. They have to be in time in order to be able to forge connections to others and stay for a specific (and sometimes even an unspecific) amount of time. In order to show up, they potentially have to unhinge themselves from the daily rhythms that structure their individual lives, which might include neglecting their work, family, education, or other responsibilities, so that they are able to commit to the temporal patterns of the assembly. By foregrounding temporality as a framework of analysis, I offer a theoretical concept that provides an alternative to the romanticization of progress and resistance as antidotal to norms. To this end, I aim to resist the impetus of over-valorizing transnational mobility and uprootedness by suggesting that time as a framework of analysis provides an additional approach to the already existing discourses that centre on the home or the homeland, foreign spaces as realms of (utopian)

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Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics

existence and resistance, and globalization or glocalization.22 Shifting the focus to time, I intend to de-emphasize the idea of geographical dis/relocation as a mode of resistance or as an assertion of sovereignty and counteract the romanticization of the idea that an escape from the known signals liberation from the controlling limits of the social system by introducing the notions of timeliness and untimeliness. I elaborate on these terms below, but for now I note that both describe a subject’s relationship to the temporal mandates put forth by contemporary society and its cultural narratives around “proper” intimacy and productivity. While timeliness is associated with an individual’s embeddedness within the system, untimeliness indexes the potential of a detachment from regulatory schedules and coercive routines. Drawing on these two categories, I offer here a concept that adds to the ways in which subjectivities are conceptualized and different modes of relationality and intimacy are constructed in post-2000 (Berlin School) films. Although explicit discussions and theoretical considerations of temporality are absent from most scholarship on the Berlin School, Marco Abel’s monograph The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School engages with a variety of Berlin School directors in systematic and political terms useful to my approach. Abel examines time through a specific parsing of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the “minor,”23 which is anticipatory and a modality of yet-to-come. He proposes a reading of Berlin School films that takes into consideration the past and a longing for a (different) future, which “could potentially bring about actual change for a Germany that will have been worth longing for.”24 Thus, Abel’s work underscores the importance of interrogating the centrality of temporality for the cinema of the Berlin School. Building on The Counter-Cinema and Abel’s readings, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics argues for the consideration of time as a central feature of the cinema of the Berlin School and other post-2000 German-language films, but it demands the refinement of his argument by engaging contemporary queer theory. This approach, which involves conceptualizing temporality through a queer lens, is necessary in order to uncover novel readings of the filmic corpus in question in ways that Abel’s analysis does not. Indeed, the shift to queer time that I propose is important because it stresses process over stasis and speaks to the kind of theorizing emblematic of the work of Jasbir K. Puar and Karen Barad, among others, and their attention to the posthumanist framing of doing and becoming. Extrapolating from the notions of assemblage (Puar) and performative metaphysics (Barad) as modes of privileging organization and linkages,25 I examine what kinds of relationships and bonds emerge between those subjects who populate contemporary

Introduction

11

film and in what ways their embeddedness in dominant socio-political and cultural power structures shapes their ways of being in the world. By underscoring the significance of process and relationality, I seek to offer an analytic approach that foregrounds ontological becomings over epistemological beings, echoing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of “becomings” as rhizomatic processes that allow for the creation of connections with each (new) encounter between subjects.26 Thus, “becoming” is never stable and does not follow a linear telos with a definite beginning and end point. Considering the kind of fluidity and open-endedness that “becoming” calls for, I propose temporality as one of the distinctive features and categories of analysis of the post-2000 German-language filmic texts that form the corpus of this book. This shift allows for a move beyond a binary understanding of inside and outside, here and there. Further, an emphasis on temporality permits reflection on questions of the future and the past, two matters that do not necessarily enter the conversation when the analysis is preoccupied solely with space. As I show, time constitutes a major motif in contemporary works of the Berlin School, and, in turn, these films symptomatically register the same conflicts percolating through post-millennial Germany.27 Thus, the specific focus on the Berlin School and the readings throughout this book draw attention to the political stakes of becoming embedded in normative temporal rhythms and how the depictions of these structures affect viewers, the aim being to encourage them to turn the analysis onto themselves, onto their own desires, expectations, assumptions, and, ultimately, adherence to or deviation from “straight time” in their own lives. Given this approach, the films I analyze in the ensuing chapters display images and concepts of temporality as a key means of exploring moments of possibility, even when the individual is embedded and rooted in restrictive and normative socio-cultural formations. In other words, there are numerous instances in these films that allow for the formation of temporary temporal utopias, during which individuals are able to loosen the tight grip of the restrictive, controlling social order and potentially forge interpersonal, intimate connections. However, the subjects in the films I examine never fully detach themselves from the system, and these moment of escape and bonding do not last. As a result, the filmic figures are forced to contend with the fact that utopia’s existence is fleeting. This reality underscores the pervasiveness of interlocking systems of power and dominance based on socially constructed cultural and political standards but does not render utopia worthless from the outset. Instead, it highlights the impossibility of the permanency of an idealized state of being.

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Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics

I offer an approach to Berlin School films that takes into account how the normative and traditional life narratives of many cis, hetero, white, Christian able-bodied individuals of a certain socio-economic and citizenship status produce and reinforce particular temporal rhythms and cadences and thus have a strong hold on, and shape discourses around, the organization of daily routines and life trajectories and affect the legibility of subjects in the post-2000 cinema of the Berlin School. I contend that temporal rhythms and routines manifest in myriad ways and that untimely bodies are indeed ubiquitous. While my focus is on filmic productions of the Berlin School, all the films discussed in chapters 2 through 4 and the conclusion foreground the coercive nature of the schedules and temporal rhythms of life in the twenty-first century, each doing so through different genres and plots. In this sense, the filmic texts emphasize the impact that normative time has on the staging and legibility of the protagonists’ subjectivities. As the figures in the films are forced or decide voluntarily to make themselves intelligible to others, they run the risk of being misread or being exposed to and by others. While one might assume that this type of exposure is negatively connoted, the films demonstrate that, under particular circumstances, such misreading can be favourable for individuals, allowing them to forge connections to others, even if those bonds are not permanent. In my reflective and analytical engagement, I take a cue from Jennifer Petzen’s call for “queer trouble.”28 In keeping with her claim that allies in the struggle against racism “must have a commitment to an accountable positionality … and move to a public commitment to be held accountable,” the following chapters articulate the need to recognize and insist on different modes of apprehending the world. Thus, my reading practices are attuned to tracing subjects and their respective relations and positionalities that insist on the accountability of viewers. This type of active audience participation and engagement is prompted not only by the content of the films but also by their form. While the content more or less explicitly addresses social, political, and cultural topics from the past and present, formal aspects of the filmic texts I discuss disrupt the frequently linear and continuous progression of the narrative. Thus, they cause viewers to stop, pause, stumble, or rewatch certain passages. Such disruption potentially creates a sense of unease and alienation, or a feeling of awkwardness, to borrow from Carrie Smith and Maria Stehle, that pushes the audience to engage with what is on the screen in a different and potentially unfamiliar manner and, I hope, prompts viewers to think critically about their assumptions about and expectations of particular genres, aesthetics, story lines, and characters.29

Introduction

13

A Note on the Book’s Organization Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics traces untimeliness in post-2000 films on the levels of both content and form. Following a theoretical chapter that conceptualizes untimeliness, three chapters consider the different ways in which filmic figures navigate their attachments to and detachments from coercive normative structures; are repeatedly forced or aspire to explore their position in a world; and become un/intelligible and in/tolerable within these normative temporal organization of their lifeworld. The analyses also pay attention to how the films’ specific aesthetics disrupt linearity and coherence through their cinematography and various editing choices. These kinds of negotiations, I argue, allow for the emergence of different relationship structures and sexual encounters, ranging from romantic attractions and coupledom to familial configurations and relations.30 Consequently, this book considers how untimeliness, corporeal legibility, and desire all play roles in the construction and negotiation of the protagonists’ subjectivity vis-à-vis others. Shifts and changes affect interpersonal relationships as some figures are confronted with a loss or lack of attraction and infidelity (chapters 2 and 3) while others explore nonnormative forms of relationality (chapters 2 and 4). They also engender the crumbling of normative coupledom (chapters 2 and 3) and familial structures (chapters 3 and 4). In this sense, chapters 2 to 4 move from the monoheteronormative dyadic couple to the heteronormative family unit (with child/ren) and to the young adult’s intimate relations and desires to belong. Offering a starting point for filmic portrayal and commentary on constructions of subjectivity, relationality, and temporality on the levels of content as well as editing and cinematography with respect to the Berlin School, chapter 1 serves as the point of entry into the book by conceptualizing untimeliness. It outlines queer-theoretical approaches to temporality and the impact of normative as well as nonnormative understandings of timelines, routines, and rhythms on subjects (expressions and negotiations of identity) and their lifeworlds (socio-cultural structures and standards). It also emphasizes how the slowing down and accelerating of the viewers’ experience creates a particular understanding of temporality that is in- and out-of-sync with normative perceptions of timelines and thus shapes viewers’ experiences. Chapter 2 turns to notions of normative coupledom and interrogates how some of the characters in Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (2014) [Alle anderen], Christoph Hochhäusler’s The City Below (2010) [Unter dir die Stadt], and Grisebach’s Longing negotiate questions of desire and belonging as they struggle with infidelity and loss of attraction to their

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respective partners. The films in this chapter offer an interrogation of interpersonal relations and comment on the tenuous status of (hetero) normative coupledom and monogamous, dyadic constellations of relationality as the socio-culturally accepted status quo. Thus, untimeliness aids in the examination of how the various filmic subjects navigate their attachments to and detachments from coercive normative structures that shape their intra- and interpersonal relationships. Continuing with its analytic focus on monoheteronormative relationships but extending this to the configuration of the nuclear family in general and society’s investment in the child as part of the hegemonic familial unit and the symbol of the future in particular, chapter 3 examines the notion of remodelling and home improvement for the sake of enhancing the present in Ulrich Köhler’s Windows on Monday (2006) [Montag kommen die Fenster] and Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment (2003) [Milchwald]. It investigates how the two films depict disruptions of normative timelines and rhythms and how their untimeliness helps us understand the construction and negotiation of the protagonists’ subjectivity, relationality, and the crumbling of the normative family. In chapter 4, I continue an interrogation of relationality through heterofamiliality by focusing on the figure of the young, rebellious adult who is or desires to be embedded in a normative family unit or committed partnership yet is unable or unwilling to participate in these kinds of traditional structures. In addition to an analysis of Hochhäusler’s I Am Guilty (2005) [Falscher Bekenner], I also examine Maria Speth’s The Days Between (2001) [In den Tag hinein] and Christian Petzold’s Ghosts (2005) [Gespenster], and thus move from the depiction of a conservative and conventional white, middle-class, settled German family in the case of I Am Guilty to a young, working-class couple with one young, deaf child in The Days Between, and finally to an orphanage for troubled youth in Ghosts. I demonstrate how the protagonists are embedded in the normative, restrictive structures of the now and its coercive cadences and temporal patterns, even as they also challenge the system – expressing their longing for a queer utopian then when they refuse to find and keep employment, to engage in reproductive and nonviolent sexual acts, and to be legible to others as a productive citizen-subject. In other words, The Days Between, I Am Guilty, and Ghosts portray a sense of liberation that is accompanied by a further subjection to the dominant social order. In the spirit of the cinema of the Berlin School, the concluding chapter does not end with a set of deductive observations and interpretations but, rather, offers a diagnosis of neoliberalism’s connections

Introduction

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among temporality, relationality, and work. These relationships are exemplified through a brief sequence analysis of Nina’s work detail in Ghosts and a staged job interview in Hochhäusler’s I Am Guilty to emphasize the ways in which desires and investments in (hetero) normative time and life narratives shape not only intimate bonds but also understandings of productivity and proper (working) bodies. Many Berlin School films comment on the prevalence of neoliberalism as a cultural formation that seeks to regulate the actions of those subjects who are deemed improper because they do not fit within a system of labour that disguises the absence of freedom and demands self-policing through mechanisms of self-optimization and self-transformation. The book ends with a reminder that, despite the pervasiveness of hegemonic, normative socio-cultural structures, the cinema of the Berlin Schhol also offers its audience exemples of alternative forms of intimacy and relationality that allow for unique attachment and moments of temporary conviviality. Charting the different configurations of how the filmic figures understand themselves and relate to one another in a socio-cultural landscape that is shaped by (mono)heteronormative intimacies, the different films I discuss foreground links between notions of disintegration and rebuilding, deterioration and improvement, and destruction and renovation in various spheres – that is, work, love, sex, the home, the family, and the self. In outlining a politics of relationality that is attentive to a subject’s embeddedness in and rejection of normative rhythms, I not only ask readers to reconsider what it means to be (and to desire to be) in-sync and out-of-sync with straight time or temporal patterns but also encourage them to extrapolate from the filmic figures on screen to critically interrogate their own positions. This is to say, I encourage readers to question their investments in normative sociocultural structures and ways of being and to carefully consider the various possibilities and restraints that exist in their own lifeworlds.

1

Of Becoming Untimely

Temporality and the unfolding of time have constituted an important site of contemplation for queer theorists in the twenty-first century in order to generate and reactivate conversations about the impact of hegemonic socio-cultural institutions and phenomena such as 9/11, the war on terror, monogamous coupledom, and reproduction, among many others.1 Time and its non/linear unfolding have played a prevalent role in these analytic approaches, and many refer to the first decade of this millennium as the “temporal turn” in queer studies. On the one hand, this development indexes the importance and growing body of scholarship theorizing issues in society and culture and interrogating texts through the lens of time; on the other hand, it offers a response to what has often been called the “spatial turn” of the late 1990s.2 The focus shifts away from foregrounding geographical situatedness and spatial arrangements of objects and subjects fundamental to the construction of subjecthood to understanding identity as emerging from a body’s embeddedness in temporal structures, such as genealogies, timelines throughout a life, and daily rhythms, which often defy a linear style and teleological arc. Indeed, temporality provides a different framework of analysis within which to examine the impact that time has on the expression and perception of subjects and their identities in particular as well as on the new-gained freedoms and restrictions on individuals within socio-cultural systems in general. In what follows, I introduce different approaches to time and provide the theoretical foundation for the rest of the book. Extrapolating from some of these queer-theoretically informed temporal concepts, in the first section I trace what queer theorists such as Lee Edelman, Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, Heather Love, José Esteban Muñoz, and Elizabeth Povinelli, among others, identify as the centrality of

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instrumental and routinized patterns of day-to-day life for discussions of normative life narratives, socio-political structures, desire, and historiography. Each of these scholars has grappled in related yet distinct ways with the idea of queer time as a mode of intervention into dominant discourses of progress and acceptability tied to the teleology of heteronormative life. Using these foundational texts as a springboard for my own conceptualization of how time serves as a guiding principle for analyzing relationality and intimacy, the subsequent five sections introduce the notion of untimeliness as a way to examine which bodies become legible as expressing and reflecting normative and nonnormative subjectivity. The final section of this chapter turns specifically to the cinema of the Berlin School to demonstrate how untimeliness serves as a productive framework for analyzing how the unfolding of time and theorizations of past, present, and future are linked to both normative desires and to instances of queer imaginings and world-making.

Queer Time and Nonnormative Temporal Structures of Existence In thinking about the utility of queer and its connection to time, I turn to scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who outline that this term is no longer necessarily linked to sexual practices but, rather, is seen as a way to describe alternatives to hegemonic institutions such as heterosexual reproduction and nuclear familial configurations as well as to traditional work schedules and the accumulation of wealth.3 Jack Halberstam understands “queer time” as emerging out of the AiDS crisis of the 1980s at a time when gay communities were coping with the fact that their “horizons of possibility ha[d] been severely diminished,”4 and many people – straight and queer alike – attempted to conceive of alternative alliances and ways of existing in the world. This notion of fostering connections bespeaks Elizabeth Freeman’s project on temporality, which pivots on the idea that “time binds”:5 that is, the creation and socio-cultural reification of particular normative temporal rhythms and patterns mould, transform, and adjust subjectivity so that it becomes socio-culturally meaningful. Freeman interrogates normative temporal structures and coins the term “chrononormativity” to describe the biopolitical management of subjects through the manipulation of time in relation to the capitalist principle of maximizing profit.6 Chrononormativity, according to Freeman, is “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” for the sake of maintaining and affirming

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capitalism’s institutional power and its force vectors7 – and to appear “natural” to those whom these regulated paces and pulses privilege. Based on this link among time, body, and work, only “properly temporalized bodies,”8 whose lives are organized according to conventional timelines and “normal” and “logical” sequences of traditional milestones in their development, belong and are intelligible as subjects within the dominant social order. Freeman contends that chrononormativity and its emphasis on profit maximization produces “people whose individual bodies are synchronized not only with one another but also with larger temporal schemae.”9 It further orients them towards particular teleological (life) narratives that promote the organization of society around normative events and values such as monogamous marriage or coupledom, heterosexual reproduction, and the optimization of one’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being. These organizing principles not only privilege certain tempos and routines but also function as regulatory frameworks of power that valorize certain lives over others. Working from these assumptions, Freeman’s theorizaton of queer temporalities is antidotal to normative ones; she offers an understanding that “propose[s] other possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present, and future others” and,10 in so doing, challenges hegemonic conceptions of (normative) time, both when considering larger socio-cultural histories and when considering the  day-to-day life of singular individuals. In this sense, Freeman unveils the importance of temporal gaps and narrative detours in literature, film, and art that emphasize asynchronous narratives of past and present. As Freeman argues, these asynchronicities provide opportunities for countering the methods of traditional historiography. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010) emphasizes how certain individuals question and trouble the construction and regulation of ostensibly socio-culturally and economically valuable identities through temporal diversions, digressions, and deviations that render subjects meaningful. As these subjects disturb the process of chrononormativity and rearrange the ways in which people and groups relate to each other, they not only point to the gaps and fissures in the hegemonic organization of society but also interrogate and unsettle dominant epistemes and linear temporality. Tracing out-of-sync and nonteleological moments of stuckness or endurance and examining the construction of past, present, and future in order to probe the normalizing rhythms and routines of chrononormativity, Halberstam’s and Freeman’s theorizations of time complement José Esteban Muñoz’s emphasis on inquiry as pertaining to

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the future and the potentialities of the “there and then,” or the Blochian not-yet-here.11 According to Muñoz, “straight time” is marked through its linearity, which constructs, affirms, and reiterates static epistemological and ontological narratives of dominance, power, and normativity. Queer time, by contrast, challenges straight time’s presentism as well as natural, naturalizing, and naturalized temporality. It questions the here and now with its quotidian tempos, patterns, and periodicity, and urges the subject to turn to – in the phenomenological sense – the not yet, or the there and then. This shift opens the field of vision and directs one’s view towards the horizon – a utopian space where “objects and movements … burn with anticipation and promise” that galvanize and stimulate hopes, desires, and fantasies.12 In his future-oriented approach, Muñoz provides a response to antisocial negativity – a particular strand of queer theory, most prominently espoused by Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, that advocates the negation and rejection of hope or the future.13 Instead, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) “argues against antirelationality by insisting on the essential need for an understanding of queerness as collectivity,” and proclaims that “queerness is always in the horizon”14 – that is, a mode of existing in the present that encourages the individual to insist on cruising ahead into a future with alternative spaces, tempos, and kinship formations rather than combating a short-sighted assimilationist perspective, such as the focus on pragmatic issues like gay marriage and a stagnant present. In so doing, Cruising Utopia sets up a temporality that does not reject past and present but foregrounds the importance of the past “as a field of possibility” for the present in order to envision a future.15 In a similar vein, Alison Kafer proposes a framework for nonnormatively abled bodies and time. Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013) introduces crip time as a mode of Muñozian queer time (and thus a critical engagement with futurity and utopian thinking) and a way to think about time as flexible rather than additive: crip time decentres the able-bodied subject and dismantles normative temporal structures in order to “reimage our notions of what can and should happen in time.”16 Emphasizing that time registers differently for different bodies, Kafer’s conceptualization attempts to dialogue productively with queer time while also ensuring that she pays attention to the important fact that queerness does not preclude a future yet remains critical of “hegemonic expectations of (re)productivity.”17 Thus, crip time, according to Kafer, aims at negotiating the temporal frames of private versus public to interrogate the organization of life and relations according to normative economic and cultural parameters.

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Relationality and time are also at the forefront of Jasbir Puar’s analysis when she describes her work as an “assemblage of temporalities and movements – speed, pace, duration – which is not strictly bound to developmentalist or historical telos or their disruption.”18 Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) is characterized by an understanding that time is “nonlinear” and “nonmetric,”19 and seeks to “deconstruct the naturalization of the administrative units of measurement.”20 Arguing against the hegemonic rhythms of normative life, Puar, like Muñoz, seeks to maintain a profound sense of an “anticipatory temporality”21 – a temporality that is much more closely related to the future than to the past and in which subjects explore the present moment while simultaneously looking ahead to what is yet to come. Akin to both Muñoz’s and Puar’s investments in futurity, Heather Love’s notion of a “backward future” in Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007) is intended to counteract the impetus in some queer theory to idealize the past.22 Love cautions against blindly valorizing progress and rebukes queer scholars and community members alike for necessitating and insisting on an investment in forward movement and advancement as the only acceptable and even possible narrative. Instead of insisting on an affirmative genealogical methodology, she calls for “a politics forged in the image of exile, of refusal, even of failure” in order to reconceive queer figures and events that do not fit any neat assimilationist teleological accounts of queer culture.23 Only once one is able to see beyond the restrictive and restricting horizon of constant advancement and improvement, and embrace feelings of pain and shame, is one able to identify losses that have been ignored and forgotten and mourn them adequately. Theorizing neither an anticipatory moment in the future nor a time in the past, Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” as they emphasize in their book of the same name, focuses on the present and individuals’ ways of being stuck in the present. Positioning the idea of “good-life” fantasies at the centre of their inquiry,24 Berlant takes into consideration different types of relationships, “ranging from objects or scenes of romantic love and upward mobility to the desire for the political itself.”25 They argue that fantasies of the “good life” have collapsed and that “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy” are no longer available to most people,26 although subjects still cling to these desires and fantasies of relationality. Instead, people exhibit what Berlant describes as “cruel optimism” – that is, the pursuit of fantasies and desires that seem positive but are in fact restrictive and normative.27 Instead of being able to

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thrive in our respective lifeworlds, we often desire those relationships that present an obstacle and keep us fastened in an impasse or a “time of dithering.”28 Thus, the “good life” creates an impasse or a time of dithering, which appears to keep subjects stuck in the present. This present moment, however, is “a moment in extended crisis,”29 in which idealizations and fantasies begin to fray and individuals are rendered precarious.30 These precarious bodies are then left to move around in our contemporary spatio-temporal reality in which “the crisis of the present meets multiple crises of presence” as each individual loses political or economic security in the process,31 affecting everyone’s material and psychological state of well-being.32 It is precisely the “time of dithering,” as Berlant calls it, that does not provide us with any assurance of our identity, our place of belonging, or our relations with others. While many individuals are often seen as experiencing a sense of stuckness in the present that weighs them down and keeps them in a holding pattern, it is precisely this experience of an impasse that also opens up the possibility of uncoupling themselves from normative socio-cultural rhythms. They are able to break with conventional and dominant understandings of time as unfolding in a linear or cyclical fashion. This a-chronology of time is also intimately connected to the spatial realm in which these individuals reside and from which they depart or to which they return. In this sense, the representations of our contemporary world are marked by characters and subjectivities that are caught in a space-time continuum that pulls them in one or the other direction and reorients them. Thus, the present moment urges us to “reinvent, from the scene of survival, new idioms of the political, and of belonging itself, which requires debating what the baseline of survival should be in the near future, which is, now, the future we are making.”33 What we ought to strive for is to “imagine a potentialized present that does not reproduce all of the conventional collateral damage,”34 a present that allows us to experiment, to revision, and to create new forms of existence and ways of inhabiting the world – even though we might fail in the process of doing so.35 Taken together, these scholars concentrate on different aspects of how these normalized and normalizing rhythms and cadences of straight time and chrononormativity govern the socio-cultural configurations of our lifeworlds. However, they also propose ways in which these rhythms and routines can be disrupted and thereby point to the potentiality that resides in the present moment. Based on these approaches to time, I deem it most productive to take a queer-theoretical approach to reading the cinema of the Berlin School and theorize together concepts of

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temporality, subjectivty, relationality, and intimacy. To this end, I bring these strands together to culminate in my concept of untimeliness. In putting into dialogue these distinct discourses and applying them to the German-language context, I demonstrate how, in violating conventional standards and temporal norms, the protagonists in Berlin School films challenge the conventional cadences of straight time and instead embrace instances of temporal nonnormativity. In so doing, these subjects make visible how certain temporal patterns structure their daily lives and enforce routines in service of not only a capitalist economic program but also heteronormative logics. At the same time, these figures reveal that becoming untimely offers a release, albeit only temporarily, from these restrictive and normative routines, enabling the envisioning of alternative worlds.

Theorizing Untimeliness: A Note on Concepts and Methods In order to add to the current scholarship on the Berlin School that foregrounds space, mobility, and national and transnational belonging, I take a cue from a number of the queer theorists just discussed who have explored how time has been socio-culturally coded and increasingly functions as a regulatory framework in contemporary society. Based on these scholarly discourses, I strive to highlight how the portrayals of temporality in the film corpus of this book include moments of linear and nonlinear time. I read the representation of the protagonists in the films – and more generally in post-2000 cultural production – as interventions36 in the rhythms of what Muñoz deems “the coercive choreography of a here and now,”37 or what Freeman understands to be “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity”38  – that is, the need to find and keep employment, to engage in reproductive and nonviolent sexual acts, and to be legible to others as productive citizen-subjects. In so doing, I demonstrate how contemporary film negotiates and unearths the proliferations and collapse of chronological time (the structuring of one’s day according to certain rhythms) and teleological time (the organization of one’s life around social norms of education, marriage, reproduction, and family). Sharing an investment in the “then and there,” German film scholar Marco Abel introduces the notion of the “future perfect.”39 Abel, in his work on Berlin School films, aligns with Muñoz in his attempt to rethink the present moment, which, in turn, affects our understanding and perception of the past and future. According to Abel,

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the future perfect is a condition that is grounded in the present – the “here and now.”40 It reveals a time that is “not yet” and always remains “to-come,”41 yet looks back at what was.42 While he is concerned with a type of “presentism [that is] pursued in the name of affecting the future” and that relies on the past as the point of departure,43 Abel does not engage with Cruising Utopia in his work. Yet Abel’s notion of “future perfect” resonates with Muñoz’s utopian line of thought. While Abel leans on Deleuze and Guattari in his theorizing of time, Muñoz draws on the writings of German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. He references The Principle of Hope (1954) [Das Prinzip Hoffnung], in which Bloch asserts that “Essential being is not Been-ness; on the contrary: the essential being of the world lies itself on the Front” [Wesen ist nicht Ge-Wesenheit; konträr: das Wesen der Welt liegt selber an der Front],44 and, in so doing, establishes hope as the central driving force for human beings. This kind of hope, however, takes into account negativity and understands failure as having value and being part of it. Therefore, Muñoz’s notion of hope and futurity ultimately directs subjects towards the future and “potential queer worlds that thrive with, through and because of the negative.”45 Expanding on Muñoz, Freeman, and Abel, all of the works I examine articulate a sense of longing for a queer utopian “there and then,” yet foreclose the possibility of this future ever fully coming into being. In other words, the films I analyze on the one hand, identify a kind of pessimism and apprehension and, on the other hand, gesture towards a potential or a utopian fantasy of a world beyond the present moment. These alternative possibilities suggest that particular sexual and gendered gestures, performances, and practices hold the potential to create alternative forms of knowledge, affect, and belonging. Thus, the texts portray and grapple with a sense of stuckness that allows these subjects to find and embrace new ways of producing, relating, and sustaining – but only temporarily. In so doing, the works entertain the possibility of a validation of subjectivity beyond dominant logics of (hetero and mono)normativity, while also withstanding its actualization given the current power structures in place. This book proposes the idea of untimeliness as a way to probe whether a study of time can help us understand how time shapes and affects bodies and subjectivity and how individuals are positioned or position themselves vis-à-vis institutional power structures. Untimeliness attempts to enact a theorization of temporality that takes into account Muñoz’s “straight time” or Freeman’s “chrononormativity” and suggests that moments of straight and queer time oscillate in many Berlin School

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films. Based on the kind of standardized and routinized structuring of life within the system that Muñoz and Freeman describe, temporal patterns and rhythms serve as points of reference vis-à-vis which the degree of value and integratedness of each citizen-subject is assessed and determined. Those individuals who are able to display the type of productivity and efficiency valued by the dominant society receive the status of citizen-subject and are granted access to the social system, even rewarded with benefits.46 Thus, the working of straight time within society is evocative of the notion of the panopticon as people are encouraged to police and control their behavioural patterns – and those of other citizens  – in order to reaffirm and perpetuate the temporal partition and regulation of life.47 I agree with Muñoz that “the here and now is simply not enough [and that] [q]ueerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being in both the world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough.”48 However, following Muñoz, if queerness is an ideal to strive for and “is not yet here,” but can be glimpsed in the “realm of the aesthetic,”49 I want to turn exactly to the aesthetic to ask: What is here? I postulate that contemporary Berlin School films function as a means to allow viewers to get a glimpse of that “horizon imbued with potentiality” while also underscoring that sometimes individuals have no choice but to accept the mandates of things just being enough.50 The term “untimeliness” is born precisely out of this mandate and seeks not only to describe the “potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” but also to remind the filmic audience of the “quagmire of the present.”51 Untimeliness hopes to provide an alternative methodological framework to conceptualize the depicted lifeworld of the filmic figures that considers the “here and now” as well as the “then and there” in ways that give an account of and visualize the phenomena in contemporary culture.52 My concept of becoming untimely does not insist on the absolute rejection of the now but, instead, acknowledges the possibility of the emergence of a potential in the present moment. While Muñoz sees potential in the future and insists on the necessity of reaching beyond the present, and Freeman connects queerness with the time of the “not now,” I inquire whether there is a possibility for the existence of instances of nonnormativity in the present that come close to this Muñozian “[]other way of being.” Indeed, through content and their particular aesthetics, post-2000 German-language films underscore that the present is filled with fleeting moments of potentiality that encourage us to remain future bound. Rather than

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necessitating progress and insisting on what Edelman terms “reproductive futurism” as the only possible way of inhabiting the world and of forming coalitions,53 characters in the Berlin School films that I examine develop alternative tempos and projects of world-making that challenge – in the present – the demands to obey traditional circadian rhythms, compulsory progress, individual thriving, and the promise of “freedom.”54 Engaging with the question of whether and how individuals face the need to conform to particular norms and standards, I illustrate how many of the characters in contemporary Berlin School film are faced with constantly changing situations and conditions in their lives. These subjects often elect and even desire to conform to the chrononormative temporal rhythms or are coaxed by neoliberal narratives into a faith in self-optimization and progress. However, I do not want to lose sight of the fact that many protagonists are confronted with a reality that forces them to act in accordance with the cadences and rhythms of the system. I suggest that considering Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the present understood as not completely congruent (or rather as an incomplete synchronoization) with the now but as that which is “what we are and, thereby, what already we are ceasing to be,” or, according to the two thinkers, the actual, and an anticipatory process of becoming without the need to “contemplate the eternal or to reflect history,”55 or the virtual, then the present is a productive way to approach becoming untimely and its linkages to relationality, intimacy, and a monoheteronormative hegemony.56 If the present always extends beyond the actual and includes what is yet to (be)come, then it bespeaks Muñoz’s utopian approach to time, conceptualized as queerness on the horizon,57 and encourages a theorization of temporality as non-linear and as a continuum. Untimeliness, as I outline in more detail below, takes into account this Deleuze and Guattarian approach by underscoring the fluidity of time and connecting it to the ways in which subjects are embedded in and yet outside of socio-culturally normative structures that make certain modes of being seem not only coherent but also privileged. Extrapolating from this understanding of the present, or the now, my theorization of untimeliness in many of the works by Berlin School filmmakers suggests that the films are manifest(ation)s in their time, of their time, and on their time. The films engage in the project of making sense of the contemporary world and its socio-political, cultural, and economic dimensions shaped by neoliberal capitalism, mass

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consumerism, and globalization. In so doing, the directors of these filmic texts utilize distinct aesthetics while at the same time anchoring the narrative in their respective present moment. It is this particular mode of situating the films in specific temporal and cultural contexts that underscores how a theorization of temporality is emblematic of Berlin School film being in their time. Particularly through an explicit engagement with current social, cultural, economic, or political discourses, the cinema of the Berlin School mobilizes discourses and debates that bespeak the here and now and thus allow for its works to be defined as contemporary films of their time. Indeed, many of the Berlin School films function as commentaries on developments, problems, and changes endemic to the twenty-first century and capture cultural and socio-political currents of that present moment, an exposure that becomes part of the viewing experience and that is integral in the mandate for the audience’s active engagement with these films. Taking into account this temporal situatedness of the corpus and the time of the publication of this book, it is crucial to underscore that some of the films are almost two decades old and thus can be historized. For this reason, the films in this book are representations of and comment on the socio-cultural realities of those citizen-subjects who embody dominant identity markers yet fail to fit. In this sense, the films address topics related to gender, sexuality, race, socio-economic and citizenship status, and ability, and they reflect the experiences of some of their viewers who find themselves in, to echo Butler, the habitable and inhabitable zones of the social world. Underscoring the connectedness of these zones, I argue that the filmic texts from which my concept of untimeliness emerges make visible the impossibility of a clear divide and emphasize that certain subjects in the twenty-first century can register as abject despite, or rather because of, their ostensible embeddedness in conventional social structures. This duality is foregrounded in all the films discussed insofar as whiteness, heterosexuality, or ablebodiedness do not secure the characters’ status as timely and their belonging within their respective social communities. Most of the figures struggle to produce coherent and legible forms of subjectivity that secure their connections to others, and they have to grapple with the fact that their desire for intimacy and relationality remains a “good-life” fantasy, which they are pursuing in a Berlantian cruelly optimistic fashion. They also exhibit a yearning for “attachment[s] to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.”58 Indeed, the characters highlight that physical

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proximity and emotional bonds do not result in the kinds of intimate and relational connections that normative society has idealized as the blueprint for desirable interpersonal and affective ties. Foregrounding a recognition of contemporary films being in, of, and on their time, I empahsize the importance of temporality for the analyses presented in the following chapter and the contextualization and historication of twenty-first-century German-language cinema. What specific time do I refer to here? If we were to follow classic models of periodization of German culture and geopolitical identity, the time span in question is most likely the period after 1989 since this date has entered the “register of periodicity” as a significant one for the “master dating system of the modern West – 1789, 1914, 1945.”59 Without a doubt, the exceptional events in the year 1989 and ensuing developments were of extraordinary importance for and have affected the socio-political, economic, and cultural landscape of many countries in Europe and North America. However, I wonder if the tremendous influences of neoliberal capitalism, mass consumerism, and globalization are calling for further segmentation or if they are merely a development of the years following the Second World War and the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949? In lieu of insisting on a traditional dating system based on so-called important events pertinent to Western European history, such as the beginning of the French Revolution and the First World War as well as the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is in line with linear and normative models of temporal organization of  European and, more specifically, German history, I propose the start of the new millennium as a marker of time and use “post-2000” and “contemporary” throughout. These phrases, I contend, are more elastic and point to a time span or duration rather than to a fixed point in time. Furthermore, they are not exclusively tied to Germany or to particular events in European history. Although specificity certainly matters, the impact of neoliberal capitalism, mass consumerism, and globalization cannot be fully accounted for without giving consideration to their transnational contexts and acknowledging their impact on the German-speaking world – impacts that include 9/11, the advent of the internet, the expansion of the eU, and the economic crisis of 2008–09.60 This refusal to rely on the kind of “master dating system” that insists on 1989 as the crucial marker for German culture in the late twentieth century and, instead, to embrace a shift in periodization allows me to mobilize discourses of social control through dominant narratives of heteronormativity that have gradually emerged in

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North America and Europe since the start of the new millennium and to show how they surface in Berlin School films as well as in contemporary cinema. The films I discuss do not represent an exclusively German phenomenon and, thus, underscore the applicability of untimeliness beyond the German-language film context. Indeed, contemporary cultural productions (such as film, literature, and art) are no longer attributable to one national context, and the funding of many projects necessitates a transnational approach in order to successfully finance the production of a film.61 I Am Guilty was co-produced by a Danish film company, Petzold involved a French production company to make Ghosts, and Windows on Monday was produced by an Austrian film production company. Rather than being situated in a narrowly defined national framework, these films (and many others) transcend the narrowly defined German national context and should be understood as visualizations of socio-cultural phenomena and reflections of different modes of being in the world.

Timely and Untimely The terms “timeliness” and “untimeliness” extend a theoretical utility that emerges from their semantic and grammatical flexibility. Akin to concepts such as “fit” and “misfit,” “timely” and “untimely” offer a layered multitude of meaning. Being timely can mean a variety of things.62 Staying with the register of time, timely means well timed and at the right time. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, synonyms include adjectives such as “opportune,” “convenient,” “appropriate,” “expedient,” “seasonable,” and “felicitous.” All these terms point in a similar direction and underscore that, in the normative understanding, “timely” is positively connoted. I understand timeliness to characterize the state of abiding by the regulatory norms and temporal rhythms of dominant society. Given this connection, becoming timely hinges on the paradox inherent in a system governed by neoliberal ideologies – namely, the convergence of economic and socio-cultural factors. To be more specific, the majority of citizen-subjects experiences a lifeworld in which the circulation and prevalence of a narrative of privatization, self-optimization, and “freedom” in public discourse, coupled with an overprivileging of chrononormativity, overshadows and distracts from the fact that many lives are evermore controlled and rendered precarious.

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Central to the desire to be timely are the perpetuation of good-life fantasies of the liberation from state control and the empowerment of self-management, which go hand in hand with the ratification of a range of social policies that have dismantled the social safety-net and led to an upward redistribution of power and resources and the biopolitical regulation and alignment of bodies with heteronormativity. I discuss these key features of neoliberalism and their linkage to temporality and the cinema of the Berlin School in greater detail in the conclusion of this book. For now, let me underscore that chrononormative temporal structures are ubiquitous – even as members of society perpetuate the fiction of independence and self-managed and self-organized daily  rhythms (indeed, many individuals are trapped inside this system), rhythms of straight time are all-pervasive, and an adherence to them extends the promise of the “good life.” While neoliberal capitalism rests on and successfully perpetuates individuation and privatization as highly desirable, it also presents consumption and mass consumerism as appealing activities that bestow upon subjects a sense of individualism and self-determination. As Daphne Berdahl emphasizes, people perceive the experience of purchasing those consumer goods that they desire not only as an indicator of personal freedom but also as an expression of their “fundamental rights and democratic expressions of individualism.”63 In this sense, the culture of neoliberalism assures us that “self, identity, and labor are defined primarily in relation to consumption,”64 with the result that work, consumerism, and subjectivity cannot be understood as separate entities under neoliberal capitalism. Instead of existing as individual categories, they have become interlocking concepts of one system within which many people are blinded by the fantasy that they are capable of actively shaping and determining their lives both professionally and personally. Flexible work hours and constant access to a vast variety of consumer goods appear to transform individuals into, and legitimize them as, the ultimate self-optimized and self-directed subjects within the marketplace and, by extension, the nation. In this sense, those who possess enough purchasing power become both consumer and national bodies while others might be – partially or fully – excluded from becoming legible and from affirming their status as members of society. Given this oxymoronic, dual nature of neoliberalism and the fact that timeliness and its synonyms are typically positively connoted,65 timeliness characterizes precisely the idea that the routines and cadences of individuals are regulated and directed by neoliberal capitalism. This

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is not to say that all subjects perceive these routines as restrictive or that they have the freedom to choose an alternative order. Indeed, close examination of my core group of cinematic works indicates that there is a range of ways to relate to timeliness. Individuals can embrace their embeddedness within regulatory systems of power and can even be content with their position inside the system, despite their exposure to injustices. These subjects may desire to embrace the system even when this very same system repeatedly attempts to prevent them from entering the normative temporal structures or seeks to eject some of those bodies who have inhabited and claimed their position inside. Others, however, might desire to escape the system but are forced to exist within oppressive structures in order to survive. In contrast to “timely,” “untimely” commonly refers to actions and events that are inopportune, unwelcome, or premature.66 As I deploy the term, becoming “untimely” signifies the potential to detach oneself from those cadences and rhythms that neoliberal capitalism and chrononormativity prescribe and reinforce. In this sense, untimeliness describes moments when subjects are out-of-sync. In this respect, the concept of untimeliness links both temporality and the construction of subjectivity. Untimeliness describes how at times individuals actively pursue lives apart from market value, corporate profit, and heteronormativity and are able to free themselves from the shackles of highly routinized and regulated normative temporal rhythms and, in so doing, demonstrate the possibility of being out-of-sync. In this sense, the concept uncovers a temporary promise (or a fleeting hopefulness about the possibility) of breaking away from the hegemonic social structures and a capitalist-driven economy. At other times, becoming untimely is not a matter of choice for subjects and they are barred from belonging to normative social structures they desire to inhabit based on their unintelligibility as normative subjects. Regardless of whether it is chosen or imposed, however, untimeliness as I theorize it can be understood as related to moments of stuckness and impassivity (Berlant) as well as to abandonment and endurance (Povinelli) – descriptors that seem negatively connoted but that are also theorized as possessing a generative potential. These moments hold the possibility to produce tempos that index unboundedness from normative temporal rhythms but that do not exclusively direct the subject towards a future as a time that allows for the fulfilment of desires. However, becoming untimely does not necessarily indicate a complete liberation from the precarious circumstances subjects experience when embedded within the system. Individuals might be able to escape

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the restrictive structures of chrononormativity temporarily and become untimely bodies in ways that do not automatically render them free and signal an absolute detachment. I attempt to resist the glorification of abandoning the system and fully detaching oneself in order to inhabit a position outside of the social order. In this sense, I seek to avoid the pitfall of overvaluing untimeliness, which would suggest that this mode of being might be seen as radical, liberated, and thus more desirable. Taking a cue from Alison Kafer’s claim about crip bodies, visibility does not directly result in acceptance.67 As will become apparent, many of the untimely bodies in contemporary film face the challenge of becoming intelligible as fitting not quite properly and are thus perceived as a looming threat to the hegemonic status of normative life. Thus, untimeliness has a twofold potential: on the one hand, the notion indicates the possibility of disconnecting from heteronormative socio-cultural structures in order to enable bodies to persist and forge connections; on the other hand, moments of heightened precarity might arise for certain bodies when they are extracted from those hegemonic structures that shape the socio-cultural fabric of their lifeworlds.

Untimely Bodies in the Cinema of the Berlin School Given the particular ways in which many subjects in contemporary films are always in flux, moving in and out of regimes of normative rhythms and nonnormative temporal formations, a conceptualization of timeliness and untimeliness as two separate categories does not accurately reflect the temporal realities of the individuals depicted in many contemporary Berlin School films. Rather, I propose merging the two words and italicizing the prefix, which allows for the theorization of subjectivity as a way of existing in the world, as a relational positionality, and as a mode of fluctuating contingency. I employ this particular mode of writing as a way to visually highlight linkage and to avoid the use of two separate terms. Instead, I suggest that timeliness and untimeliness are co-constitutive states of being rather than states that occur sequentially and in alteration. Written thus, the term “untimely” is meant to indicate the possibility of conditions that are indeed constantly changing and to avoid a rigidly bifurcated model of conceptualizing temporal realities. While the use of the prefix “un” appears to suggest a dichotomous mode of thinking that is based on the assumption that the affirmative is always already included in the negative, the use of italics is intended to indicate not only an attachment of the prefix to the adjective but also a distinct

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separation between the two. This particular way of loose coupling suggests the idea that Puar puts forth in her rethinking of intersectionality and assemblage theory as “frictional” and not oppositional.68 Indeed, untimeliness resists a rigid bifurcation and instead underscores that subjects in contemporary cinematic texts never inhabit a single position but are always negotiating their positionality vis-à-vis normative, temporal structures. In this regard, untimeliness encourages us to think beyond a binary, clear-cut division between being in-sync and aligned with straight time (timely), and out-of-sync and unhinged (untimely). The italicized modifier foregrounds subjects’ embeddedness in rhythms of straight time or chrononormative temporalities, while also suggesting that they are able to push against the system. The characters in those post-2000 films that feature in this book demonstrate that it is not only impossible fully to escape normative socio-cultural structures but also that one’s rootedness within the system can render one precarious. As the protagonists in the set of Berlin School films that comprise the corpus of my study evince, a permanent break with straight time is impossible if one remains embedded and desires to participate in the existing economic, socio-political, and cultural structures. The figures also underscore that residing within the system can occur either out of free will or be a forced state of being. Thus, the performing agents in untimely bodies materialize not in themselves but, rather, emerge out of and crystalize vis-à-vis the temporal structures of the world. Untimeliness emphasizes shifting modalities that occur in the interactive dynamism of becoming. Performativity theory, so Butler suggests, certainly takes into account that bodies are located in the social structures of their lifeworlds in different ways.69 However, becoming timely and untimely are transitional states. Based on the assumption that subjects can exist in a state of flux and inbetweenness, untimely bodies become visible as timely and untimely at different intervals or at the same time, depending on the situational setting. This type of fluidity mobilizes a Deleuze and Guattarian “becoming” but does not glorify one state of being over another, acknowledges that timeliness and untimeliness can exist alongside one another, and is not necessarily indicative of the fact that the filmic figure possesses agency to initiate those changes. As these shifts entail specific effects and consequences for subjects, they may experience affective responses that range from happy going-with-the-flow to ambivalence, anxiety, and even fierce resistance. At times the filmic figures appear content when operating within

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chrononormative structures and at other times they seek escape; at times they enjoy detachment and at other times they detest their position outside straight time’s regulatory tempos; at times their fluidity is self-determined and at other times it is not. Regardless of what position subjects inhabit and what their affective response is towards the temporal organization of their lifeworlds, what remains constant is the steady, ubiquitous beat of normative time. Taking seriously this fluidity, untimeliness builds on but also diverges from recent discussions in German and queer studies and is certainly not the only way to discuss Berlin School films in particular and post2000 German-language films in general. Indeed, employing the concept of becoming untimely is one particular mode of theorizing so as to analyze socio-cultural notions of intimacy and relationality that are tied to normative conceptualizations of subjectivity in the cinema of the Berlin School (as well as other films that are not featured in this book). By adding to the existing scholarship and opening up new avenues of inquiry, the idea of becoming untimely can help us do necessary and important work. Its utility lies in its application to filmic (and other) texts to attend to the specificities of the malleability and intelligibility of identities as well as to the regulation of life through socio-cultural ideas  of normalcy in post-2000 filmic texts by foregrounding the importance of relationality. Thus, my concept speaks to the politics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist and gender studies as  well as to political theory and philosophy, which have put forth ideas on subjectivity, posthumanism, gender, and time. Theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari and Rosi Braidotti consider the human subject in a relational way, stressing an ethics of relationality and conceiving of time as nonlinear.70 Thus, untimeliness offers one way of engaging the “relational structures of the subject” through its very “capacity to affect and be affected” in order to interrogate the various representations of possibilities and foreclosures and so to forge connections.71 Moreover, as I argue in the next section, rather than exclusively understanding untimeliness as an analytical tool to interrogate content and representation (and form and aesthetics), it also has interventional potential. This being the case, it urges viewers to think critically about their own investments in and resistance to timeliness and untimeliness at different points in their lives. These various affective ties to others generate fantasies and attachments that turn the films’ protagonists into what Valerie Kaussen calls “quasi-invisible specters.”72 While this type of existence could be

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understood as a form of nonbelonging – a way of existing in the world that disconnects its characters from a place of being and propels them into a state of suspended nonrelationality – the protagonists that feature in this book are better understood as untimely. As I analyze the films, I  highlight how the figures are able to leave the system temporarily. At the same time, however, the films also throw into relief how these moments of detachment fail to grant the respective individuals a permanent escape. Indeed, the films programmatically withhold from viewers any opportunity for a romanticized reading of these figures as removed from the structures of the dominant social system. In other words, the cinema of the Berlin School renders its protagonists legible to others as subjects because of their ability to traverse normative paths and to reproduce rehearsed patterns that signal belonging to mainstream society due to their status as white, cis, able-bodied individuals. However, these filmic figures are capable of stepping outside of the present moment and abiding by different rhythms, blurring the temporal patterns and sequences of straight time. In so doing, they become untimely bodies, detaching from and reattaching to normative cadences, which enables them to glance ahead into the future and recognize moments of potential and possibility, even if these do not always materialize clearly as ways of existing in the present. Based on this fluidity and drawing on queer-theoretical concepts of time in order to think critically about subjectivity and relationality, I offer a unique and productive discussion of contemporary Berlin School films and propose the concept of untimely bodies as a way of showing how post-2000 films collectively explore questions of relationality and intimacy as well as possibilities for desiring and breaking free from dominant and restrictive social structures. In my proposed term, the word “bodies” comes to stand in for a variety of modes of constructing subjectivity and forging interpersonal relational bonds, and I use it throughout this book as an umbrella term. In other words, I use the phrase “untimely body,” or “bodies,” to address the materiality of bodies per se and how aspects of a person’s identity are made or become il/legible on the body. I also understand body as a way to refer to the discursively constituted formation of langauge and (identity) politics that comes to represent the filmic figure as “the subject” who is embedded in the narrative story world. Thus, the “body” or “bodies,” in the way I use these terms, are located and dislocated by the book’s very own analytics, a dynamic shift that is reflective of the queer-theoretical impetus of the fluidity of Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics.

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The Cinema of the Berlin School, Slow Cinema, and Untimely Aesthetics One of the goals of those filmmakers of the late 1990s and 2000s who are categorized under the moniker Berlin School is to challenge and subvert the patterns of mainstream (Hollywood) films – such as a clear narrative arc, a happy ending, stock or token characters that allow for easy recognition, an emphasis on sentimentality (often underscored with pop musical soundtracks), or an increased use of visual and auditory special effects.73 Berlin School films, as Roger Cook, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, and Brad Prager indicate, “have a politics predicated on confronting spectators with static images and with sporadically disjunctive sounds” in order to draw close attention to the action in the frame(s) and dialogic exchange between the characters.74 Many Berlin School films – and the ones I discuss are no exception – employ what Cook et al. call “dysnarration” or “aesthetics of refusal.”75 For Berlin School filmmakers, the aim of their films is not to create a sense of comfort in the viewers but, rather, to engage topics critically to encourage viewers to interrogate their investment in hegemonic normative narratives both on screen and in/for their own lives. Based on these characteristics, the films of the Berlin School have sometimes been criticized on the grounds that they are “tense,” “slow,” or “lacking narrative impetus.” Critics such as David Clarke suggest that Berlin School films are “always slow, always depressing, nothing is ever really said in them … they are always well thought of and have an audience of between five and ten thousand.”76 Abel underscores how many Berlin School films reject those industry formulas that make films more accessible for mainstream society and movie-goers, commercially viable, and financially effective – concerns that director Dominik Graf also discusses in connection with the New German Cinema of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s.77 Indeed, Berlin School films are best characterized as undoing “preexisting cliché perceptions of reality in order to induce a different experience of it,”78 situating the Berlin School as the “single most important German film studies topic to develop during the last decade”79 and still sparking major public debates about the filmmakers’ particular styles and the quality of their cinema.80 One of these unique formal features is slowness, which Clarke, among others, attributes to the cinema of the Berlin School as well as to a larger development in film studies – namely, slow cinema.81 Although understood as “an unstructured film movement made up of disparate

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films and practices that are conceptualised as a grouping thanks to their comparable style,”82 slow cinema entails filmic texts that adjust a film’s use and portrayal of time, viewers’ perception of it, or both, and thus allow for a grouping based on these and other characteristics. Lutz Koepnick’s book On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (2014) discusses slow aesthetics in several art forms, including film, and underscores that slow cinematic works experiment with “strategies of hesitation, delay, and deceleration” to consider temporality in all its forms. These nonnormative temporal cadences and rhythms encourage the audience to engage with the films’ aesthetics and the philosophical questions that variations in a temporal structure engenders.83 Slowness, according Koepnick’s argument, is also a way of contemplating those instances when the film is not slow.84 Slow aesthetic techniques play out on the cinematographic level as well as the editing level and include long takes, reduced editing, static framing, and minimal dialogue in order to draw attention to the passing of time.85 They can also encompass aspects of a film that are not necessarily categorized as temporal,86 such as “attenuated takes, long tracking or panning shots, often of depopulated landscapes; prolonged hand-held follow shots of solo people walking; slow dollies to a window or open door framing nature; a materialist sound design.”87 This kind of description of a particular type of filmmaking echoes Jonathan Romney’s claim of the development of an “austere minimalist cinema,” which is best characterized as prioritizing mood and “an intensified sense of temporality over events.”88 This kind of cinema is, however, not reflective of the majority of movie-goers. According to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, a “polarized film culture” has developed, which they categorize into two camps: “fast, aggressive cinema for the mass market and slow, more austere cinema for festivals and arthouses,”89 a division that bespeaks not only the North American context but also the European. In German-language cinema, particular aspects of slow cinema can be found as part of the stylistic choices of many Berlin School filmmakers who attempt to resist the narrativization of their films and the urge to create palatable, Hollywood-like blockbusters in which formal elements of film are recognizably used to drive the story.90 Unlike Hollywood cinema, which “thrives by feeding the audience illusionary forms of reality,”91 Berlin School films derive their political potential from “denying the spectator what it is that they want or expect to see.”92 Through a combination of unique cinematography and film editing, which I discuss throughout this book, the aesthetics of the Berlin School “rebuff the pleasures of affirmative cinema” through

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characteristic features,93 such as long takes, long shots, clinically precise framing of the images, deliberate pacing paired with very little movement, sparse or no use of extradiegetic music countered with a poetic use of diegetic sound, and the predominance of mostly unknown and unprofessional actors.94 Films such as those I discuss pay close attention to the durational aesthetic modes often associated with slow cinematic expressions and are exemplary of these impulses. That is, they (1) convey narratives that eschew identification with the characters or immersion in the plot; (2) begin their stories in medias res as well as end them abruptly without offering resolution and closure; (3) employ alienating aesthetic elements, such as long takes or sound – including absolute silence; and (4) are often “at best, a-political”95 as they abstain from directly engaging in socio-cultural and political polemics.96 Being in this vein, many of the Berlin School films do not create a sense of comfort in the viewers but, instead, encourage them to interrogate their investment in normative narratives both on screen and in/for their own lives. Instead of supplying answers or solutions, delivering propagandistic messages, or soothing viewers into an escapist utopian world, Berlin School films encourage the audience to construct meaning through representing rather than presenting, introducing rather than reducing, and depicting rather than restricting. They introduce the viewer to events, settings, or characters and film worlds that resist conjuring up sentimentality, nostalgia, or melancholia; and, as Maria Speth points out about her own films (but this also applies to many others), they deliberately “present neither a moral judgment nor an emotionalized view” and so allow viewers to engage with moments on screen that generate affective and intellectual responses in the audience.97 Indeed, many of the films of the Berlin School understand their images to possess a certain impetus or force and a potential to transform the reality of their viewers, recalling Teresa de Lauretis’s notion of an “aesthetic of reception,” which emphasizes that “the spectator is the film’s primary concern  – primary in the sense that it is there from the beginning, inscribed in the filmmaker’s project and even in the making of the film.”98 By foregrounding an approach that centres on the participatory audience, the cinema of the Berlin School tends to “engage the seemingly familiar as something unfamiliar while never alienating us from what we see” and, in so doing, demands that viewers reflect critically upon their own ideals and conceptions of life.99 However, these ways in which viewers are asked to contemplate their investments in normative formations of the social are not representative of a moral or didactic impetus of the filmmakers; rather, the films show

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how normative socio-cultural structures seem not only coherent but also privileged and aim at projecting an ideal that becomes the only acceptable version of life. Attempting to call this perceived normalcy into question, the unique aesthetics of Berlin School cinema can open gaps and fissures that construct distinct tempos, engendering a sense of time that unfolds in unfamiliar ways. As Kopp points out, Hochhäusler’s I Am Guilty in  particular and Berlin School films in general privilege the act of (visual) showing over (narrative) telling.100 While the images of many Berlin School films seek to depict, and often even embrace, stuckness, hopelessness, and an absence of futurity on screen, they do not resolve these issues within the diegesis. Rather, the films provide scenarios of what I call untimely aesthetics by both slowing and accelerating the viewers’ experience of temporality. On the one hand, this untimely aesthetics compels viewers to endure a slowing down of time when the camera lingers on objects and characters, making already still long takes seem to last even longer, making the films more “contemplative.”101 On the other hand, this aesthetics challenges viewers with a radical use of jump cuts, which creates a sense of noncoherence between sequences. Rapidly speeding up filmic time and prohibiting the possibility of the development of a linear narrative, these jump cuts leave the audience feeling apprehensive and constantly questioning what is to come. By paying close attention to time, I suggest that the untimely aesthetics of the Berlin School creates a specific aesthetics that is reminiscent of Berlant’s understanding of it as “metrics for understanding how we pace and space our encounters with things, how we manage the too closeness of the world and also the desire to have an impact on it that has some relation to its impact on us.”102 In addition to this reciprocity and relationality, Berlant’s theorization of aesthetics also includes the significance of affective responses to these encounters.103 It is precisely this theorization of affect, desire, and impasse as a crisis of the present moment that relates to my concept of untimeliness. What makes Berlant’s concept so generative is their emphasis on the present both as the temporality in a state of crisis and as a time of suspension. In other words, it is both immediate and prolonged, both discrete and indeterminate. This being the case, Berlantian cruel optimism rests on the notion of a crisis of the present that is inherently timely in the sense that it is linked to the present moment out of which subjects emerge. The individuals’ stuckness in the Berlantian impasse and the time of dithering, however, also render these subjects untimely or, rather, require them to embrace becoming untimely bodies. They are fastened in the

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present, are weighed down in the actual, and are kept in a position of suspension that extends the time of the virtual ad infinitum. This untimeliness generates the potential of a possible future by impeding progress towards that future. Considering depictions of the “good life,” I emphasize how Berlin School films encourage viewers to ponder what these irregular tempos and cadences reveal about our own attachment to and embeddedness within normative culture. More specifically, the films provoke audience members to become active spectators and to contemplate in the present moment their own attachment to “good-life” fantasies and narratives and the desire to be legible as proper citizen-subjects. Some of these fantasies index the wish or need to become timely and to create sentimentalized notions of optimism, economic prosperity, independence, heterofamilial bonds, and normative modes of procreation. Still others engender moments of crisis in the present. Through these moments, as Berlant has it, we may affirm our presence in the now – a means of investing the energy and affective labour necessary to become untimely and, from that vantage, to re-examine and potentially alter the then. This duality of desiring visibility within the dominant structures of society while concomitantly experiencing a longing for detachment and struggling to establish bonds with others creates what some feminist theorists describe as the double bind.104 On the one hand, belonging to core society rests on the individual’s willingness to adapt to the normative rules and regulations that confer subject status; on the other hand, resistance and separation from socio-cultural frameworks of power engenders the predicament of becoming complicit through opposition in the investment in the authority of a telos of progress. In this sense, both the former and the latter modes of existence rest on the idea that the individual is driven to entertain a certain fantasy of what is ostensibly the quintessential perfect outcome. As the figures from those films that form the corpus of this book point to what is at stake when an individual’s behaviour disrupts normative notions of relationality, desire, and pleasure, the cinema of the Berlin School makes visible and critically interrogates the persistence of those norms and regulations that not only fuse and unite but also separate and estrange subjects. These films serve as a commentary on the troubling dominant status quo of contemporary mainstream cinema with its majority heteronormative narratives and characters. They also call implicitly for viewers to re-examine their traditions and values through a signature film aesthetics that conjures a film world that feels both real and abstract. Emphasizing these stylistic qualities, I look

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specifically at how the subjects in the films navigate their attachments to and detachments from coercive normative matrices and how moments of stuckness allow for a glance towards the horizon of futurity and a nonsentimental prospect for hope. In this sense, the untimely aesthetics of Berlin School films creates a signature film aesthetics that conjures a film world that feels both real and immediate to the audience and that simultaneously allows viewers to abstract themselves from their empirical reality. Impasses arise to encourage viewers to engage with their own affinity to and embeddedness in good-life fantasies of constructed and highly gendered, racialized, politicized, and economized institutions such as monogamy, coupledom, conventional family units, and experiences of (sexual) intimacies. Indeed, many of the formal aspects of Berlin School films create unexpected and inconsistent moments when the audience aligns with or distances itself from the narrative or characters on screen and, in so doing, encourage viewers to revisit, revise, and re-envision ways of longing and ways of being in the world. These unstable positions reconfigure what Jacques Rancière calls “the sensible”105 – that is, instances that prompt viewers to inspect, experience, and contemplate their affective ties to present, past, and future. In considering the sensible in the cinema of the Berlin School, my notion of untimeliness resists employing solely analytical methodologies that rely on the films’ formal aspects, their protagonists, or their narratives. Instead, the concept I propose draws on Eugenie Brinkema’s claim to read visual elements of film through the lens of affect without locating it “outside of language” and “obliterating the problem of form and representation.”106 Insisting that affect is indeed a matter of form and “must be read for” rather than positing affect as resisting reading,107 I trace moments of temporal gaps and narrative detours that trouble the construction and regulation of ostensibly socio-culturally valuable identities and unsettle dominant epistemes and temporal rhythms by foregrounding the films’ untimely aesthetics. These moments also offer opportunities to create, amend, and reject imagined lifeworlds and to probe whether new forms of living are viable and attainable. Based on the bringing together of different analytic strands and theoretical perspectives, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics offers an intervention into a variety of academic fields, such as German, film, and queer studies. It does so by introducing and drawing connections among contemporary gender and queer-theoretical approaches, film

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analyses of form and content, and the socio-cultural contexts to which the films speak. By bringing into conversation queer theory’s temporal turn and the cinema of the Berlin School, I introduce a set of theoretical concepts that are seldom referenced by Germanists either in North America or in Europe as a way of providing new modes of readings and analyzing the core texts in order to expand the theoretical repertoir that is available to German studies scholars and Berlin film scholars. I propose that untimeliness allows for a reading of filmic texts to identify and to analyze critically different modes of forging relations and connecting on an intimate level. In the same way, I intervene in the field of queer studies by offering the notion of untimeliness as one possible response to the question posed by David L. Eng and Jasbir K. Puar in the Social Text special issue published in 2020: What is left of queer?108 According to Eng and Puar, one important aim of the issue’s contributions is to interrogate what conditions create socially and politically acceptable queer subjects and identities, and what subjects remain outside those mandates that uphold the liberal individual as the prized subject. In the spirit of defying the mainstreaming of queer and identifying acceptable queer bodies, I propose that queerness can be thought of and found in intimate encounters and relational bonds that, at first glance, might seem normative. In this sense, the following three chapters of Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics encourage a consideration of the filmic representations of different temporal patterns and timelines that produce subjects and relationships whose identities and intimate connections call into question compulsary heteromonogamous coupling, heterofamilial bonds, and heteronormative reproduction because of how the characters disrupt what Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt call the “conventional intervals of heterotemporality.”109 The films I discuss portray characters and rely on narratives that are sometimes in- and out-of-sync with hegemonic structures of time, and offer alternatives to or foster certainty about the validity of monoheteronormativity, engendering a unique temporal experience both for viewers and for the filmic figures.

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Tenuous Relations and Fleeting Connections Dismantling the Normative Couple

“But I can’t stay here alone,”1 Gitti (played by Birgit Minichmayer), the female protagonist in Maren Ade’s Everybody Else, divulges when her boyfriend Chris (Lars Eidinger) tells her that he is about to go to the nearby town to have a drink with his friend Hans (Hans-Jochen Wagner). She proclaims to be scared and asks to come along, but Chris refuses to take her because she “can’t behave normally,”2 articulating a sense of discomfort and embarrassment that he experiences in response to some of Gitti’s actions and displays of emotion around other people. As he gets up from the lawn chair to head to the car and leave, she follows him and throws herself onto him, hugging him at first and then wrapping her body and legs around his. Due to a lack of any type of response on his part, Gitti appears to hang off of him while she tries to convince him that she is indeed “normal.” However, she does so by speaking in a modified, grotesque voice, repeating herself multiple times – so much so that the sentences she utters blend together and sound nonsensical. As she is slowly sliding down his torso, he finally moves and, with some force, pushes her body down so that she drops to the ground and ends up on the dirty gravel path. Without a word in response to her behaviour or to reiterate his intentions, he walks to the car, gets in, and drives off. Throughout this sequence, the camera is focused on Gitti and begins with a long shot of her, her body positioned on the ground in the right bottom corner of the frame. When Chris walks into the frame on the left upper side, the camera position shifts to a series of medium shots, drawing the audience in closer. While this movement might create the sense that viewers are about to witness an intimate encounter or conversation between the two, the camera distance and ensuing focus on Gitti during this long take places her actions front and centre on the screen. As the camera lingers on the woman and foregrounds

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her struggle with her feelings and ostensible inaptness to react in a “normal,” anticipated way, the untimely aesthetics of this scene compels the audience members to contend with their own sense of propriety in regard to Gitti’s behaviour and the ways in which they might react if they were in Chris’s place. The audience has to stay with Gitti and endure watching her strange actions and is forced to see her display of insecurity, inappropriateness, and oddity until the film finally cuts to the next scene. This lack of cuts, or the absence of a shot-and-countershot sequence during the long take, which would move the film along more swiftly or diffuse some of the tension generated in the sequence, keeps the audience fastened in the present moment with the characters and necessitates that viewers stay with the two figures, particularly Gitti, for the duration of the scene without providing any relief of tension. This mode of having to stay with the characters contributes to the film’s untimeliness and encourages the audience to engage with the scene unfolding on screen. Instead of being able to move through the sequence quickly due to a quick succession of cuts and to maintain an affective distance from what is happening on screen, the long take does not allow the audience to turn away. Indeed, viewers have to stay with the actors and are made to feel along with the characters on screen and, thereby, probe what their emotional responses might mean beyond the context of the scene. Thus, the untimely aesthetics of the film urge audience members to exrtapolate from the images in front of them and to explore either their attachment or their resistence to the need to behave properly so as to fulfill the normative expectations of traditional gender roles. Given this emphasis on propriety and hegemonic understandings of gender, the sequence roughly two-thirds into the film is emblematic of one of the thematic foci of Everyone Else insofar as it provides a close examination of the couple as the symbol of heteronormative culture and comments on the ways in which the protagonists act and interact with each other as well as the socio-cultural expectations of respectability and appropriateness. Gitti’s actions and Chris’s reactions portray their (strained) relationship and underscore Everyone Else’s complex engagement with discourses of normative gendered expectations, acceptable social behaviour, and expressions of one’s individuality. Indeed, Gitti’s performance in particular and the couple’s relationship dynamics bring together the social and the personal in ways that allow for a close reading of the sequence that examines the notion of normalcy as it relates to the traditional romantic couple on the microscopic level (interpersonal interactions between Gitti and Chris) and on the macroscopic level (coupledom as a socio-cultural heteronormative institution).

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In keeping with this two-pronged approach, in this chapter I examine how Gitti and Chris in Ade’s film as well as the characters in Hochhäusler’s The City Below and Grisebach’s Longing negotiate conventional conceptualizations of normative coupledom as they struggle with societal expectations, libidinal temptations, infidelity, or and/loss of attraction to their respective partners. Reading these three films through the lens of time, I offer an interrogation of interpersonal relations and comments on the tenuous status of mononormativity – understood as the discursive institutionalization of beliefs and practices that make monogamy appear coherent, normal, and right3 – and the dyadic constellation of the heterosexual couple as the socio-culturally accepted status quo as well as an understanding of the role of monogamy in legitimating and perpetuating gendered, raced, and classed relations of social and cultural inequality. Untimeliness aids in the examination of how various filmic subjects navigate their attachments to and detachments from coercive normative structures that shape their intra- and interpersonal relationships. Becoming untimely underscores the possibility for queer relationality and fleeting connections to emerge, but the concept also makes visible the links between compulsory and institutionalized monogamy and heteromasculine privilege and dominance as it intersects with race, gender, and sexuality  and thus forecloses the possibility of permanency for the female, queer, and racialized figures. As I move through the three sections of this chapter, my analysis of each film highlights how untimeliness enables new readings of the Berlin School that comment on, destabilize, and even offer the possibility of bonds and relational formations beyond the normative couples. Furthermore, I underscore how the cinema of the Berlin School is concerned with the unstable status of monoheteronormativity and how narratives about traditional couples are recurring themes that comment on contempoary socio-culutral concerns. I suggest that being in-sync and out-of-sync with chrononormative temporality bespeaks Dean Spade’s project to envision polyamory as a viable alternative to normative structure for those people who “organize their gender, desire, or family structure in a way that offends a norm.”4 Spade’s thinking, taken up implicitly and explicitly by others, serves as a springboard to envision instances of untimeliness in the three films under discussion probe the possibility of a critical intervention into the hegemonic status of not only heteronormativity but also mononormativity in order to eschew universalizing socio-cultural assumptions and hierarchies in the cinema of the Berlin School. Mononormativity functions as a socially

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imposed belief system that “refer[s] to dominant assumptions of the normalcy and naturalness of monogamy, analogous to such assumptions around heterosexuality inherent in the term heteronormativity,”5 and legitimizes the existence of the monogamous, heterosexual couple above all other relational configurations.6 In other words, mononormativity can be understood as “the relations of power that stem from the belief that the monogamous dyad is a natural, morally correct and essential aspect of relating and being human.”7 In engaging critically with mononormativity in the cinema of the Berlin School, the following sections shed light on the fragility of normative coupledom, illuminate the crumbling of the heteronormative couple, and offer new modes of forging intimate connections that weave a complex relational tapestry suggesting the need for viewers to interrogate their impetus to valorize mononormative coupledom, to scrutinize prevailing societal attitudes, and to question existing cultural, institutional, and legal mechanisms.8 While Ade’s Gitti and Chris embody a couple who is on the cusp of a breakup precisely because of their inability and unwillingness to participate in socio-culturally gendered roles and scripts of propriety, The City Below portrays a young woman, Svenja, who appears to be happily married to her husband Oliver yet starts an affair with her husband’s boss Roland. Despite the abusive nature of the relationship between Svenja and Roland and her repeated attempts to break things off, the film concludes with them in bed in a hotel room. In this case, Hochhäusler toys with the notion of destabilizing the mononormative couple for a brief moment but seems to suggest a return to this traditional structure at the end of the movie. Longing, as the final film discussed, focuses on the married couple Ella and Markus and the latter’s affair with Rose. While Markus loves his wife, he is unable to end his budding relationship with Rose, calling into question the primacy of mononormativity and monoamory in the present without suggesting that this relational configuration is indeed a viable alternative in the future. In each of these three films, the protagonists’ actions call into question and destabilize those temporal rhythms and cadences that are closely tied to monoheteronormativity, which render bodies timely, and offer different yet temporary ways of forging bonds with others that suggest untimeliness. Much as Everyone Else features how Gitti is left behind alone and forced to wait while her partner drives off to meet a friend, the two other films also include illustrative sequences with female characters who embrace moments of untimeliness. Svenja in The City Below chooses to step out of the room and meander through

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the building during her husband’s important presentation, and both Ella and Rose desire to be with Markus but have to wait patiently for his arrival when he is with the other woman. All three films feature protagonists who reside happily within monoheteronormative relational constructs and normative rhythms but who also embrace moments and momentums that misalign them with those tempos that underscore their mode of beoming untimely. These instances not only allow for alternative ways of coming and being together but also encourage viewers to critically interrogate their own attachment to, and desire to depart from, hegemonic socio-cultural structures and cadences that reinforce mono- and heteronormativity.

Rupturing Normative Coupledom in Everyone Else Much like Ade’s 2003 debut film The Forest for the Trees [Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen] and its depiction of a young female teacher who is socially ill-equipped to do her job and engage with others and whose emotional and mental breakdown is visualized in a surreal sequence at the end of the film, Everyone Else examines the affective shifts of a couple who struggles to fit into normative conceptions of middle-class, bourgeoise society. Chris, who is on a working vacation in Sardinia, is accompanied by his girlfriend Gitti. While she is an open, free-spirited, sometimes immaturely behaving woman who works as a publicist for a rock band, he struggles as an architect and is charming but distant, reflective, and introverted. When they meet another couple  – Hans (Hans-Jochen Wagner), a successful architect and an acquaintance of Chris, and Sana (Nicole Marischka), a respected fashion designer – who is also on vacation, and spend time with the two of them, Chris and Gitti recognize their fundamental differences and have to grapple with the fact that, as a result thereof, their relationship is slowly falling apart. Although often characterized as a cinematic romance, the film offers few moments of the kind, endearing, and tender gestures between the two protagonists that would typically evoke this genre category. Instead, Everyone Else is completely devoted to the drama of a couple, whom viewers follow during their time in Italy and who are headed for a breakup in a way that is completely nontraditional and filled with instances of dysfunctional, messy displays of intimacy and communication breakdowns. Painful attacks, displays of pettiness, and expressions of ugly slights shape Gitti and Chris’s interactions with one another throughout the film, impelling the audience to bear witness to how actions and interactions unfold at the “believable rhythm of a real

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couple in a state of quiet upheaval” as Ade dismantles their relationship without providing a feel-good, redemptive ending.9 Notwithstanding the few moments of tender intimacy and coital pleasure, throughout the film there is little evidence that the couple is not headed for the anticipated split. In other words, Everyone Else foregrounds the tenuous and fragile connection between the two protagonists as they try to maintain their relationship yet struggle to relate – a struggle that is grounded in the very fact that they are connecting, albeit in ways that are not congruent with one another, and that they are unable or unwilling to conform to normative life narratives and structures. While the movie initially insinuates that the couple shares a bond that is grounded in a monoheteronormative relationality in the present even as they experience fleeting moments of nonnormativity, it makes clear that there is no potential for this connection to extend into the future permanently. This being the case, Chris and Gitti exemplify untimely bodies that are repeatedly grappling with the allure and fear of the rigidity of heteronormativity and its temporal organization of life. My reading of Gitti and Chris as registering as timely and untimely at various points throughout the film departs from that of Cook, Koepnick, Kopp, and Prager, who suggest that the film exemplifies how Ade’s protagonists – and many others in the Berlin School – are “alienated” and “disconnected” from each other in the age of neoliberalism and postindustrialization.10 By drawing attention to moments that allow for a reading of their bodies as untimely, the following analysis is more closely aligned with Lisa Haegele’s reading, which proposes that “Ade’s postromance offers a far more optimistic view of the relationship between its protagonists in particular and of the future of the cinematic romance in general.”11 However, I do not agree that the film depicts protagonists who “constantly shift their gender identities”12 – at no point do Chris or Gitti call into question their gender identity as male or female – or with Haegele’s use of the term “performativity” in regard to gender roles. I contend that her use of the Butlerian concept of performativity as linked to deliberate expressions that do or do not correspond with hegemonic notions of gender roles reflects precisely the misuse of the concept that Butler addresses in the preface to their subsequent publication.13 In the Butlerian sense, Chris and Gitti do not “shift their gender identities,” but their very acts of performing gender constitute the legibility of their identities. Gendered identities in Everyone Else, extrapolated from Butler’s essay, are actualized through the protagonists’ performative acts,14 but they do not exist a priori as Haegele’s comment seems to suggest.15

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My critical take on performativity aside, I concur with Haegele’s assertion that Everyone Else prevents the romanticization of what I identify as monoheterosexual coupledom and portrays unabashedly the difficulties and messiness of the relationship between Chris and Gitti.16 Oscillating between moments of timeliness (and successfully staging monoheteronormativity) and untimeliness (when traditional monoheteronormative frameworks are destabilized or undermined), the film’s protagonists and their interactions with one another and others serve as examples of the shifts in how they are able and unable to uphold socially acceptable and meaningful relationships. Thus, their interactions serve as reminders of the fragility of traditional relationality and intimacy connected with monoheteronormative coupledom. This type of reading of Everyone Else also speaks to Muriel Cormican’s and Baer’s respective claims about the flexibility of gender roles. Cormican suggests that “Maren Ade’s films challenge the dominant representational paradigm of white, middle-class, professional German femininity through women like Gitti who become the socially awkward and unconventional objects of others’ disapproval. Ade’s scripts, moreover, deny these heroines the traditional telos associated with the chick flick (i.e., their recuperation of a normative lifestyle and satisfying relationships).”17 While the focus here is on Gitti’s gender presentation and the ways in which she does not abide by traditional scripts, Baer adds that “both characters [Gitti and Chris] struggle to adapt the more flexible gender roles they inhabit to the demands of their heterosexual relationship, their professional lives, and their friendships,”18 and that, “for Gitti, the difficulty of reconciling her own expectations with the remarkably persistent demands of heteronormativity becomes increasingly insufferable.”19 Extrapolating from Baer’s reading, I suggest that heterosexuality and monogamy as social structures are highly inflexible and that they firmly secure cultural expectations of normativity in regard to both physical intimacy and gender roles. Extrapolating from these different readings of Ade’s oeuvre in general and Everyone Else in particular, I foreground the ways in which monoheteronormativity operates as a hegemonic framework of power that centres on relationality and binds subjects to normative temporal rhythms that render them timely. As the example above evinces, Gitti is expected to act and respond to others in a “normal” fashion – that is, Chris signals his desire to go out without her and assumes that his departure will ensue in a timely manner. However, Gitti’s actions weigh him down, pressure him to stay, linger, and slow down his momentum. In this way she coerces him into becoming an untimely body together

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with her, or at least attempts to do so, instead of letting him leave in order to meet Hans as he had planned. This particular mode of slowing down, accentuated by the film’s editing and cinematography through its long takes and lack of cuts at pivotal moments, creates an untimely aesthetics because these formal features force the audience to endure what unfolds on screen and, as Cormican underscores, to “remain painfully present” in the present moment.20 Viewers are encouraged and even expected to pause and to reflect critically on the events on screen as well as to extrapolate from the narrative and visuals to interrogate their own investment in and desire for the two adults to work out their issues and to remain coupled. The aesthetic choices of incorporating sequences with long takes and medium shots in order to zero in on one particular character demonstrate how Everyone Else (as well as Ade’s other films) “reflect[s] on a formal level the insecurity of the present that forms the matrix of her narratives; they also work on an affective level to evince this feeling of insecurity”21 – an insecurity that fastens the audience in the present and renders it untimely without guaranteeing the promise of a future. Acts and articulations of a desire for life events and trajectories linked to traditional gender roles, monogamy, and reproduction that affirm monoheteronormativity come to the fore repeatedly in Everyone Else, but they have remained underexplored in the scholarship on the cinema of the Berlin School. I contend, however, that monoheteronormativity is one of the guiding principles for the interaction between the filmic figures and that it encourages viewers to examine their own investment in such hegemonic socio-cultural frameworks. Indeed, the very first sequence of the film begins inside a family home and introduces the audience to a scene of domestic bliss: a man and a woman – most likely in their early thirties – interacting with two small children. Without any contextual clues and, at first, with very little dialogue, viewers are encouraged to assume that they are witnessing the interactions of a heteronormative family unit. Approaching this from the lens of time, this scene of familial domesticity coaxes the audience into situating the characters on screen within the structures of a normative family unit whose existence is rooted in monoheteronormativity, thus constructing a past and future that rests on chrononormativity to establish a particular idea about the present. This display of domestic bliss rests on the audience’s assumption that the film represents a traditional family unit embedded in the teleos of straight time. As the sequence unfolds on screen, the audience constructs the interpersonal relationships and, in so doing, renders

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the two adult figures timely bodies whose assumed positionality as married couple and parents emerges in the present moment, which also supposes a past that is determined and guided by principles of monoheteronormativity. However, this creation of the normative parental unit is undone by the arrival of another woman who turns out to the be the kids’ mother and Chris’s sister, and Gitti’s subsequent actions further rupture the impression of heterofamilial happiness and the continuation of a linear timeline. After the older child, a little girl of about four or five years old, refuses to interact with Gitti and walks out of the house to the swimming pool outside, the woman follows her to confront her. Gitti disapproves of the child’s pouting and wants to know why the little girl does not like her. When she gets no reaction at first and realizes that the mother and Chris are standing on the other side of the pool watching them, Gitti encourages the girl to express her feelings of dislike and to tell Gitti that she hates and detests her. This strategy elicits a reaction in the child, who is now willing to engage with Gitti and who responds with “I hate you!” and then with “I detest you!” Cognizant of the fact that she was finally able to dupe the girl into interacting with her, Gitti eggs the child on to scream at her in an exaggerated, grotesque, and angry-sounding voice. The girl complies and repeats the sentences “I hate you! I detest you!”22 Then Gitti encourages the child to modulate her voice to a quieter, mean-sounding tone to tell Gitti: “never call me again.”23 Gitti then gets the child to pretend to shoot her with her hand, whose shape resembles a gun when she extends her index and middle fingers. The girl obliges and Gitti’s response is a dramatic staging of her “death” by stumbling backwards, pretending to look at blood coming out of a wound in her chest, and finally falling into the pool  – a “death” that foreshadows the relationship breakup between Chris and Gitti at the end of the film. While this rather unconventional way of interacting with the girl can be attributed to Gitti’s lack of experience with children and her inability to recognize that her approach might not be age appropriate, it functions to establish a linkage between temporality and relationality from the very outset of the film. It is the very articulation of a “never” in the present that forecloses the possibility of a future for Gitti, which she herself utters and the little girl mirrors. Indeed, it is this initial exchange with the child that resembles a relationship breakup, and I read it as emblematic of the rupture of the normative couple as well as of the impossibility of Gitti having and maintaining an interpersonal connection, either in the present or in the future.

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Based on this assertion, the absurd interaction with the child in the now can be read as an act of mimicry that turns the girl into a mirror, reflecting Gitti’s words back onto herself. This kind of doubling has a dual effect. On the one hand, the exchange that Gitti initiates in order to get a response from the girl as to why she does not like her is completely unsuccessful, which can be attributed – at least in part – to the act of mirroring itself. Rather than allowing the child to have a sense of agency and to be given the freedom to express herself with or without words, Gitti coaxes the girl into mimicking her in order to elicit any reaction from the child. This ploy, however, does not succeed in creating a moment of true interpersonal exchange and merely reflects back onto Gitti what she herself had uttered. This doubling has the effect of catching Gitti’s utterances in an iterative loop that does not include anybody but herself. On the other hand, this particular cyclical communication with the girl makes it impossible for Gitti to move the conversation along. She finds herself in a situation that is linked to her desire to find out why the girl dislikes her, but this particular exchange neither offers any true connection between Gitti and the child nor provides her with concrete answers as to why she is the target of the girl’s feelings of hostilty and animosity. Each of the woman’s statements are repeated by the girl, which stands in direct opposition to Gitti’s intention of getting answers. Gitti’s attempt to forge a connection in the present moment is foreclosed through the girl’s act of repeating the woman’s words. Thus, Gitti has to endure this time of failed relationality and is forced to persist through a feeling of stuckness rather than being able to establish a bond. By foregrounding interpersonal connections and exchanges, I take this sequence that occurs about ten minutes into the film as setting the stage for the rest of it. Although heretofore understudied in scholarship on Everyone Else, this sequence, I argue, is emblematic of the kinds of interactions that Gitti and Chris have with one another as well as with other people: throughout the film both adults act in ways similar to how the child acts in this scene. They merely parrot back words or repeat actions in lieu of engaging in conversations or reacting to the other person. Verbal exchanges are often structured in a way that they are responded to with hypotheticals or phrases that signal the opposite of what they articulate. Indeed, the film portrays two coupled individuals who both desire to be legible as timely bodies and as “normal,” but, at the same time, Chris and Gitti embrace a sense of untimeliness when they actively refuse to embody socio-cultural expectations and normalcy.

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Notwithstanding whether or not their statements, actions, and exchanges are sincere or are a reflection of the other person’s desire, they both express wishes and exhibit actions that underscore a yearning for, as well as a rejection of, monoheteronormative modes of relationality. As such, they register as untimely bodies who are repeatedly oscillating between staging and rupturing the normative socio-cultural expectations of desire, intimacy, and coupledom. One of these instances that highlights the protagonists’ longing for as well as their refusal of normativity comes to the fore during an exchange in which Chris articulates that he is experiencing an existential crisis about the meaning of his life and his work. In an exchange that is edited as a sequence of over-the-shoulder and frontal medium shots and countershots, Gitti explains that she attributes his feelings of inadequacy to his fear of “committing to something” and his tendency to ruminate about everything in his personal and professional life;24 in short, he takes too much time thinking about what decision to make, “endlessly considering” his options while never getting anywhere.25 According to Gitti, Chris’s life is shaped by “total standstill!” and an inability to follow through with the things that he claims he wants to do.26 However, Chris displays an attachment to a Berlantian “good life,” with his “studio, bikes, and books,”27 that is supposed to affirm his sense of independence from normative routines and structures. He is able to coerce his business partner and friend, Philipp, into comparing their lives and into articulating to him “how much he [Philipp] misses his freedom because of his family.”28 Indeed, Philipp’s life is organized along a heteronormative trajectory, and he embodies timeliness as his daily rhythms are structured by work and family time and the embrace of domestic bliss with his girlfriend. One way of overcoming what Gitti has identified as “standstill” is, according to her, to try something new, even though it might not work out, and she ends her monologue by suggesting that she would like to move in with Chris as a way of trying something new. She proposes that Chris can have his own room and decorate it in the way he likes in order to feel at home. However, Chris’s response is neither positive nor appreciative of Gitti’s honesty towards him, and his question of why she thinks that she knows him so well is filled with spite and contempt for her because it clearly indicates that he wants to talk about something completely different. In this sequence, Gitti’s words articulate a linkage between normativity and temporality and underscore the instability of timeliness or untimeliness in and of themselves. She critiques Philipp’s inclination to uphold traditional routines and patterns as well as Chris’s attachment

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to a “good life” that only seemingly rejects normativity. She points out that his attachment to particular objects, such as his studio, bikes, and books, reflects his desire to resist socio-cultural normalcy by being able to invest in objects that underscore his individualism and independence. Chris seems to be an untimely body who indulges in a lifestyle that serves his own needs and stages his rejection of a monoheteronormative family life. While his lifestyle and choices signal his refusal to settle down and to organize his daily routines and spaces according to conventional familial logics and might suggest that he registers as an untimely body, he is nonetheless at a standstill, stuck in the present, and has to endure a life whose perpetual cruelly optimistic attachments to certain objects and modes of being do not grant him escape from, but rather return him to, the kind of “good life” that renders him timely. Thus, he has no choice but to continue to exist in an endless cycle of desiring a life of ostensible detachment from normativity when these attachments replicate precisely those conventional structures and foreclose the very possibility of liberation: he remains a timely body. However, Gitti’s critique of Chris and his stuckness turns into her articulation of a desire for a life very similar to that which she criticizes in the first place. Although claiming that only the experience of something new will eject Chris out of his halting position, her idea of reconfiguring their relationship in new ways reflects her willingness to participate in socio-cultural normalcy by living together as a couple. Much like Chris, who remains a timely body and is only able to become untimely temporarily, Gitti’s desire for change and newness might read at first glance as an articulation of her longing to step out of the regular routines and to embody, at least temporarily, a sense of untimeliness. However, her eagerness for renewal and for modifications of their current reality reflects precisely the kind of “good life” that signals a return to, rather than a break with, monoheteronormative coupledom. While she seems to long for a heretofore unknown mode of relating and being together, which would allow for a reading of her as an untimely body, her wish to cohabitate situates her firmly within the hegemonic framework of monoheteronormative relationality and, similar to Chris, renders her timely. Although both register as timely bodies who exhibit an impulse to transform their lives and become untimely, their exchanges and Chris’s response to Gitti illustrate a disconnect between the two characters and how they envision life. While Chris feels lost and unable to overcome a sense of stuckness and rumination that keeps him fastened in the now and unable to see a possible then, Gitti’s idea of finding a way out of the

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position of standstill is her submission to normative structures and its attending routines. Indeed, this schism emphasizes a state of rupture in their relationship as well as their individual isolation from one another insofar as they are attached to different narratives of coupledom and intimacy that do not lead them down a shared path: they both exist as untimely bodies, who vacillate between a desire for and refusal of monoheteronormativity. This notion of going in different directions and not down the same path, an idea that is also discussed in relation to Petzold’s Ghosts (see chapter 4), becomes ever more apparent as the film progresses and viewers witness further instances that affirm the couple’s slow but gradual detachment from one another and the rupture of their relationship. One such example is the hiking sequence that occurs about halfway through the film. Without providing many details in this sequence, the film cuts from the scene with Hans and Saskia, during which Hans and Chris bond over the rejection of Chris’s proposal at a major architecture competition, about which he did not tell Gitti, to a long shot of a parking lot lined with trees in the background. The sequence begins with Gitti standing next to the open car door and Chris bent over, tying the left hiking boot she is wearing. Neither one of them is dressed in a way that signals that they are about to embark on a hike: Gitti wears a short jeans skirt, a lacey tank top, and a track suit jacket, while Chris is in jeans with a long-sleeve button up. When Chris gets the backpack out of the back of the car, Gitti walks around the car and opens the trunk and takes out another backpack. Chris responds with confusion and surprise, making clear that he does not understand why Gitti feels the need to bring this backpack. He advises against her taking the backpack because it will eventually be too heavy for her and he is unwilling to carry it. Gitti assures him that she will be fine and that it is a surprise. He pushes her to tell him what is inside, so she lies and says that there is a paraglider inside and that she used to paraglide in the past. She insists that she has long been wanting to do this with Chris and then bursts out laughing because, for a moment, Chris is gullible enough to believe her. Although, or maybe because, she keeps apologizing to Chris, it is unclear whether she is laughing at him for believing her or whether she is laughing because of her lie. Moving time ahead swiftly without any contextual cues, the film cuts from Gitti laughing to a long shot of the rocky mountain wall on the right and forested rolling mountain terrain in the background, which suggests to viewers that Chris and Gitti have been walking for a while uphill. When Gitti asks if the spot that Chris is looking for is still far and

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if they are “even on the right mountain,”29 he confirms that he knows where they are. A subsequent cut shows a medium shot of Chris turned to the right and the audience can hear Gitti announcing from outside the screen that he is not allowed to look. When he turns around and takes a few steps in the opposite direction, he exhales. A cut to a long shot with the camera angled downwards reveals Gitti sitting next to a picnic blanket that has a variety of different foods distributed all over its surface. She turns around and pulls a bottle of champagne out of the backpack, announcing it to Chris in a cheerful voice and with a smile on her face. Chris walks down to Gitti, sits down on some rocks at a short distance from her and the blanket, and remarks critically: “Look at all that stuff.”30 When Gitti pours a glass for Chris, he responds that he is “not getting drunk here now,”31 but then he moves closer to eat some of the food from the plate that Gitti hands him. When Gitti returns to the topic of the competition and asks why Chris did not tell her, he simply states that he had not had the chance to do so. Gitti follows up by saying that she is sorry, that she likes it that Chris ruminates about everything, and that she does not care whether or not he is successful. Another cut to a long shot shows Gitti resting on her back on a rock with the backpack next to her and Chris, at a distance, chucking rocks into a mountain lake. When he walks towards her, he tells her to “move on,”32 leaving viewers with the sense that Gitti is tired from a lot of walking and has to rest because they might have managed to get lost. In the next cut to a tracking medium shot of Chris walking past Gitti, her voice becomes audible again, confirming that the couple is indeed lost. Chris responds that they are not lost and asks why Gitti does not trust him. Her answer is: “Because we’re lost! I can’t walk another five hours.”33 Instead of responding with a verbal comment, Chris makes a sighing sound, turns around, and walks away. Another cut shows Gitti, first climbing some rock and then walking swiftly, trying to find Chris, who clearly decided to keep going and did not wait for her. When she turns to the left and looks up the mountain, she sees Chris at a distance, walking steadily and at a fast pace without looking back. Gitti visibly struggles to follow him until she finally screams, “Do you have to run like a maniac?”34 And she lets Chris know that she thinks that he is “such an asshole” because he seems either not to notice or not to care that she is tired and cannot walk any further.35 A cut to a long shot shows Gitti sitting on rocks, breathing heavily, and Chris on top of the mountain formation, finally turning around and coming towards her. Another cut to a long shot shows Chris and Gitti walking downhill, with Chris carrying her backpack on his back and

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his own on his front. Yet another cut reveals the two coming down the gravel path towards the parking lot. The lighting has changed and it is getting dark, indicating that it is early evening and that it took them a long time to find their way back. Throughout this entire hiking sequence, there are several moments that highlight how the interactions between Gitti and Chris centre on narratives of normalcy and are emblematic of their tense relationship. Much as in the scene discussed at the outset of this chapter, the two seem to be unable to maintain and affirm their connection as a couple and to relate to one another. Their time of being together is characterized by brief moments when they establish a bond that is only to be severed again by an injurious action or a statement that emphasizes the growing division in their partnership. Indeed, the sequence starts with Chris’s chivalrous act of tying Gitti’s shoes and the execution of her plans to surprise him by bringing the second backpack in order to have a picnic – both acts that function as expressions of affection, intimacy, and care in the present moment. However, this time of connection is ruptured almost immediately because of Chris’s need to know what is in the backpack and Gitti’s subsequent lie and mockery of him. While he insists on having to know and attempts to coerce her into telling him about the backpack by withdrawing the support that he had offered her only minutes ago when tying her shoes, she decides to respond with an untruth about her past. In doing so, Gitti’s fabricationthat she used to paraglide and had long felt the desire to do so with Chris ruptures the present by referencing an imaginary time that existed prior to their relationship. Indeed, the lie functions as the verbal articulation of an assumed time of before and a longing to share an experience in the now that undoes that very possibility precisely because it is grounded in a lie. The lie and following mockery are predicated on her successful deception of Chris and undo a temporal trajectory of the existence of a past. Thus, Gitti’s own words render her timely insofar as she seems to only exist in the present time of their relationship, and the rupture of a past and detached time in the present disrupts the linearity of time and forecloses any possibility of having a future together. This sense of being caught in a present, which may not hold the potential for a future, runs like a red thread through the entire sequence and is particularly palpable during its final portion. Although Chris insists on not being lost, his suggestion to “move on” when Gitti is on the ground resting confirms her assertion that they are lost and serves as an articulation of his desire to keep going, not only in the literal

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sense but also in the figurative, in order to overcome this moment of stuckness. Having lost their orientation, they are caught on the mountain without knowing where to go to find the path that would lead them back to their car. They are forced to keep going in order to move on – that is, to find a way that prompts forward motion and thus offers the possibility of projecting a goal into the future. However, their actions and reactions underline the fact that this feeling of stuckness and the impossibility of envisioning a future is not shared. While Chris seems to insist on moving, perpetually setting one foot in front of the other and thus propelling his body forward, Gitti feels exhausted, sits down because she “can’t walk another five hours,” and is unable to continue. Her response indicates her lack of being able to project herself (and, by extension, the two of them as a couple) into the future. Gitti’s explicit reference of time rather than place is significant insofar as it underscores and counteracts the filmic images throughout the sequence. While the visual focus is placed on the mountain and its particular spatial intricacies of steep rock formations and hiking paths, Gitti’s comment stresses the importance of temporality and allows me to argue that she underscores that spatiality appears to cease to matter in her understanding of herself in the present. She is unable to see any hope looming on the horizon of possiblities and experiences a sense of stuckness that is weighing her down. In this sense, the current moment is marked by an exhaustion that forms the limit of her ability to imagine a then beyond her field of vision in the now and renders her a timely body. Contrary to Chris’s desire to move on, Gitti is not moving and seems to be unmoved by his desire to find their way back. Their different physical responses  – walking versus sitting  – result in the fact that Chris is quickly out of sight, hiking at an even faster pace than before and leaving her behind. By not paying any attention to whether she is able to follow, he has decided to focus on himself and his goal, and to move on. I read his decision to detach from Gitti and to walk away from her as an act of detaching himself from the stuckness of the present moment – of being stuck on the mountain and being stuck with Gitti. His desire to move on is an expression of his overcoming a feeling of halting and of becoming untimely by detaching from the weight of the present moment and heading towards a future that is simultaneously a point in the past since the “right” way back is a circular path that will eventually return him (and Gitti) to the car. While Chris is moving, Gitti articulates the limitations of her body and, in doing so, points to the impossibility of projecting herself into

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Figure 2.1 Gitti is taking a break while Chris is ready to move on.

the future. She is unable to continue, and, whether or not she has indeed been walking for five hours, her statement locates her in and affixes her to the now and forecloses the possibility of a then. Unlike Chris, she needs to surrender to the lack of her physical capabilities and take a break. In the long shot, Gitti sits on the rock formation in the centre left of the frame, breathing heavily and slightly slouched over, while the small figure of Chris is in the top right corner, almost blending in with the landscape (see figure 2.1). Her body seems to be caving under the weight of the backpack, which becomes more than simply a material object to hold the items needed for the picnic. In this very moment, the backpack with its food and beverage was meant to create a romantic atmosphere and not only nourish and sustain their bodies but also rejuvenate their intimate connection. Read this way, it symbolizes the monoheteronormative relationship that seems to weigh Gitti down and forces her to succumb to a state of timeliness. In other words, the present moment forms the limit of her field of vision and she is incapable of moving because she cannot envision a future. What underscores Gitti’s felt lack of being able to imagine a then is emphasized through the scene’s editing and cinematography. The sequence of the couple on the mountain is marked by a frequent use of long shots that show the two hiking up and across rocky terrain. This particular camera position creates a sense of distance and places Chris and Gitti in an indistinguishable and seemingly never-ending sameness of rocks and steep climbs in a way that makes it difficult if not impossible for viewers to discern where the couple is, for how long

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Figure 2.2 Chris and Gitti walking back towards the car.

they have been walking, and if they are really lost. Each shot of the mountain terrain could be understood as a replica of the previous one, reaffirming the sentiment of stuckness that Gitti experiences throughout, and dislocates the scene from its attachment to place. The combination of the long shots of the couple walking through the mountains and the cuts to connect the shots fulfills a dual function in this particular instance: on the one hand, the cuts move things along and aid in the construction of a linear sequence; on the other hand, the repetitive nature of the images and the movement of the bodies in the frames evokes a sense of circularity. I read this sequence as emblematic of the film’s untimely aesthetics – that is, the film’s editing choices are moving time along in a linear fashion through the cuts and the depiction of the moving bodies through the frames, which can be attributed to timeliness, while simultaneously constructing untimely aesthetics by showing over and over again a moment in time that is referencing the one that just happened and thus suggesting it will be the one that is yet to come. In this sense, during this sequence viewers experience both a linearity and circularity that emphasizes an oscillation between its timely and untimely aesthetics. This particular kind of undoing of normative temporal patterns also comes to the fore in the final portion of this sequence and encourages a reading of the last two cuts as emblematic of the film’s untimely aesthetics. After the series of shots of Gitti and Chris walking up the mountain without giving the audience any concrete indication of whether they finally found the right path (and, therefore, giving it no

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sense of release), a cut to another long shot finally reveals Chris and Gitti walking downhill, with him carrying her backpack on his back and his own on his front, and a subsequent cut to the gravel path close to the parking lot shows where they started (see figure 2.2). The dim light in the second cut insinuates that a lot of time must have passed between the two long shots. They have finally found their way back to the car, and Chris, despite his pronouncement at the beginning, is now carrying Gitti’s backpack for her. In the context of this entire sequence and based on my reading of the film as a portrayal of the crumbling of monoheteronormativity, the shot that marks this particular ending with Chris’s act of chivalry signals a return to precisely the kind of traditional relationship that some of the actions of the filmic figures were undoing at earlier points in this sequence. Both characters  – Chris through his refusal to participate in the romantic picnic or to walk with Gitti, and Gitti through her mockery of Chris’s gullibility and her verbal insults – behave in ways that gesture towards a rupture in their bond as a couple. So far from affirming their connection, neither one is able to relate to the other – so much so that they repeatedly turn away from rather than towards each other. While these acts of detaching call into question the stability of their bond and render them untimely bodies, suggesting the possibility of the rupture of the scenes of a Berlantian “good life” that neither of them wanted to stage, the last part of the scene signals a safe return: indeed, Chris and Gitti return safely not only to their car but also to traditional coupledom visualized by the backpack. Functioning as the harbinger of the monoheteronormative relationship in this sequence, the backpack embodies precisely what Chris and Gitti both desire and despise: the socio-cultural conventions of coupledom. It is the very presence of this object that sets in motion the cascade of actions that cause, or maybe deepen, the rift between the two figures because it prompts Chris’s questions, Gitti’s mocking response, and his retaliatory refusal to help her. Indeed, it is the backpack that spurs their exchanges at the beginning and it is the only thing that circulates between the two of them at the end of the sequence. Thus, I read the backpack in a twofold manner: the concrete materiality of the object connects the two bodies as it gets passed from Gitti to Chris and, in the process, materializes the objective of affirming their connection. Meant as a carrying device that contains a kit to foster a romantic interaction and strengthen their bond, the backpack initially intensifies the fracture of the couple’s relationship but ultimately unites the two when Chris supports Gitti, albeit unwillingly.

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Particularly during this last part of the sequence, the cuts move time ahead swiftly and return the two to their original point of departure. The untimely aesthetics of this final portion proposes the possibility of a sense of untimeliness, of moving beyond a linear timeline and the present moment to a future. However, this possibility of embracing nonnormativity is undone by the very fact that Gitti and Chris find themselves back where they started, and the final cut of this hiking sequence is a twenty-second tracking long shot that foregrounds continuity and linearity. While the two figures endure the final part of the hike, viewers are asked to stay with them. Instead of moving time along, the lack of cuts creates an uninterrupted flow – a telos – and thus a sense of timeliness. This continuous flow of time ultimately ensures that the audience is reminded of the linkage between the linear unfolding of straight time and the perseverance of normativity before the film moves on to the scene in which Chris wants to go out and leaves Gitti behind (discussed at the outset of this chapter). This oscillation between normativity and nonnormativity and its linkages to temporal rhythms and routines on the level of both content and form throughout Everyone Else culminates in an exaggerated breakup scene at the end of the film, leaving viewers unsure whether the relationship is indeed broken, and it allows for a reading of untimely bodies and aesthetics. This final sequence is set up in part by the frequent articulations of fear and distress on both sides about being left or no longer loved by the other and in part by the various moments in which gendered expressions of femininity and masculinity are staged in ways that are socio-culturally legible as normative. When Gitti, for example, voices her worry that Chris will leave her, he responds in a way that does not directly alleviate her unease. Instead of providing an explicit and clear answer, he asks her if she would prefer it if he told her that he loves her and that he will never leave her even though this might not actually be true. By stating his answer as a question – and it is unclear whether it is sincere, sarcastic, or rhetorical – he avoids a frank reply and seems to insinuate that he in fact does not love her and intends to leave her. Given the lack of clarity about the stability of the couple’s relationship, Everyone Else generates in viewers feelings of ambiguity and anticipation by portraying monoheteronormative love as volatile and  flawed because it is tied to hegemonic socio-cultural expectations and assumptions that are unattainable. In particular, Gitti’s feelings of distress about being left might resonate with the audience insofar as they speak to viewers’ hopes and anxieties when in a relationship and

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coax them into assuming that Chris’s response ought to correspond with the conventions of such exchanges by assuring the interlocutor of his love and assuaging her fears. However, Gitti and Chris make visible the impossibility of  performing normativity in a way that suggests dominant ideals of coupledom, and the final sequence in the film is yet another iteration of the visualization of their inability to perform in a conventional manner. When they have another fight during the final sequence of the film, Gitti tells Chris that she does not love him any longer and proceeds to pack her clothes and other belongings that are distributed around the house. She stops in front of the living room glass table where the used plates and half-full glasses of juice, presumably from breakfast, are still sitting. She suddenly stops her actions and simply collapses, falling onto the floor next to the table.36 Chris, who is shocked and assumes something is wrong with Gitti, gently shakes her body and talks to her, but she continues to lie still with her limbs completely limp, exhibiting no response. Finally, Chris picks her off the floor, carries her over to the dining room table, and places her body on top of it. When he pulls up her shirt and bends over, his mouth aiming for her belly button to blow raspberries, Gitti finally reacts by laughing audibly.37 Contrary to the rest of the film, when both figures inquired about and expressed their affection and adoration for the other, this sequence features Gitti’s explicit refutation of her love for Chris, although it is unclear to the audience whether her statement is indeed reflective of her true feelings or yet another exaggerated performance and lie in order to get a rise out of Chris. She not only tells Chris that she does not love him any longer but also vocalizes the end of their relationship in the present moment and thus articulates the impossibility of their future as a couple. It is the annunciation of the breakup and of her absence of feelings for him. In other words, the exact moment of Gitti’s speaking functions as the moment of rupture that forecloses the potential for intimacy and dissolves her and Chris’s relational bond. This split and detachment are underlined by Gitti’s falling over and then being completely nonresponsive when Chris attempts to move her. Indeed, Gitti decides to let go – literally by collapsing and figuratively by refusing to engage with Chris  – and elects to remain unmoveable. Through her inaction, she is able to uncouple herself from the bond she had with Chris as well as from the monoheteronormative structures of their relationship. Thus, she refuses to embody timeliness and becomes an untimely body who has severed the unit of the couple by embracing her fall to the ground as the physical instantiation of her

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disengagement. By lying still and refusing to connect with Chris, Gitti emphasizes her desire to be left alone. This desire, however, is not respected by Chris, who proceeds to engage with her, trying to get her to engage with him. Although initially unsuccessful, he is finally able to elicit a reaction from Gitti when he lifts her shirt and touches her stomach with his mouth. It appears that his somewhat silly action is what was necessary to get Gitti to laugh in response to his doings. In other words, Chris’s actions and Gitti’s subsequent reaction serve as the physical indicators that he successfully reconnected the two bodies. Aside from evoking the traditional gendered narrative of men being understood as active and women as acting accordingly, this particular action-reaction sequence establishes a temporally linear progression that renders both Chris and Gitti timely bodies. In this sense, I read Chris’s final act as a way to lure Gitti back into being connected to him, despite her verbal breakup and her staged detachment. This connection brings Gitti back in line and aligns the two individuals in a way that rekindles their monoheteronormative bond for the brief moment of her audible giggle. Thus, her response constructs a sequentiality and a teleological arc of actions whereby hers is contingent upon his. However, the film’s final cut after Gitti’s brief reaction to Chris does not provide any indication as to whether Chris was able to rekindle Gitti’s desire for another attempt at being a couple or whether the breakup was final. Indeed, the abrupt ending does not provide any narrative resolution and leaves viewers with the discomfort of not knowing whether Chris and Gitti’s relationship is finally over. Furthermore, this editing choice is emblematic of an untimely aesthetics that is characterized by a refusal to offer its audience definitive answers and instead encourages viewers to ponder all possible scenarios. The untimeliness in the final sequence of Everyone Else functions as a way of withholding the visual cues that would affirm either Gitti and Chris’s return to or their complete rupture with the “good life.” Rather, viewers are tasked with sitting with the discomfort of not having a resolution and of critically examining their own investment in monoheteronormativity on screen and in their own lives. Withholding any definitive sign as to whether or not Gitti and Chris are headed for a breakup not only at the very end but also throughout the entire film, Everyone Else offers anything but the portrayal of stable and lasting monoheteronormative relationality and thus suggests that such expectations are the kind of good-life fantasies that many viewers are attached to in their own lives. The film in general and the title in

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particular encourage the audience to ponder whether it aligns with Gitti and Chris or whether it prefers to be like “everyone else,” desiring the kind of relationship that champions normative coupledom even though it might never fully materialize in the now and, instead, remain forever a cruelly optimistic yearning for the impossibility of a then.

Breaking with and Returning to Normative Relationality in The City Below As in Everyone Else, establishing connections and sharing moments of intimacy are prominent topics in Hochhäusler’s The City Below. The main focus of the film is on the powerful executive Roland Cordes (Robert Hunger-Bühler), who shares a fleeting moment of attraction with the wife of one of his employees, Svenja Steve (Nicole Krebitz), at an art exhibition organized by his firm. Infatuated with one another, Svenja and Roland meet at a local café and then go to a hotel but do not consummate their affair just yet. When Roland manipulates the transfer of Svenja’s husband Oliver (Mark Waschke) to replace a recently murdered bank manager in Indonesia and fabricates an idyllic narrative about his past to charm Svenja, she finally gives in. Unaware of Roland’s actions and their connection to her husband, Svenja not only starts sleeping with him but also starts exhibiting behaviors that indicate that her engagement with Roland is more than just casual sex, such as calling him at work at random times on a phone that is reserved for emergencies only. Once Svenja finds out about what Roland did, she confronts him, ends their affair, and informs his wife Claudia (Corinna Kirchhoff) about his doings, who, as a consequence, leaves him as well. In an attempt to rectify his actions, Roland resigns from his job and pursues Svenja one last time, attempting to win back her trust. Although it appears that Svenja rejects him, the film ends with the two naked in a hotel bed. Given this focus on relationality and sex in Hochhäusler’s film, I argue that the various sexual encounters between Svenja and Roland serve as a commentary on monoheteronormativity and traditional coupledom. Akin to my analysis in the previous section of this chapter, I read The City Below as a commentary on compulsory heterosexuality and the primacy of a dyadic, heterosexual pairing as the socio-cultural standard. Shifting my focus specifically to casual sex as a way to destabilize mononormative relationality, I interrogate whether or not casual sex offers the possibility of calling into question the hegemonic status of monoheteronormativity and how this kind of intimate relationality

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shatters and offers the potential to exist outside linear temporality typically associated with conventional heterosexual relationships. Although physical intimacy appears to be a key feature of The City Below that other scholars acknowledge in their analyses, Olivia Landry’s reading of this film and The Days Between, despite the promising section title (“Sex and the City”) of her third chapter, focuses more on the latter than on the former. In other words, her analysis does not engage with sex or the various sex acts in the two films but, rather, with the depiction of the quotidian and the manifestation of mobile desires as characters move through urban spaces.38 While Landry’s emphasis is on gazing and on how the “loaded juxtaposition of above and below is critical to discourse on urban space” in both of the films discussed in her chapter,39 my reading of Hochhäusler’s film concerns precisely that which, in her analysis, Landry grants a brief mention but does not give a prominent place: that is, the significance of Svenja’s sex life and her affair with Roland. By analyzing the triangulated relationship between Svenja, Oliver, and Roland in Hochhäusler’s film, I propose that, although the casual sex acts in The City Below offer an alternative to monogamy and potentially normative coupledom, they ultimately fail to provide such a possibility. Rather, the film more broadly and its ending in particular reinscribe these sex acts within an “ideal” configuration of the heterosexual couple and thus uphold the dominant status of compulsory monogamy within heterosexuality. This being the case, my analysis demonstrates that, although casual sex could possibly offer an alternative to the pervasiveness of mononormativity, it fails to provide such an alternative based on the film’s ending, which depicts the return of Svenja to Roland and thus suggests yet another dyadic relational formation. Casual sex is most commonly understood as a fleeting sexual encounter between two people that may or may not involve coital intercourse and can range from one time to multiple times.40 What categorizes sex acts as “casual” is the fact that they typically occur outside the context of a committed, longer-term sexual relationship between people who agree that casual sex is just about “the sex” and does not include romantic feelings or a longer-term relational commitment. Indeed, what makes casual sex “casual” is its relationship to and definition vis-à-vis chrononormativity and “serious” monogamous coupledom. Thus, the label is a priori embedded within a hierarchical socio-cultural structure that positions casual sex in opposition to longterm, committed, safe, caring, emotionally stable, supportive, respectful, and trustworthy monogamous relationships, which represent the ideal

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configuration of coupling in Western discourses of sexuality.41 Based on this discursive relationality, casual sex can always only function as a temporary substitute, but never as a true alternative to heteronormative monogamy, and by way of its oppositional status it reinforces rather than destabilizes its hegemonic power. Considering the central role of relationality and the depiction of various casual encounters in The City Below, in what follows I foreground how the film serves as an example of how its protagonists embrace moments of untimeliness during their unforeseen and fleeting connections as well as sexual acts. I argue specifically that these different modes of bonding allow the filmic figures to disrupt the dominant status of compulsory mononormativity, which often hinges on chrononormativity, by offering them possibilities to resist the hegemonic scripts of normative timelines to become untimely. However, the film’s cinematographic and editing choices as well as its portrayal of both Svenja and Roland underscore that their casual sexual encounters, although seemingly outside the scope of “proper” monogamous coupledom, follow those scripts that render them legibly as “proper” bodies. Indeed, the film depicts instances when their interactions champion monoheteronormative structures and thus render them timely. These shifts throughout the film underscore the protagonists’ position as untimely bodies, who oscillate between being inside the normative sytsem and their refusal of the rhythms and tempos of straight time, and ultimately foreclose the possibility of the permanency of being untimely. This kind of casual relationality in The City Below is emphasized from the very beginning of the film when Svenja sits at a table at a street café. When a woman with the identical blouse that she is wearing walks by, Svenja notices right away, gets up, and follows the stranger to a nearby bakery. The woman enters and orders a pastry, pays, and leaves, only paying attention to Svenja for a brief moment as she turns and walks away, acknowledging the presence of Svenja, who is wearing the same blouse, for less than a second. Although viewers are not privy to Svenja’s words, it becomes clear that she purchases the exact same pastry as had the other woman. A cut to the street shows Svenja in a medium tracking shot, which allows the audience to witness her taking a bite of the baked good, chewing it once or twice, and then spitting it back into the bag before she discards it in one of the sidewalk garbage bins and continues walking. Aside from the fact that the two women are wearing the same top and that Svenja is clearly not fond of or not interested in the pastry, this sequence at the beginning of the film affims the centrality and

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importace of relationality. In fact, it is not the blouse that constructs a connection between the two women but, rather, Svenja’s eagerness to abandon her own routine and to follow that of the stranger on the street. This way of re-enacting the woman’s patterns creates a particular relational bond between the two that enables Svenja to connect with the other person through duplicating her actions and thus her experiences of the world. By copying the woman, Svenja enters her life rhythm and replicates her different steps. However, this ostensible connection is one-sided, only registering as a linkage for one woman and not the other. Thus, Svenja’s actions make visible a longing for relationality – regardless of whether the reason is mere boredom or the desire for a genuine connection – that remains unattainable because of the way in which she pursues this bond. Read through the lens of untimeliness, Svenja’s actions in this sequence point to the possibility of her becoming an untimely body for a short period of time when she abruptly leaves the table and abandons her own routine when she notices the woman walking past her. She stops what she is doing, places money on the table, and gets up to step into the street and follow the woman. This act of stepping away from the café signals her departure from her current routine and indicates her willingness to pursue the woman. By walking behind her, entering the bakery, and purchasing the same pastry that she then proceeds to taste, Svenja bonds with the stranger and adopts her habits and patterns, and, for a brief moment, actively replicates the woman’s ways of being. Seizing the opportunity, Svenja is able to step out of her own routine and normative patterns, which render her timely because they ground her in a chrononormative present and keep her in line, and embrace becoming untimely. This brief moment of escape allows her to indulge in a connection with a stranger in an unconventional way that grants her a novel experience and the possibility of stepping outside her set schedule and familiar ways of being and doing. However, this diversion is only temporary and Svenja’s distaste for and rejection of the pastry by tossing it into the trash signals her intentional rupture of the connection. After trying on the other life and establishing a bond with the woman, she spits out and throws away the pastry that symbolizes the other woman’s life and returns to her own. Through her dismissal of the pastry, which is reminiscent of Nina’s actions in Ghosts (see chapter 4) and functions as a proxy for the other woman’s life, Svenja ultimately rejects not only the particular mode of being but also her state of untimeliness and returns to being timely by showing up at the art exhibition to which she was headed.

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Thus, the brief stop at the café underscores her desire for detours and detachments from chrononormativity and temporally structured life and renders her untimely. However, her return to the gallery where she is meeting her husband highlights that these digressions from her routines are fleeting and short-lived. What allows for a reading of Svenja’s status of untimeliness from the audience’s perspective is the fact that viewers only know about the vacillation between untimeliness and timeliness after the sequence is over and Svenja shows up at the gallery where Oliver is listening to a presentation. In this sense, the untimeliness of the filmic figure is understood by the audience from a retrospective position: that is, only when looking back and interrogating Svenja’s past actions from the present moment are viewers able to see what the detour and the pursuit of the stranger signify. In this sense, her untimely body emerges only once she is at the gallery and the audience knows that Svenja took a detour and stepped out of the linearity of her schedule to take time to follow the woman. She is then late to the gallery event that was organized by Oliver’s employer and that she was supposed to attend with her husband. This particular sequence introduces Svenja to the audience and sets the stage for the portrayal of relationality and casual (sexual) encounters in The City Below. The film is filled with scenes in which the woman forges a variety of different bonds with other people and then dissolves them. These connections range from following a stranger on the street to accepting the offer of the women in the washroom, who hands one of her calmative pills to Svenja, to sharing a cigarette and a moment of intimacy with an unknown man, who turns out to be Roland. This encounter between Svenja and Roland sets their affair into motion and is also indicative of their relationship, which is founded on moments of casual sex as well as exchanges of personal information. Their interactions are portrayed as at times following normative lines of relationality and coupledom as well as temporality and at other times as destabilizing these lines. Indeed, The City Below is filled with a number of different encounters between Svenja and Roland that affirm and unsettle linear timelines and temporal patterns and are thus legible as repeatedly replicating and destabilizing the socio-cultural expectations of the heteronormative monogamous couple. These oscillations in the patterning of temporality renders the two bodies timely and untimely in alternating fashion and thus calls into question the hegemonic status of both temporal and monorelational norms. One such encounter is the protagonists’ initial meeting during an event at a gallery. Instead of walking over to sit with Oliver after her late

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arrival, she does not enter the room where the presentation is taking place to sit down next to her husband but, rather, stands at the doorway and looks over to him until he acknowledges her presence. Once he notices her, she turns away and wanders through the gallery space aimlessly. She does not pay attention to whether or not she is alone, and Roland is also in the gallery, talking on the phone and watching her. Although in an indoor space, Svenja pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her bag and lights one. After taking a drag, she hears noises in the other room and assumes the presentation is over. She puts the burning cigarette down on a concrete block and walks away. Roland comes over and picks up the cigarette just as Svenja returns, having discovered the talk had not yet ended. He demonstratively takes a drag from her cigarette, tells her that smoking is not allowed, and then extinguishes the cigarette on the concrete block in front of Svenja, who looks visibly perplexed but also intrigued and aroused. This first meeting and their moment of connection hinges on Svenja’s decision to follow the stranger on the street earlier in the film, which delayed her arrival at the gallery. While all the other people sit inside the auditorium and listen to the scheduled programming, Svenja operates on a different timeline: she does not arrive on time and therefore her body does not fall in line with the planned event; rather, it stays outside the room, which functions as a bubble containing the event, which is a time-based endeavour and exists temporarily – that is, it has a start time and an end time. Thus, Svenja embodies untimeliness, a state of existence that does not abide by the normative timeline of the scheduled event and that allows her to detach. This detachment is underscored by the physical movements of Svenja turning her body away from the room and walking around, accompanied by the gradual reduction of the presenter’s voice and the ambient sound from the adjacent room. Being late and out-of-sync with the normative temporal patterns has enabled Svenja to become an untimely body by uncoupling from the event schedule and the bodies in that space. With the exception of Roland, who is also outside watching her, she is disconnected from all the other people and thus free to do other things. One such expression of her separation from others and her defiance of socio-cultural norms is her decision to smoke inside the gallery space. Svenja not only turns away but also engages in an illicit act that symbolizes a refusal to register as a “proper” subject who conforms to norms. In this case, smoking can be read as an expression of her rejection of being in relation and of being a timely body – that is, she

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rejects being a member of the social community by disrespecting its unspoken and unwritten rules and regulations. Svenja’s late arrival emphasizes this rejection of conventions as she does not prioritize being on time to sit with her husband and, instead, embraces her state of untimeliness. While one might argue that Svenja’s refusal to be in line with the temporal schedule and socio-cultural norms forecloses the possibility of having and maintaining relationships, it is precisely this rejection that enables her initial meeting with Roland outside of the presentation space. They are both not following the timeline of the event for different reasons, and each embraces their respective mode of being untimely. While Svenja was late, Roland left the room to talk on his cell phone with someone else, establishing a connection with the person on the phone instead of partaking in the event. The burning cigarette that Svenja leaves behind and that Roland picks up functions as a connecting element in the centre of a close-up shot as the camera stays focused on the cigarette instead of following Svenja back to the room.42 In this case, it is an object that is timely, which is to say that it is itself linked to timeliness since, once it is lit, it burns for a certain amount of time in the present. Thus, the burning cigarette symbolizes the linear progression of time, steadily and continuously advancing towards its final extinction. However, the very presence of the cigarette, emphasized through the distinct camera position, as a marker or index of timeliness, highlighted by how it burns down gradually, is essential for establishing a connection between the protagonists’ untimely bodies. Indeed, the illicit act of smoking a cigarette in the context of a formal event underscores the refusal of Svenja and Roland to participate in the socially acceptable normative structures, and the existence of the abandoned, burning cigarette functions as a conduit of relationality between the two characters. In other words, the object enables them to connect, even if only temporarily. In fact, the sharing of the cigarette and the ephemeral nature of the lit cigarette encapsulate their relationship: it is intense and passionate but also smouldering and uncontrollable for both parties at different times and intervals throughout the film, and their casual sexual encounters are fleeting and encourage a reading of their relationship as a critique of monoheteronormative structures. These short-lived instances that set their affair into motion and invite an analysis that foregrounds temporality and relationality in regard to their many casual sexual encounters occur more often after Svenja’s initial rejection of coitus with Roland. At first, she refuses to sleep with him, but his persistent and direct advances  – he tells her

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explicitly that he wants to sleep with her at a party at his house43 – and his scheme to send Oliver abroad to replace a co-worker cause a shift in her stance. This change is emphasized through another shot of an object – Svenja’s cell phone sitting on her living room coffee table and ringing. A cut to Oliver on his phone in his office reveals that it is him calling, but she is not picking up.44 A subsequent cut to a long shot of the street shows Svenja smoking and getting into Roland’s car. She prefaces her exchange with Roland with the assertion that this means nothing and then wants him to prevent Oliver’s new job assignment from happening. He insists that he cannot do anything, but when Svenja is visibly dissatisfied and remains distant, he promises that he’ll think about it. Another cut shows the two walking around in an apartment and Roland telling Svenja about his childhood experiences in this place. Three more cuts take viewers back to the office, where Oliver is celebrating his new job assignment, to a shot of clouds outside an airplane window, and then to Roland sitting on a hotel room bed with his tie undone and his shirt unbuttoned at the top. The use of multiple cuts in this succession of scenes creates an untimely aesthetics since it sets up Roland and Svenja’s first sexual encounter in a fashion that appears temporally disjointed from the previous sex acts insofar as it is hard for viewers to locate it in time. On the one hand, the sequence in the hotel room is the last one in a series of scenes depicting different events and thus evokes a sense in the audience that the film is presenting these instances as part of a conventional linear succession. On the other hand, the cuts to Oliver, the apartment, and finally the hotel room create ambiguity as to whether these events are all happening one after the other, at the same time, or at different times. It is unclear whether the celebration sequence is included in the scene in order to add images to the conversation between Svenja and Roland and to visualize Oliver’s excitement or whether it really takes place as the two are speaking about the deployment on their drive. The editing choices neither deny nor affirm a temporal linearity and render the sequence at the hotel room in-sync yet also out-of-sync with a teleological narrative arc that leads up to the sexual encounter between Roland and Svenja. This sense of untimeliness is further emphasized throughout this sexual encounter. As soon as she walks through the door, Svenja observes that Roland is not that tall, they kiss, she pushes him away, and she asks rhetorically whether or not he is going to sleep with her and whether he has “not forgotten how to.”45 Roland responds by taking off his shirt, while Svenja removes her panties. While it is unclear whether

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she is suggesting that his lack of knowledge is due to his age or his long-term marriage, this mockery is reminiscent of Gitti’s ridicule of Chris but differs from Ade’s portrayal of the relationship structures in Everyone Else since Roland and Svenja forge a false coupling. A cut to a medium shot of the bed shows her lying on it in the front of the screen touching his naked back with her hand and him sitting in the back and turned away from her. The audience can hear the sound of plastic being ripped, suggesting that he is putting on a condom. Another cut to a long shot of the bed shows him, now naked, on top of her still-clothed body, kissing while having sex. A few seconds after this cut, Svenja tells him that she is “not made of glass,”46 suggesting that he is not sleeping with her in the way she expects or desires, to which he responds by thrusting his pelvis harder and more determinedly before the film cuts to the next sequence. By mockingly suggesting that Roland might not remember how to have sex, Svenja creates a linkage between casual sex and time in a manner that insinuates that his last experience of corporeal pleasure is located so far in the past that it has become disconnected from the present moment. It is Svenja’s assumptions and her perception of Roland’s inablity to satisfy her need for him to fulfill her normative conceptualization of masculininty and sexual prowess that stand in opposition to the unravelling of the act itself and that render him an untimely body. Her words anchor his presence in the present and affirm his untimeliness; she believes that he is unable to recall his past in order to use it as the basis for their sexual encounter. However, his actions disprove her assertions regarding his capability: by pleasuring her and proving he is still able to perform, he creates a linkage between now and then and thus is rendered timely. What makes this casual sexual encounter significant is not only the fact that it is the first instance of corporeal intimacy between Svenja and Roland but also the way in which it destabilizes traditional notions of relationality and enables this sequence to be read through the lens of untimely aesthetics. The editing choices quickly take viewers from Svenja entering the room and taking off her underwear to Roland preparing for and then having sex with her. I read the three cuts that constitute the formal aspects in this sequence as a way of moving time along swiftly and in a noncontinuous fashion, thereby emphasizing the casual nature of the encounter rather than staging it as a stereotypically romanticized expression of affection, intimacy, and even love. Thus, the disjointed visual quality disrupts a normative sequentiality typically associated with timeliness and normative relationships that are assumed

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Figure 2.3 Svenja and Roland walking down the hotel hallway.

to follow the chrononormative course of meet, fall in love, get married, and have children. The disjointed nature of the images allows for the two bodies to indulge in casual sex as the connecting element between them and to embrace a state of untimeliness before the film cuts to the next sequence, showing a long, dimly lit hotel hallway with two figures – these are indeed Roland and Svenja, but this becomes clear to the audience only once their dialogue becomes audible and they start moving towards the camera – walking side by side all the way at the end (see figure 2.3). Instead of terminating their state of untimeliness because of the cut, this scene, in both content and form, maintains the continuation of untimeliness. In other words, the two figures’ dialogue and this particular cut function as an extension or an elongation of untimeliness. As the couple is walking briskly down the hallway, viewers hear a dialogue about how they imagined a different life as teenagers, smoking their first cigarette, and getting a driving licence. This moment of ambiguity in the temporal reimagining of a shared past had they been together as young adults at the same time as the two figures are visually grounded in the present bespeaks the dialectic status of the hotel as estranged and devoid of personal relations while also creating individualized meaning through their shared fantasy.47 When they almost reach the end of the hallway Roland remarks that “it is all happening so fast,”48 but it is not entirely clear to what he is referring. Given the lack of spatial and verbal cues, it is unclear whether there is any significance ascribed to either the space or to their dialogic exchange, and his statement may function as a comment on both, either, or neither. Regardless of whether Roland talks about the progression of their affair, his age, and the fact that he is no longer a teenager, or whether

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he is referring to the tempo by which they approach the nearing end of the hallway, his remark alludes to an increase in speed, and he explicitly verbalizes his awareness of a different pace. This perceived “fast” tempo operates as a force that moves them along swiftly and maintains the untimely state of their bodies. Indeed, the velocity that Roland senses propels them along, out-of-sync with normative temporal rhythms – they speed through flashes of past memories verbally as they speed down the hallway physically. The momentum of their dialogue does not allow for a coherent conversation or for the emergence of conventional intimacy; rather, their speed and disjointed dialogue construct a fleeting connection spurred on by past corporeal experiences and desires. This type of connection is, however, severed when the film cuts from the medium shot of the two bodies in the hallway to a close-up, presumably inside the hotel room, which depicts Roland and Svenja in an act of physical intimacy, kissing and touching each other. Based on the proximity of the camera and the extradiegetic use of piano music, viewers can assume that they are sleeping together. However, unlike in their previous encounter, the cinematography during sex presents the act in a more sensual and romantic manner and for a longer time (1 minute and 40 seconds) and thus functions as an aesthetic choice that stands in opposition to previous scenes.49 Indeed, the formal aspects of the film – camera position and distance as well as the inclusion of a sonic element – slow the fast-paced rhythm of the former encounters down to create a sense of intimacy that is sustained, mutual, and in line with socio-cultural assumptions. By constructing an uninterrupted sequence that emphasizes the bond between the two and romanticizes their encounter, the film encourages viewers to shift from their perception of the two figures and the casualness of their sex acts to inscribe them in a relational system built on the normalcy and naturalness of the loving couple. Understood in this way, Roland and Svenja are not only portrayed as bodies who are in-sync with each other: they have also slowed down to become timely bodies with whom the audience is able to engage on screen. Thus, viewers are encouraged to take the time to contemplate their investment in the relational configuration between Roland and Svenja and, potentially, are even coerced into legitimizing the dyad as the natural and essential aspect of relating. This gradual return to normativity unfolds in a variety of sequences in the second half of the film after Svenja uncovers that Roland was the one who sent her husband away and lied to her about his family and his upbringing. One such example is the meeting between the two in

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the hotel. Instead of showing any interest in sleeping with him, Svenja confronts Roland about his lies, to which he responds by ripping off her underwear to have sex with her while she seems absent-minded and talks about her experiences with a former lover. Notwithstanding the fact that Roland’s aggressive actions are invasive and violent during this encounter and it is questionable whether she gives consent to his sexual advances, I want to take a closer look at the role that sex plays in this sequence. While some might argue that the sex act is yet another casual encounter between the two or a violation of Svenja’s bodily integrity, in the context of the confrontation I understand it as the expression of Roland’s desire to affirm their dyadic relationship. Sex functions as a means to intensify their bond and is a response to Svenja’s mentioning of Claudia, whose name serves as a reminder that Roland is indeed in a legally sanctioned relationship with somebody else. While he is eager to push his wife away, and this is underscored by his pelvic thrusts, and to deepen his connection with Svenja by giving her the kind of rough sex she demanded in their first encounter, Svenja’s nonparticipatory stance and her narrative about her past relationship suggest that she inhabits a position that stands in opposition to his. Rather than engaging with Roland and his need to assert the importance of their relationship in the present by embracing a sense of timeliness, her focus has shifted to the past and her lover. Indeed, she is narrating herself out of a now that she inhabits with Roland, drifting into the nostalgic account of a previous time of sex and drug consumption, and, by doing so, she enables her body to detach from the present relationship and from what is happening to her in the present moment and to become untimely. The divergent investment in their relationship on Roland’s and Svenja’s parts – the former seeks coupling and intimacy while the latter hopes to escape it  – is underscored precisely through the sex act in this sequence. Contrasting the romanticized sex scene that encourages viewers to inscribe the two bodies within a monoheteronormative socio-cultural framework of relationality and passionate intimacy because it alludes to those normative markers and structures that count as romantic in cinematic texts, this encounter portrays failed sex and distance. In other words, Roland’s forceful advance and sole focus on corporeality is met with Svenja’s disinterest and detachment. By returning to the memories of her past lover, she has turned away from Roland and their bond and shows zero interest in participating or reciprocating his sexual approaches. Based on her knowledge about him, she has decided to withdraw and disengage sexually in this scene

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and, ultimately, shatters their bond by ending the affair. Claudia also decides to end her relationship with Roland and confronts him, wanting to know about his motives regarding Oliver’s transfer and his pursuit of Svenja. Upon receiving unsatisfactory answers, she announces that she intends to leave him.50 Although this development might suggest that Roland is being left by both women, which forecloses the possibility of any relational bond for him, the film’s final sequences portray an even stronger and more intense investment in monoheteronormativity on his part while also featuring Svenja’s continued attempts to detach, attempts that ultimately fail and conclude in her return to him. One such example is Roland’s chasing Svenja through a market space and to an empty apartment building. As she runs away from him and hides, he chases after her while telling her about himself in an embarrassing display of honesty and openness. He cannot find her until, when he finally reaches a window on the upper portion of the staircase, he looks out and down, only to see her rushing out the door and getting into a taxi. Roland’s pursuit of Svenja and his truthfulness about his past emphasize his increased investment in monoheteronormativity and his desire for a new start with Svenja that is grounded in conventional behaviors of relationship building – that is, honest conversations and a sharing of one’s past life in order to get to know the other person. What foregrounds this investment, at least as far as Roland is concerned, is his pursuit of Svenja, in the sense that he is literally following her and trying to repair their relationship in order to win her back. By exposing himself and opening up about his past, he hopes to re-establish a bond with Svenja that exceeds the typical standards of casual sex in the present moment. His narrative about his youth and previous marriage ought to function as the connecting elements in the now to pull Svenja closer to him and to enable the formation of a relational bond that persists in the then. Thus, the details about Roland’s former life are intended to generate a sense of intimacy in order to kindle a different type of connection that rests on the normative values of openness, commitment, and honesty that are constitutive aspects of a socio-cultural “proper” relationship. However, the final portion of the sequence makes clear that Roland’s attempt at laying the foundation for a monoheteronormative relationship fails when the audience watches Svenja exit the building and drive off in a cab. This failure is underscored through the film’s cinematography and editing choices. Throughout the scene, the camera remains at a mediumshot distance and follows Roland around as he moves through the

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staircase and the empty rooms of the building. Once he reaches the top, the film cuts to a close medium shot of Svenja’s legs and feet and the audience witnesses her walking down the stairs at a fast pace. The next cut aligns viewers with Roland’s perspective and positions them on the top floor of the building. The long shot through the big window is tilted down to depict the front door and part of the street so that they, much like Roland, can watch Svenja exit and leave. This particular sequence of medium and long shots produces the effect that time is moving at different tempos as the film jumps from the portrayal of Roland talking, to Svenja’s feet rushing, to the static view from above. The focus on him and his narrative of the past establishes a sense of continuation and linearity with its emphasis on monoheteronormative events and stages such as childhood, family, education, coupledom, and marriage, which are constitutive elements of a timely body. The cut to the shot of Svenja’s feet running down the stairs evokes a change of pace and speeds up time. The image of the fast-moving legs serves as a commentary on or response to the momentum that the steady cadence of Roland’s narrative produces and renders her untimely. Indeed, Svenja is trying not only to get away from him in that particular space because she does not want to be around him but also escape his attempt to create relational intimacy between the two of them, an intimacy based on the timeliness of normative life narratives. The final cut to the long shot on the top attests to the fact that Svenja did indeed get away: the change in camera distance from medium-close to long shot underscores how Svenja’s escape transforms proximity into distance on the levels of both content and form. The last shift mirrors the development of their relationship after Svenja left Roland as he repeatedly seeks to create a normative relationship based on closeness and conventional values, which she tries to escape. It appears that in her refusal to engage with Roland she is committed to breaking with traditional relationality and to embrace her status as being an untimely body. However, the cut to the final sequence of the film suggests otherwise and undoes the very possibility of her untimeliness and repositions Svenja  – quite literally next to Roland  – thus suggesting her return to their relationship. The City Below ends with a long shot of a hotel hallway and a cleaning woman pushing her cart past a door with a “do not disturb” sign on the handle. A cut to a long shot of the inside of the room portrays Svenja and Roland sleeping next to each other in the bed (see figure 2.4). While he remains asleep, she wakes up, gets out of bed, and walks over to the window. Random screams are audible

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Figure 2.4

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Roland and Svenja sleeping in the hotel bed.

outside so she pushes away the curtains to investigate their origin. A long shot of the street from Svenja’s perspective shows people running in the streets, screaming. Another cut to a medium shot shows her head slightly turned to the side and says, “it’s begun” before the film ends abruptly and without any explanation or final resolution and cuts to the credits.51 Although different from the previous one, this final sequence partly mirrors the chase scene on the levels of content and form. In both scenes, a downward tilted long shot with the camera positioned up and inside a building reveals to the audience the street below so that viewers are able to witness what is happening. In both scenes, running – and maybe more specifically running from or running away from something or someone – is a central part of the scene, with the significant difference being that it is not Svenja who is trying to get away this time; rather, she has turned into the onlooker who watches other people run away. In this sequence, she is the one who not only stands still and does the looking but also engages with Roland, underscoring their relational connection. Her behaviour and attitude towards him has changed from the previous scene to this scene, and she is no longer positioned in opposition to but in alignment with him. Indeed, Svenja’s statement seems to be directed at him and suggests a change in relationality: instead of running from him, she has turned towards him. This particular positionality of the two figures underscores that they are ultimately unable to escape the monoheteronormative system permanently and, despite Svenja’s initial rejection of Roland at the beginning of the film, The City Below ends on an ambiguous note, with Oliver gone and with Roland and Svenja together in bed, suggesting the reinstantiation of the monoheteronormative couple.

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Considering the camera position inside the room in connection with Svenja’s statement, I propose that the combination of cinematography and utterance not only emphasizes the bond between her and Roland but also allows for a final reading of them as untimely bodies. By positioning viewers inside the room with the two figures, the film creates a shielded sphere that visually unites them as a couple and separates them from the chaos in the street. However, what remains ambiguous is whether Svenja’s utterance serves as a commentary on what is happening outside or inside the room, and, depending on the position from which viewers approach the sequence, the two bodies can be seen as timely or untimely. If the audience were to understand the sentence as a remark on the commotion outside, Svenja’s comment indicates the beginning of something from which the bodies are disconnected and, as the sign on the door suggests, by which they ought not to be disturbed. Although one could argue that Svenja’s comment implies that she might know what has begun, her position inside the room with Roland separates them from that which is unfolding outside. Svenja (and by extension the audience) is only a witness, not a participant. Her state of stillness, motionlessness, and detachment vis-à-vis the movement outside and her explicit awareness that something is beginning outside render her body frozen in time and untimely. However, if viewers assume that the sentence is directed at Roland, it reflects on their time together and thus functions as Svenja’s verbal account of their relationship. The use of the present perfect tense indicates that Svenja references a temporal starting point in the past and a timeline that continues into the present moment, which underscores their embeddedness in a linear temporal trajectory. This construction of a teleological timeframe renders their bodies timely and embeds them in a mononormative relational bond. Indeed, the cut to the random people outside places an emphasis on the two of them as a coupled unit. Regardless of how Svenja’s commentary is understood by viewers, the film ends in a togetherness that highlights heterosexual intimacy and the couple who is shielded from the chaos of the world rather than a depiction of a sexual encounter. These images encourage the audience to establish a connection between Svenja and Roland that insinuates the triumph of coupledom and the commencement of a relationship that is protected from the world rather than the portrayal of casual sex. This being the case, The City Below is filled with moments that potentially destabilize normative forms of relationality but ultimately ends with a return to monoheteronormative coupling.

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Gesturing towards Nonnormative Relationality in Longing Grisebach’s debut feature film Longing, with its unassuming setting and underwhelming display of emotions, echoes some of the aesthetic and formal choices that are characteristic of her diploma film Be My Star  (2001) [Mein Stern] and won the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival as well as the prize for Best Feature Film at the Turin Film Festival in the same year of its release. The filmmaker’s third film,  Western, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017 and explores notions of (toxic) masculinity,52 relying on depictions of the intensification of affect in interpersonal relationships rather than on special effects or digital technologies. Complementary to my discussion of The City Below, Longing presents a love triangle as the focal point of its story to call into question the stability of mononormativity. However, the film does not suggest that the affair between the two protagonists provides an escape from conventional relationality; rather, it encourages viewers to consider the potential of a sexual and romantic entanglement outside of the husband-wife dyad. Without explicitly showing much of the physical intimacy, especially between the lovers Markus and Rose, the film nonetheless provokes the audience to imagine that the affair substantiates the kinds of gestures and moments of connection that the marriage between Markus and Ella appears to lack without deeming the latter a failure or the cause of unhappiness. Longing tells the story of metal worker Markus who lives a rather unexceptional but devoted, blissful life with his wife in the small town of Zühlen, where he is also a member of the local volunteer firefighters. Shortly after he is the first person to arrive at the scene of a suicide, which shakes him to the core, he leaves for a training weekend. After a night of heavy drinking with colleague firefighters, Markus wakes up in Rose’s apartment, unable to remember anything that happened the previous night. Although not explicitly articulated, Rose’s shy smile at the breakfast table suggests that they had sex. Markus spends the entire weekend with Rose (even attending a family birthday celebration), appearing to be seamlessly integrated into her daily life. When he returns home, Ella is at the door embracing him and articulating her desire and longing for him, which culminates in the sequence of her demanding that Markus sleep with her (discussed briefly at the outset of this book). Markus goes back to see Rose a few times. During his last visit, he wants to break off their relationship, but when they talk on the balcony of his hotel room, Rose falls off and has to be taken to the hospital. Disturbed by this event, Markus goes back to Ella and

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confesses his affair. The film ends with Ella having left him and Markus attempting to commit suicide with a shotgun, but viewers never find out whether he was successful. The open-endedness with which the film closes, much like its in medias res beginning, is not only a typical feature of the cinema of the Berlin School but it also contributes to the construction of a particular film aesthetics. Baer discusses Longing in the context of the home film or homeland film [Heimatfilm] and interrogates how Grisebach’s film includes key features of the genre while also disrupting it. This crucial element of affirming and destabilizing generic conventions informs the analysis of not only Baer but also of Abel and Leila Mukhida, respectively. The three scholars foreground the ways in which the film represents events in order to create a type of observational cinema that, in the words of Baer, calls into question viewers’ “perception of the reality (and truth) it seemingly represents.”53 Mukhida and Baer both discuss the depiction of violence and its impact on the protagonists and highlight the fact that the unique form of the film, along with its themes, constructs a narrative set within a filmic world that, to again echo Baser, focuses on “ordinary lives and average settings and its commitment to realism.”54 Complementary to the scholarship that focuses on what Abel calls “representational realism”55 and what Baer describes as depictions of “flexible sexuality” and a critique of heterosexuality,56 which are typically linked to identity politics, I analyze the relational and socio-cultural expectations of what counts as proper intimate coupling. Through this shift, I undertake a correction to Baer’s reading as all three characters engage exclusively in heterosexual acts and gestures and do not question or make their sexuality legible as flexible. Instead, I argue that the film destablizes the dominant status of mono- and heteronormativity. I hone in on Longing’s portrayal of “nonidealized forms of intimacy as an integral component of ordinary life,”57 as Baer suggests, and attend to the tenuous status of heternomativtity and monogamy and thus undo their hegemonic power. My reading of the two relational configurations between Markus and Ella and Markus and Rose as registering as timely and untimely at various points throughout the film underscores Longing’s temporal complexities, which are connected to both plot development and cinematographic elements. More specifically, I contend that certain aspects of her filmmaking, such as “using a handheld camera, set up either very close or quite far from the characters, and regularly employing long takes – as well as its foregrounding of ambient sound,”58 situate Grisebach within slow cinema and allow for an analysis through the lens of time.

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Foregrounding instances of untimeliness, I show in what follows that the film is a display of normative and nonnormative relationality, or a longing for emotional closeness and corporeal bonds, that calls into question the rigidity of the “good life” and gestures towards the possibility of forging connections beyond the traditional husband-wife dyad. However, Longing is different from Everyone Else and The City Below insofar as it destablizes the centrality of mononormativity through Markus’s affair by suggesting that it exists as a complementary relationship rather than as in opposition to his marriage.59 Regardless, Markus’s encounters with Rose are indeed an affair and not polyamory because Markus keeps them a secret; however, similar to Svenja’s infidelity in The City Below, his relationship with Rose begins as being corporeal rather than emotional. Indeed, since the film withholds any explicit sex scenes between the two, Grisebach constructs a complex affective landscape of romantic intimacy that relies on the absence of coital pleasure on display and the repeated shifts from the one relationship to the other. Markus and Rose’s affair is introduced to viewers through a medium shot of a bed. The audience sees the back of Markus’s head on a pillow and an empty pillow next to him in the background and slightly out of focus.60 He sits up and looks confused because he does not seem to know where he is. A cut to the kitchen reveals Rose, who sits at a table drinking coffee. Rose lets him know that she has to go soon and offers him coffee. Markus and Rose sit at the kitchen table and smile at each other awkwardly. Rose seems embarrassed, and Markus gets ready to leave because the other men are supposedly waiting for him. Another cut shows Markus walking down the street, still in his clothes from the previous night, evoking the popular trope of the “walk of shame.”61 Aside from the awkward tension between the two characters, which underscores their initial disconnect, I argue that Rose and Markus also adhere to different temporal structures of straight and queer time within the story world and register as timely and untimely bodies at different points in the film. Based on the fact that Rose is clothed and drinking coffee at the kitchen table, the audience can assume that she has been awake for a while and carried out some typical morning tasks. She indicates that she is ready to go to work and cannot stay at home for much longer. Despite the unexpected encounter with Markus, she has returned to her regular routines and appears to abide by the kinds of normative timelines that render her timely – namely, she wakes up in time to be able to get dressed and make coffee prior to going to work. Contrary to Rose, Markus registers as an untimely body. The cut to a medium shot of him waking up reveals that he is the only one still in bed. The presence of the empty pillow in close proximity fulfills a

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dual function in this shot: it points to the previous presence of a second person and concomitantly underscores that person’s absence. When he finds Rose in the kitchen and she tells him that she has to leave soon, he responds that he also has to go because the others are already waiting for him. This assertion affirms that his colleagues, much like Rose, are following a temporal rhythm with which he is misaligned. They have moved on and are in line with the weekend program while he is out-of-sync with the schedule. This discrepancy of being in-sync and misaligned with chrononormativity is underscored through Markus’s and Rose’s exchange of looks and smiles, which makes visible not only their lack of connection – while the one appears awkward and flustered, the other appears perplexed and confused – at this point in the film but also their misalignment as untimely bodies. Indeed, Rose smiles in a way that suggests she is a bit embarrassed and shy about what happened the night before. These actions, although unbeknownst to viewers, inform the present moment in a linear and causal way, and shape her interactions with Markus. Unlike Rose, who remembers the events from the previous night and is able to recall the acts step-by-step, Markus seems clueless as he is unable to reconstruct the events of the past or make any sense of the particular chronology of the previous night. Unable to assertain what happened, he is stuck in the present, which resembles a vacuum because it is not attached to a time prior to this moment. It is precisely the (affective) misalignment of the two figures and the combination of medium and close-up shots and the frequent cuts that generate the sequence’s untimely aesthetics. The initial focus on Markus and his state of disorientation and uncertainty aligns the audience with him and leaves it wondering about the past. Each cut reveals a bit more of Rose’s apartment without offering clarity as to why Markus is there. Even their exchange and the cuts of close-up shots of Rose’s and Markus’s respective faces does not give viewers direct and unambiguous access to the past. Rather, the sequence of cuts requires spectators not only to reconstruct the timeline of the events from the previous night but also to hypothesize what exactly happened. The absolute disconnect between the two bodies is resolved in a subsequent scene when Markus and Rose sit down together in a restaurant and he finally asks her explicitly about the night that he does not remember. Rose does not explicitly say that they slept together, but it is suggested in the way she looks and smiles at him. In this instance, Rose’s non-verbal answer aligns the two bodies and puts them in-sync with one another because they finally share a past to which Rose gives Markus access without articulating exactly what happened.

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This relational bond is affirmed when the film cuts to Markus and Rose saying goodbye. A medium shot shows him stroking her face gently and then they embrace. The film cuts unexpectedly to a truck passing by and then back to the two figures, kissing passionately. The cut from the truck driving by to a medium shot of Markus and Rose returns viewers abruptly to the couple and, in so doing, finally resolves the tangible tension created by the ambiguous gestures and nonverbal cues in relation to the one-night stand and renders the two bodies untimely. This image of the two bodies kissing passionately in the street and illuminated by the passing truck’s headlights concretizes the affair by displaying the two bodies in-sync with one another and offers a sight that the film has been withholding up to this very moment. During this moment of sexual intimacy, they become legible to one another (as well as to the audience) as timely bodies in the present. As they engage in this act of experiencing libidinal pleasure, however, the act itself, which is the corporeal expression of their affective tie, also renders them untimely since it transforms the heretofore suggestive sex act into concrete physical intimacy and signals the rupture of monoheteronormativity. Another instance in the film that simultaneously affirms and calls into question the hegemonic status of monoheteronormativity is Markus’s presence at Rose’s family barbeque. Instead of going out with his colleagues, he lies about his plan for the day. A cut takes viewers to a backyard, where Rose’s extended family is getting together to enjoy the nice weather and drink and eat. It is unclear when Markus showed up and how he was introduced since he sits at the table with everybody else as if he is part of the family. When they all eat and Rose offers to go inside to get some napkins for everyone, Markus follows her. A cut to a medium shot reveals the two of them looking at each other before beginning to kiss. Another cut shows them on a bed, presumably inside the house, still semi-clothed. The two figures are lying there, looking at each other, until Rose breaks the silence and says, “Tomorrow everything will seem like a dream,”62 to which Markus does not respond. A subsequent cut moves time ahead swiftly to the next day when the firetruck drops Markus off in front of his house in Zühlen. In this sequence, their kisses, followed by Rose’s statement, can be read as an extension and, concomitantly, as a reversal of the earlier scene. While the two adults talk first and then kiss in the previous instance, they do the exact opposite in the latter sequence, which reflects their intentions and expectations to behave like proper, normative subjects. If the corporeal closeness in the first instance visualizes the beginning of their affair, Rose’s observation after they kiss signals an awareness

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of an end, manifesting a teleological arc. Indeed, as the weekend is coming to a close (and the final cut that returns Markus to Zühlen solidifies this end point), their affair is also nearing its end and will be recognizable as a fantasy retroactively when she looks back at the time with Markus once the weekend is over. In this way, she seems to accentuate a cruelly optimistc yearning in the present moment that foregrounds it as the only realm of possibility, while the future does not hold the potential for them to be together. The two figures are both untimely bodies given that Rose clearly articulates an awareness of a linear timeline and the end of their relational bond. She understands that their relationship is bound to the present moment and requires the two of them to be in-sync in the now in order to share intimate moments. However, their actions also render the two bodies untimely as they have turned towards each other (visualized through their kisses and their position on the bed; see figure  2.563) and away from those individuals and structures that materialize the dictates of monoheteronormativity such as Ella and her extended family and friends. While the training weekend allows Markus to establish a bond with Rose and to become untimely for a brief period of time, his return home terminates the affair and centres Ella in his field of vision and, more important, underscores that Markus occupies hers. After a day of work once Markus is back from the the weekend with Rose, they sit at the dinner table in their house and reflect on the fact that they had a “nice day.”64 Unlike the previous scene, in which Markus and Rose sit at the table together to talk, in this scene Markus and Ella’s dinner table constructs a setting that allows for the two to come together and creates a feeling of togetherness. Indeed, tables, and in particular dinner tables, Sara Ahmed reminds her readers, can function as objects that affect a person’s orientation beyond one’s spatial location: they reveal how bodies are raced and gendered and are expected to have a heterosexual orientation.65 In the case of Markus and Ella, the dinner table matters insofar as it is meant to affirm their orientedness towards one another and thus reposition their monoheteronormative dyadic structure, placing it at the centre of their lifeworld. As the two bodies sit and connect in the present moment by reminiscing about their daily tasks, they confirm their status as timely bodies who abide by those temporal rhythms that govern their marriage. However, Ella’s comment about their relationship emphasizes that there is a disconnect in how they relate to one another. She tells Markus, “I have to think of you so often. Of us,”66 and she verbalizes the desire to

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Figure 2.5 Rose and Markus lying in bed together.

experience intimacy differently with him. Ella explains that she imagines things that they do not do, such as looking at each other while having sex, but Markus does not reply and looks away, seemingly thinking about something else. This lack of any verbal or explicit nonverbal reaction in response to her wishes highlights his detachment from her. While Ella explicitly articulates her desire for closeness and a bond that connects them when having sex, Markus causes the conversation to stall or halt. While their previous conversation about their daily tasks brought them together, this one does not register as an exchange. Rather, Ella’s statements become utterances of her fantasy of the “good life” to which Markus does not respond at all. His inability or unwillingness to connect and to affirm her desire for monoheteronormativity ultimately renders this couple untimely. Indeed, it is his silence and impassivity (much like the reactions of Chris and Gitti in Everyone Else) that rupture the tie, which Ella had hoped to create through her honesty and openness, and that prevent Ella and Markus from generating the connection for which the former so desperately yearns. At several points throught the film, Markus’s lack of reaction to Ella’s explicit reference to the sex that they experienced the night before underscores their misalignment and failure to forge the kind of intimate bond she hopes to create. While she tells him that she keeps thinking about their night together, he does not respond to her; instead, he announces that he has to go and be alone, but he does not know (or tell Ella) where he intends to go.67 When Markus puts on his coat, the film

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cuts to a close-up shot of his bag and then back to Ella looking at the bag. As he is about to leave, Ella articulates the shift she has observed in him, “Somehow at night you‘re totally different from during the day. I love you.” His response is, “I love you so much,”68 and then he turns around and walks away. A subsequent cut shows Markus’s truck moving away from the house and down the street. There is an initial (affective) disconnect between the two protagonists when Ella brings up their sex, which results from their respective attachment and detachment from linear timelines and normative rhythms and renders Ella and Markus untimely bodies. Ella’s reference to the previous night constructs a telos of intimacy in which the coital pleasure of the past informs the present. It appears to generate a particular affective response in Ella that fuels her sense of happiness in the now based on what happened before and constructs her as a timely body. Contrary to Ella’s effusive display of affect, Markus does not engage with her and appears impassive. While Ella desires to reminisce about the past night and their sexual encounter, Markus’s response does not continue along the trajectory that she establishes. Indeed, his announcement of having to leave to be alone ruptures not only the affective tie that Ella was hoping to create but also the temporal arc that connects the night of pleasure to the next day. This disconnect and Markus’s wish to be alone destabilize their bond and render him untimely, detached from the scene of maritial bliss. This disengagement is verbalized by Ella’s vague observation of Markus’s change of attitude and/or behaviour towards her. Although her statement is phrased in such a way that it does not reveal exactly what she means or what those differences involve, it nonetheless underscores the schism between her impression of her husband at different moments in time. To her, his actions change in ways that affect how they relate to one another and shape their life as a couple: their repeatedly transforming relationship indicates an oscillation of being timely and untimely. In fact, Ella’s utterance withholds from Markus and the audience a clear sense of which type of relational bond she enjoys and prefers, and whether his behaviour aligns with her cruelly optimistic yearning for a certain display of affection and coupledom. In this sequence, the film’s editing and cinematography underscore the misalignment of the two filmic figures and aid in the construction of its untimely aesthetics. It opens with a close-up shot, with the camera located at shoulder height and facing Ella, who is positioned in the right half of the frame. Markus faces her so that the audience sees the back of his head, which is in the left half of the frame. After Ella’s

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utterance, the camera cuts to a reverse shot to make visible Markus’s reaction to her statement. Another cut back to her reveals a change in affect from happy and excited to pensive and somewhat anxious. A cut back to Markus focuses on his response, and the camera stays with him even though Ella inquires where he is going. His response follows a cut back to Ella to display her facial expression in response to his assertion. This shot and reverse shot pattern with the camera close-up is repeated when they say goodbye and they both declare their love for one another. Then Markus turns around and walks slowly out of the frame and out of focus. The final cut to a twenty-second long shot of the street depicts Markus driving off in his truck. It is precisely this arrangement of back-and-forth shots to the final cut that initially sets up a linear and consecutive progression of time and then ruptures it by cutting from the interaction to Markus’s truck driving down the street and, thus, determines the sequence’s untimeliness. Indeed, the emphasis during the conversation is on the two characters talking to one another and the sequentiality of their exchange, which contributes to the timely aesthetics of the sequence. It is, however, Markus’s departure and the abrupt cut to the long shot of the road that creates a temporal split, and the untimeliness of the sequence prevents viewers from being able to continue the narrative arc from before. The cut visually and temporally separates Markus from the conversaton and declaration of love between the two characters and transports the audience away from their time of togetherness to follow Markus in his pursuit of his individual desires. This quest leads him back to Rose to see her one last time and to end the affair permanently. When he brings her back to the hotel room he has rented and they initially neither kiss nor touch each other, she observes, “You’re so far away.”69 This observation moves the two figures – literally and figuratively – since they embrace and Rose begins to cry. Rose leads him outside where she sits down on the edge of the balcony and asks Markus what he plans to do the next day. He responds that he intends to build a fence and a gate – although it is unclear whether he will do this at his own house or somewhere else – and then adds that they “must not see each other again. This is the last time [they]’ll see each other.”70 Rose does not respond to his declaration of the end of their relationship but, rather, inquires if he will stay with her that night, and he agrees. Then she asks if they can see each other again. Markus shrugs, says her name, and embraces her. However, this embrace ends suddenly and unexpectedly when Rose falls off the balcony.

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Throughout this sequence, Markus remains in a state of untimeliness, oscillating between wanting to terminate the affair and return to his monoheteronormative relationship with his wife (and thus become timely [again]) and his desire to continue being with Rose (which renders him untimely). On the one hand, he clearly articulates his intention and, therefore, the temporal limits of their affair in the present. While they have shared physical intimacy, he tells her that this time of togetherness is over and does not extend into the future: there is no possibility for the perpetuation of Rose’s understanding of the “good life” and of being with Markus in the then. On the other hand, he agrees to spend one more night with Rose and answers her question with two non-verbal, ambiguous bodily gestures rather than with a firm verbal statement. These actions appear to indicate to Rose (and the audience) that he seems unsure of his initial assertion about the end of their affair. He is unable to end their relationship for good in the present moment and postpones the final goodbye without clarifying the exact point in time that marks the end of their time, deferring their breakup into an indeterminate future. Despite this vagueness, it is ultimately Rose’s fall that terminates their relationship in an abrupt way as she does not want to see Markus at the hospital and does not allow for them to become untimely bodies. Rejected by Rose, Markus returns home to Ella and his life in Zühlen. However, this return does not offer the potential for a rekindling of their bond; rather, Markus has to face the fact that Ella has left him and their shared home because she could not live with his infidelity. When he finds her to talk to her, he says: “Please, don’t leave me alone. I didn’t want to hurt you.”71 Ella responds by asking how Rose is doing before saying: “I never thought I’d have feelings like this for you.”72 Then the film cuts to the next scene of Markus working in his shop. With regard to this sequence, which is the last one that depicts the couple together before Markus’s suicide, I argue that Ella’s statement is ambiguous and allows for a reading of her body as no longer timely. She articulates the magnitude and intensity of her affective landscape (“feelings like this”) but it is unclear whether she is referring to her feelings of love for Markus or her mistrust of him – that is, whether she is referring to a love that she felt for him in the past prior to the disclosure of his affair with Rose or to the shift towards disappointment and unhappiness that is shaping her emotional makeup in the present. Regardless of what point in time and affective state Ella addresses with her comment, the crucial factor is the articulation of a process, or a

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change of condition, that has caused her to abandon the “good life” she has built (with Markus). She has turned away from the marriage and the family home, which are both emblems of monoheteronormativity that render her a timely body. This ambiguity of Ella’s final comment is reminiscent of Svenja’s final words in The City Below: “It’s begun.” However, Longing does not end in heterosexual intimacy and a rehearsal of mononormative coupledom; rather, the open-endedness of Grisebach’s film suggests that the traditional husband/wife dyad is no longer a stable and enduring structure that guarantees domestic bliss. Indeed, the film attests to ways in which nonnormative forms of relationality call into question monoheteronormative coupling, but it does not provide a happy ending for any of the filmic figures. This being the case, Longing can be understood as a commentary on the cruelly optimistic desires that are not generative of the kind of conventional “good life” that any of the three protagonists envision in the film. In sum, Everyone Else, The City Below, and Longing evince how the notion of untimeliness as it pertains to filmic figures, relational configurations, and cinematographic choices foregrounds the ways in which mononormative configurations of the heterosexual dyad are destabilized and shattered. Looking specifically at coupled relationality and intimacy, I propose that each film not only articulates a desire for nonmononormativity and a rupture of traditional hegemonic structures but also emphasizes how the protagonists are unable to escape normativity entirely. Indeed, moments of being in-sync and out-of-sync with chrononormative temporal patterns and structures highlight that normative and queer figurations exist side by side and often even concomitantly in the films examined. The filmic figures in Everyone Else, The City Below, and Longing underscore how alternative ways of coming and being together are temporarily possible. However, each film makes clear that possibilities of escape, such as casual sex or a one-night stand, are only a brief a detour that ultimately returns the figures to traditional modes of relationality and intimacy. Given this restoration and conservation of norms, all three films are evidence of shifts in the socio-cultural attitudes in German society in the first decade and first half of the second decade of the twenty-first century with regard to what relationship formations are deemed viable options for intimacy and conviviality. Released within a window of eight years – 2006 to 2014 – the films discussed in this chapter serve as a

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commentary on the exploration of alternative modes of being together, but they do not resolve the hegemonc primacy of monoheteronormativity, dictating which subjects are understood as proper. This being the case, Everyone Else, The City Below, and Longing demand viewer participation and encourage viewers to critically interrogate their own investment in the hegemonic socio-cultural structures that reinforce monoheteronormativity. This examination of particular formations of coupledom is continued in the next chapter, where I emphasize the normative familial configuration of parents and child(ren). Thinking more specifically of the role of the child and its embeddedness in socio-cultural narratives of progress and teleology, chapter 3 takes a close look at reproductive futurism as a mode of being timely and in-sync with chrononormativity while, at the same time, tempos and instances of untimeliness come to the fore, enabling incompleteness and impassivity to destabilize and even completely rupture family lives. In other words, I seeks to unpack what is at stake when the nuclear family unit is in a state of arrested development, not quite falling apart but also not intact.

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Of Homes and Families Stifled Construction Projects and the Crumbling of the Normative Family

Unfinished houses – newly built or renovated old ones – with plasticcovered door frames and interior structures, such as stair cases or large sheets of plastic stapled onto window frames to cover the empty space where the old windows were taken out, mark the mise-en-scène in Köhler’s Windows on Monday and Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment.1 They can be seen as both “stripped down and utterly inhospitable” and as the realm of growth and nurturing of the prototypical nuclear family,2 and they are indicative of ongoing construction processes and renovation projects of the home as well as shifts and changes in the home (and the family who inhabits it). In other words, the films present transformations of domestic spaces, which I link to formational modifications of the nuclear family unit exemplified by the heterosexual couple and their chid(ren). These changes indicate a state of being in progress without necessarily suggesting movement or even improvement. Thus, these two Berlin School films destabilize narratives of advancement and betterment – of the home and the family. Remodelling, redoing, and restructuring of the home is most often linked to processes of planning, sketching, revising, and editing, followed by implementation and execution for the sake of leaving behind past configurations and structures and of creating something new, better, more functional, of reshaping one’s current reality into an upgraded and enhanced version in the future. House renovations and home improvement projects are thus tightly coupled with understandings of and investments in teleology and an unfolding of time in a linear, straight-forward fashion that has completion as its outcome. This temporal progression is underscored by the films’ titles, which hint at the centrality of time in and for both films. While Windows on Monday points to a day that lies ahead in the then and is future-oriented,

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This Very Moment suggests that its focus is on the now of the present moment. Seemingly invested in teleology and progress, these films, however, show that delays occur, timelines need readjustment, and projects come to a complete halt, and they encourage viewers to ponder what happens when progress is stifled and processes do not unravel as outlined according to a preconceived plan. In order to attend to these questions, I take a cue from Baer’s interrogation of the “genre of the Beziehungskömodie [or romantic comedy as it] charts the transformation in family and caregiving structures and notions of intimacy” in order to examine the crumbling of the heteronormative family unit in Windows on Monday and This Very Moment and the attendant depiction of stifled or incomplete home improvement projects.3 Complementary to Baer’s focus on the impact of neoliberalism on the failing family and nonnormative sexuality, I examine the portrayal of shift and changes, or rather the lack thereof, and propose that the films are evidence of how notions of renovation and remodelling are linked to temporal structures as well as to their disruption. In tandem with examining the depicted home improvement projects, the subsequent analyses of the two films seek to unveil what bodies register as untimely and which (familial) structures are emblematic of teleologies of social progress and which ones defy those temporal norms. Underscoring precisely this relationship between (hetero)familiality and temporality, Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) emphasizes that notions about the future are tied to society’s defence of the well-being of children. The all-pervasive figure of the child, according to Edelman, is constructed in the public eye as in need of protection and stands in for, or helps to construct, the image of the Child, whose idealized innocence and “value [are] so unquestioned, because so obviously unquestionable,”4 and thus written with a capital letter. Based on this understanding, one cannot be invested in anything but the defence of children and the protection of their future; or, phrased slightly differently, children come to stand in for the future, they are the embodiment of the possibility of a future. This particular vision is embedded in a kind of logics that Edelman terms “reproductive futurism”: that is, a logics that relies on the “absolute privilege of heteronormativity,” and one that, as a consequence, renders queerness impossible because it is always, from the start, nonreproductive and thus antisocial and future-negating.5 In this vein, children signify the possibility of a future while the queer subject is positioned in direct opposition and as a threat to the child/Child.

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Leaning on Edelman’s theorization of reproductive futurism, this  chapter moves from the monoheteronormative couple of the previous chapter to the family unit and investigates how untimeliness helps readers understand how the ongoing remodelling plans slow down, reveal failures, and come to a halt entirely, abandoning and thus destabilizing normative time and embracing queer time. By depicting protagonists that repeatedly shift between being in-sync and out-of-sync with tempos and rhythms of straight time as they find themselves in the midst of their respective renovation projects, they become untimely bodies. This shift away from chrononormativity is emphasized through the construction and negotiation of the protagonists’ subjectivity and relationality, and the crumbling of the normative family visualized in Köhler’s and Hochhäusler’s films. Indeed, the individuals in Windows on Monday and This Very Moment develop alternative tempos, display an investment in the “good life,” and forge relationships with others that do not always necessarily obey traditional notions of progress and (individual) thriving. Both Windows on Monday and This Very Moment depict characters who embody a sense of emotional detachment from and inability to relate to one another, visualized for the audience through a strained relationship between the parental figures whose attempts to show intimacy and bodily desire for one another not only structure their interactions but also affect the ways in which they connect with their  child/ren. This general sense of tension, dissatisfaction, and exhaustion generates actions and initiates certain changes, but these do not result in any real transformations; rather, some of these gestures and efforts keep the filmic figures stuck, albeit discontentedly, in their respective family lives. This type of disaffection and frustration is reflected in the very homes of these two families and, in particular, in their renovation projects. The houses are portrayed as unfinished, inhospitable, and cool with their uninviting, plastic-covered spaces. Indeed, Windows on Monday underscores this notion with its title, which emphasizes the incompleteness of the construction project since the wrong windows were delivered and the right ones are yet to come, and the family temporarily lives in a house with all its openings covered with plastic tarps in lieu of proper windows. Renovations in the two Berlin School films discussed in this chapter are emblematic of stuckness: they are untimely projects – that is, they are very much about being in the present since any changes are visible and recognizable immediately. This quality of immediacy not only foregrounds the project’s timelinesss but also speaks to neoliberal

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fantasies of (self-)improvement and (self-)optimization. In the case of home improvement, these Berlantian good-life narratives fuel the desire to continuously enhance one’s quality of life, which, in turn, fuels the economy and one’s willingness to invest larger amounts of money into bettering the home. Renovations are, however, also untimely because, as is the case in both Windows on Monday and This Very Moment, they do not seem to ever end (the English titles bring this to the fore even more so than the German onces). This being the case, both films are indicative of how construction sites and unfinished houses appear like ghostly presences that do not give a sense of an intact home – a sentiment that is reflective of the relationships between the various family members despite the protagonists’ attempts to create heterofamilialty and normative intimacy. With this duality created by the untimeliness of the renovations in mind, the projects mirror the crumbling of the nuclear family units. As each step in the renovation takes time and seems to have no end in sight, the family is in a state of arrested development, not quite falling apart but also not intact. The projects are marked by stuckness: the subjects are always present and are “working” on the house (exemplified by Frieder’s attempt to lay down a complex pattern of coloured tiles in Windows on Monday), but there is no explicit time of completion in the future, while a return to the pre-renovation version (and thus the past) is impossible. In an analogous fashion, the family units are portrayed as stuck in the present moment, unable to enact normative patterns and to exhibit proper traditional structures, while the future does not necessarily offer the possibility of the realization of a family unit that embodies and is embedded within socio-cultural heteronormative values and structures. In what follows, I attend to Windows on Monday and This Very Moment to analyze in two separate sections how each film concurrently champions and provides a critique of reproductive futurism despite their respective investments in the logics of the child as the harbinger of the future. By repeatedly portraying the child as the symbol of hope and the possibility of a then and then undoing such a possibility, the films visualize untimeliness by mobilizing teleological progress narratives and advancement as well as misalignment and stuckness on the level of content and form. Attending to these constant shifts, I read these two films as cruelly optimistic examples of how viewers are confronted with depictions of houses and two sets of traditional heteronormative family units – constituted by a father, a mother, and one child in Windows on Monday and by a father, a (step)mother, and two children in This Very

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Moment, respectively – that seem to be almost completed or functioning but, instead, lack a stable foundation and are crumbling. Thus, the narratives of both films feature elements of timeliness that invite viewers’ investment in normative temporal structures and a sense of possibility that is linked to the construction sites of the respective family homes and the notion of reproductive futurity embodied by the child(ren). By contrast, untimeliness is exemplified by the paused and postponed completion dates of the projects and the dissolution of familial ties. On the level of form, a variety of aspects, which are emblematic not only of the two films discussed in this chapter but also of many others that are part of Berlin School cinema (and are discussed in this book), contribute to the emergence of untimely aesthetics: exceptionally long shots, the use of a static camera that prevents the audience from connecting with the characters on screen, the incorporation of nonprofessional actors alongside professional ones, and a preference for authentic settings.

Disintegration and Slow Death of the Family in Windows on Monday Attending to a seemingly normative family unit, which includes two adults and one pre-school-aged child, Köhler’s Windows on Monday reveals how the parents are slowly drifting beyond the point at which their relationship can be repaired. The narrative centres on Frieder (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and his wife Nina (Isabelle Menke), a doctor, who are in the process of renovating their family home. Although they appear to work together on some of the projects, such as taking down wallpaper or making decisions about the colour scheme of the tiles in the entryway, they do not communicate well and they do not finish any of the tasks together. In fact, one of the two either tends to stop and go off to do something else or is disinterested and nonparticipatory from the start. Indeed, their relationship seems strained and the renovations are slow-going. One evening, instead of picking up their young daughter Charlotte (Amber Bongard) from the house of Frieder’s parents, Nina, who is seemingly pregnant, drives off and goes to her family’s cabin, which is located away from the city in the woods. Upon arrival, she realizes that her brother Christoph (Trystan Wyn Pütter) is already there to make up with his girlfriend on whom he has been repeatedly cheating. Desiring time away from the other two, Nina, without notifying anybody, leaves again on a bike and takes the nearby gondola up the mountain to a local sports resort. Aimlessly wandering around the property, she has a brief encounter with a former tennis

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pro, David Ionesco (Ilie Nastase), who was invited as a special guest to a party. The two hang out in a room and talk, briefly kissing awkwardly, but not much else comes of this encounter, and Nina leaves the hotel. Once she arrives back at the cabin, Frieder and Charlotte are there to convince her to return home with them. Nina refuses to go, and the two leave because Frieder is about to receive the delivery of the new windows. However, the company does not have the type of wood that the family ordered, so Frieder rejects the windows and instead puts up a plastic tarp to seal the house from the outdoors. With Nina gone, he starts an affair with Maria (Ursula Renneke), a former girlfriend, who is now Charlotte’s preschool teacher. When Nina finally returns to the house without any explanation, the two adults attempt to rescue their marriage one last time. However, even this final attempt fails, emphasized by an awkward and unsuccessful effort to create a moment of physical intimacy in the back of their car. This lack of sexual satisfaction (or, rather, the incompleteness of the sexual act) for both Frieder and Nina depicted in the film’s final sequence is what, throughout Windows on Monday, appears to be a determining and reccuring factor contributing to the family unit’s moments of failure. The home is in a state of arrest, without any indication of when or how the relationships and house projects will be resolved or finalized. Just as neither one of the characters seems to experience sexual pleasure or satisfaction in the car, so Nina’s looming pregnancy at the beginning of the film is never clarified, the onset of her period does not occur, and the couple’s separation is never explicitly depicted. Likewise, the old wall paper is never completely removed, the tiles in the hallway of the house are never properly laid down, and the windows never arrive. Addressing the notion of upheaval, flux, and the breakdown of rigid boundaries in the film, Michael Sicinski underscores that “the lack of windows in Nina’s house serves as a structural anomaly – a disruption of the very public/private divisions on which bourgeois European society is established. But it also offers a kind of invitation, allowing Nina (and to some extent Köhler) the freedom to wander outside the family home in order to explore alternative spatial relationships.”6 Indeed, the film seems to suggest that one such alternative to the home is the hotel, where Nina stays and meets David. Hotels and hotel-like places start playing a significant role for bourgeois authors in modernity, enabling them to stage realms that feature “alternative or counter project to the bourgeois home,”7 and the hotel in early twentieth-century literature is linked to the emancipation of young women.

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While the hotel in Windows on Monday serves the similar function of enabling Nina to escape her lifeworld and function outside of the mandates of the traditional family by being a proper wife, mother, and sister to the other figures in the film, I want to foreground the importance of the notion of the intact middle-class home, which, following the Second World War, rests on the rise of the single-family home as a marker of bourgeois arrival and of forgetting the past.8 However, in Köhler’s film this understanding of the home as a symbol of socio-economic status, and of its inhabitants as performing particular gendered and sexualized familial roles, is destabilized due to the renovation projects. Drawing attention to the house’s state of incompleteness allows me to shift the analytic focus to time. This approach also closely aligns my readings of Windows on Monday with James Quandt’s comparative study of Köhler’s film and the use of time and Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, underscoring that the latter, much like Köhler and many of the filmmakers of the Berlin School, “treats time as malleable, flowing rather than fixed and linear,” and creates films that suggest a “co-existence of various times,”9 which is what I propose with my concept of untimeliness. Leaning on Quandt’s observation of the malleability of time, I argue that, in Köhler’s film, things seem to start and point towards a telos and a sense of timeliness, which is then undone by untimeliness caused by instances of incompleteness, stagnation, halting, and deferral. I read the film as indicative of a mode of untimeliness that appears to suggest the slow disintegration of the normative family but not its complete rupture; that underscores an investment in reproductive futurism based on Charlotte’s presence and Nina’s potential pregnancy but not  the protection of the child given the woman’s actions; that implies the construction of a family home but not its realization. In other words, Windows on Monday is filled with instances when relationships are on the brink of falling apart and when renovation projects come to a halt – that is, moments that do not point to the possibility of a future but do not completely foreclose one either. This being the case, the film encourages viewers to develop a cruelly optimistic yearning for normative structures and teleological trajectories that never come to fruition and that remain forever out of reach. Just as the windows never get installed because the company does not deliver the frames in the particular wood that Frieder wants, so a decision on the colour patterns of the tiles in the hallway is never made. Although the film starts with the family bringing home the tiles together and Frieder arranging them that same day, he is unable

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to complete the project because he struggles with the pattern. However, the endeavour, which started out as involving the entire family and thus communicating a sense of unity, turns quickly into Frieder’s solo venture. Neither Charlotte nor Nina show an interest in the tiles, which can be understood as a synecdoche for the entire house and the nuclear family unit. Read in this way, Charlotte’s remark to “put a rug there” and Nina’s complete disinterest in pattern or colour scheme signal a sense of indifference towards Frieder’s attempt to work on and improve the family.10 Their unhelpful comment and impassivity set Frieder back, slow him down, and inhibit the completion of the task. Indeed, the stack of tiles as well as the unfinished floor serve as reminders of a stifled project that he is eager to complete but cannot. While Frieder’s investment in progress and the finalization of the task render him and his desires timely, the other two figures complicate this realization. Indeed, Charlotte and Nina deter his goal and cause him to become untimely. As he struggles between desiring the completion of the project and experiencing a sense of disconnectedness from Charlotte and Nina, Frieder can best be read as an untimely body, the only member who is invested in improving the home for the family but who is ultimately unable to do so. He is invested in a good-life fantasy that does not come true. This one-sided interest in home and family, or, rather, Nina’s complete lack of investment in sharing and communicating, comes to the fore again when the two adults work on the house, taking down the old wallpaper in the hallway, which appears to be a tedious and laborious endeavour. A long shot portrays the two figures on either side of the hallway, Nina kneeling and Frieder standing facing the wall on which they are working (see figure 3.1). Although they are performing the same task at the same time, the position of their bodies (turned away from each rather rather than working on the same side) and the brief interaction underscores the division between the two. When Frieder asks about Charlotte, Nina tells him that his parents took the daughter with them, to which he responds in an irritated manner, “you are on vacation for once and you send the child off right away.”11 They continue with their task and the audience bears witness to their work for over a minute, until the light goes out because their scraping blows a fuse. Frieder fixes the issue and, once the light is back on, encourages Nina to keep working. However, Nina takes a sip from a water bottle and walks upstairs without any explanation. Frieder looks confused and does not understand why she did not finish the wall on which she was working.

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Figure 3.1 Frieder and Nina scraping wallpaper off the hallway walls.

When Nina appears again, dressed in jeans and a sweater, she announces that she is going to pick up Charlotte. Frieder objects because he thinks it is too late, but Nina tells him that she is doing what he wanted. A cut moves time along and shows Nina arriving at the grandparental house, where a long shot displays her standing in front of the large living-room window, looking inside where Charlotte is watching TV. Pausing there for about twenty seconds, Nina then turns around and walks back to the car, gets in, and drives away. When her cell phone rings, she answers and it becomes clear that it is Frieder, who is asking her questions with which she does not engage until she ends the conversation with, “I won’t come back.”12 In this sequence, Nina’s actions establish her position as an untimely body by setting up a clear direction and telos with her initial impulse to pick up Charlotte and then by undoing it towards the end when she decides both not to complete the task of picking up Charlotte and not to return home. Announcing to Frieder that she will get the child and fulfill his wish, she encourages viewers to envision a particular future narrative that relies on her present actions and assertions. This announcement entices the audience to read her as a timely body, whose existence is linked to the presence of the child within the realm of the family home. Indeed, it is Frieder who criticizes Nina for sending the  girl away instead of having her around and who, in articulating his irritation with Nina, establishes a connection between the nuclear family and the home. As viewers witness the woman drive away to get

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Charlotte, they expect her to do as she says and for a linear narrative to unfold. With no indication of shifts or changes at the point of Nina’s departure, the audience is made to understand the filmic figures as timely bodies whose primary investment is the normative family unit and their home. However, Nina’s unexpected decision to leave the child behind and her refusal to return to Frieder and the family home, without giving a clear indication of where she is headed or what she plans to do, render her untimely. Unable or unwilling to complete the task she set out to do – getting the child and reuniting the family – Nina unhinges herself from the socio-cultural traditional assumptions of heteronormative motherhood and partnership. She has decided to abandon the conventional life, at least temporarily, and does not provide any indication as to what she intends to do next. This change of course of action disrupts the audience’s projected narrative and forces it to pause and hang suspended without being able to envision a future. Indeed, viewers find themselves cruelly optimistically yearning for Nina to change her mind any minute, to go back to Charlotte and, by extension, the normative family unit, and thus to be reintegrated into the normative temporal logics of the child-raising heterosexual nuclear family unit and so embrace her status as a timely body within the hegemonic construct of familial relationality. Another example that highlights incompleteness and underscores Nina’s status as an untimely body in Windows on Monday is a set of two related sequences that occur after the woman returns from spending time at the hotel. The first one depicts her conversation with Frieder when he and Charlotte show up at the cabin to find out what is going on with Nina, and the second depicts the delivery of the wrong windows and Frieder’s first sexual encounter with Maria. When Frieder confronts Nina outside the cabin and asks her why she decided to leave without talking to him or anyone else, she does not respond verbally but, instead, turns away from him and starts walking up the stairs. Not knowing how to react, he resorts to violent measures, grabs her arm, and pulls her down the steps, shouting, “I am talking to you! Are you drunk?”13 She confirms his suspicion and shrugs when he inquires whether she is not pregnant after all. Declaring that she cannot drive the car back, Nina makes clear that she wants to stay without Frieder and Charlotte. He packs the car, and, once he has gathered the last bags, he turns to Nina one last time to ask her if he bores her. Her answer is a quick and straightforward  – “yes”  – and then she walks off. Frieder, completely enraged, drops the bags and picks up the bicycle Nina took to escape

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and smashes it against a tree three times. Once he is done, he throws the object to the ground, walks back to the car, gets in, and drives off without a word or gesture of goodbye to Nina. A subsequent cut to the house moves time along to what is most likely the next day and shows workers removing the windows and Frieder discussing the type of frame with the company owner. While the latter does not understand why Frieder insists on Oregon pine, he stops the project since the windows that he delivered cannot be installed. Another cut moves the audience inside the house with all the windows covered with white tarp. Frieder walks around naked, checks on Charlotte who is sleeping in her room, and then passes the stack of tiles. He stops and looks at the unfinished project and the stack that is still sitting on the steps. A voice off-screen, presumably from the other room, inquires if she – that is, Charlotte – is asleep. A cut to a medium shot of the bed depicts Frieder and Maria naked, talking about their past and revealing to the audience that they had been in a relationship. In the first sequence, much like in earlier parts of the film, untimeliness is linked to incompleteness and, in this particular case, to the incomplete conversation between Frieder and Nina due to the latter’s dismissive reactions and lack of willingness to engage with the former. While Frieder initially tries to understand her behaviour, Nina does not reciprocate his invitation to have a productive and informative exchange. Throughout the entire sequence, she is unresponsive, does not allow for any conversation to emerge, and appears distant and affectively detached. Although it is unclear whether she is sincere about her answers or whether her reactions are affected by her self-declared state of inebriation, Nina either refuses to answer Frieder’s questions or responds in a manner that is direct and hurtfully honest. These two modes of engagement with one another emphasize a sense of incompleteness in their conversation in that particular moment and in their severed relationship more broadly. And, when considered from the lens of temporality, they point to the crumbling foundation of their marriage and the slow death of their relationship. Taking Berlant’s notion of “slow death,” which refers to the “physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence,” and applying it to the microcosm of the family, I propose that slow death in this section points to the “incoherence, distractedness, and habituation from deliberate and deliberative activity, as they are all involved in the reproduction of predictable life.”14 Indeed, the couple’s actions and reactions in this sequence and throughout the entire film construct anything but a “predictable life.”

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This incoherency is reflected in many conversations and back and forths between the two adults in this sequence and throughout the film. The failed attempts at communicating “properly” and effectively are evocative of Sianne Ngai’s notion of “stuplimity” and its emphasis on “language that threatens the limits of the self by challenging its ability to respond – temporarily immobilizing the addressee.”15 This inability of the self to communicate, and thus rendering a response for the other person improbably or impossible, appears to characterize the exchanges between Nina and Frieder. In this instance, Frieder’s questions and the expectation of receiving an answer underline his investment in following a proper sequential and timely mode of communication, but these are not shared by Nina. While she appears impassive and unwilling to engage, he indicates a clear intention of moving forward, of moving on by moving things along. And he wants her to move on with him – so much so that his violent outburst is emblematic of his desperate need to return Nina to her proper point in line. His physical reaction to her impassivity seems to bring her back to his point of departure; however, in eliciting the desired reaction from his wife, he only succeeds in having her emphasize her disinterest in him and in the familial unit that he represents, which she does when she divulges that she is drunk. Indeed, Frieder’s remark about her possible pregnancy reminds Nina and the audience of their past sexual encounters (confirmed by Nina when she tells her brother that they are still doing it occasionally) and the role that heterosexual reproduction and the child play in the couple’s projection of a future. While Frieder is invested in registering as a timely body who is oriented towards a then by means of following normative, linear patterns of communication, Nina does not engage in any of his topics so as to have a back-and-forth dialogic exchange, and her lack of responses stalls the conversation. In fact, she represents what Sara Ahmed might consider a willful subject: an individual who seeks to determine their own way and, in so doing, can stand in opposition to normative structures and thus be perceived as a problem by others.16 Much like Gitti and Svenja in chapter 2 or Nina and Lynn in chapter 4, Nina embraces willfulness in this sequence and is out of line insofar as her actions and inactions force a pause in or a break-down of the adult relationship and render impossible a future built on the well-functioning family and the figure of the child. But it is not clear from the film that Nina is doing these things intentionally. Her unwillingness to participate renders her body untimely because she disrupts the linearity and interaction of a conventional verbal exchange. She appears to have no interest in falling back

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in line but, rather, seeks to misalign or break away from keeping the normative familial unit intact. Throughout the sequence, she appears to reflect the type of ambiguity that Ahmed references in her reading of Rosi Braidotti’s theorization of willfulness as the kind of resistance that is linked to willfulness, which does not necessarily point to a “subject who knows how she feels, what she wants, and even who she is.”17 The willful subject, based on this understanding of willfulness, appears to exhibit a misalignment of speech acts and actions. Following Ahmed, Nina’s responses – either no reaction at all or brutal honesty – can be read as a type of not knowing that causes the conversation to stall and renders the communication between the two adults improper and incomplete. Indeed, her way of willfulness does not allow for a bond to (re)emerge and for the future of the couple to be secured; rather, the telos of the relationship is ruptured in the present moment and Nina persists as an untimely body that is disconnected from Frieder and Charlotte. She has turned away from the family unit and does not display any interest in falling back in line. Indeed, her behaviour is out of line and causes her familiar and familial normative past to slowly disintegrate and die while concomitantly leaving her without the prospect of hopes for the future. The cut to the second sequence, during which Frieder walks through the hallway and looks at the unfinished tiled floor, serves as a reminder and affirmation of the desire to create a home for the family, on the one hand, and underscores the reality of the fragmented and broken familial unit, on the other (see figure 3.2). As he stops at the stack of differently coloured, disorganized tiles and looks at it contemplatively, the audience is reminded of the earlier scene in which Frieder brings home the material and attempts to sort it and is thereby encouraged to draw a connection between the blocks and the family unit that inhabits the house (see figure 3.3). However, Frieder does not engage with the tiles, leaves the incomplete renovation project behind, and moves on to the living room where Maria is on the couch naked and waiting for him to return. Given Nina’s absence and the nude woman in the house, it appears that Frieder has moved on  – not only from the tiling project in the hallway but also from the relationship with Nina. This being the case, the dissembled building materials come to stand in for the marriage that has slowly fallen apart because Frieder and Nina were unable to arrange the various pieces in such a way that they aligned and that they were in line. Instead of championing timeliness, Nina left and Frieder started an affair with Maria. Thus, both adults have turned away from

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Figure 3.2 Frieder returning to the tiles at night after sleeping with Marie.

Figure 3.3 Frieder working on the pattern of the tiles.

their familial relationship and a future together and are embracing becoming untimely bodies who have disconnected from the dictates of normative relationality as a married couple with a child. Just as the hallway remains incomplete, so the dyadic unit is ruptured and appears to no longer to exist in its initial constellation. This particular behaviour of turning away from each other and not having a proper conversation is seen again when Frieder returns home after having spent the night at Maria’s apartment and Nina is finally

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Figure 3.4 Frieder on the couch when Nina is talking to him.

back in the house. Frieder, looking exhausted, sits on the couch that is still not unpacked and remains wrapped in plastic, while Nina comes into the living room to talk to him (see figure 3.4). Unlike during previous sequences, this time it is Nina who is turned towards him to engage in a conversation while he is positioned in the right bottom portion of the frame so that viewers only see his upper body. His head and torso are facing forward and are not oriented towards Nina, whose posture, which is slightly bent forward, and gaze, which is directed at Frieder, reveal that she is eager to talk. However, Frieder, without moving and thus showing no sign of reciprocating her intension, continutes to look straight ahead and tells her right away that he was with Maria, to which she responds, “I did not ask.”18 Instead of responding to Nina’s statement or respecting her implicit request not to get more details from him, he adds that he wants to be with Maria and then heads to the bedroom to take a nap, thus ending the conversation between the two. Much like in the previous sequence, complete honesty is paired with a lack of response, creating a situation in which the communication between Frieder and Nina does not establish any sense of connection but is indicative of their ruptured relationship. They are disconnected and their modes of relating to one another, in addition to the content of Frieder’s statements, render them timely and untimely in different ways. Frieder explicitly states that he wants to be with somebody else and, by starting an affair with Maria, clearly establishes temporal markers that signal the endpoint of the marriage with Nina and his desire to move on and orient himself towards having a new relationship and thus

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a shared future with somebody. His distinct articulation of wanting to be with another woman and, thus, his wish to enter a new relationship with Maria affirms Frieder’s investment in socio-cultural conventions of coupledom and clearly divided, linear temporal structures. His desire to create a monoheteronormative relationship with Maria renders him timely. Unlike Nina, who does not want to engage, Frieder voices his determination to turn away from her and to be with Maria because, having not helped to finish any of the projects and by delaying their completion, Nina has turned into a disruptive, untimely force inside the house. To Frieder, Maria has come to embody monoheteronormativity while Nina embodies the affirmation of the slow death of the family. Despite her own desire to escape the familial fold, Nina’s response to her husband’s assertion that he spent the night with another woman suggests that she does not want to know and to be confronted with the fact that Frieder is seeing somebody else. Not asking and thus not having any information would allow Nina to remain in a position of suspension and untimeliness  – that is, in a state of arrest and of being in the marriage without experiencing the intimacies or affect that a marriage engenders. Indeed, Nina’s lack of interest in Frieder’s whereabouts allows her to detach from the linear timeline, in which the present conversation is contingent upon the events of the past night, and affects the next phase of the couple’s relationship. Recalling Berlant’s notion of slow death as the “wearing out” and a “mode[] of incoherence,”19 I argue that the lack of communication, incomplete interactions, and a slowly rupturing connection between Frieder and Nina not only undergirds the decline of their marriage and rupture of their familial bond throughout the film but also shapes the final interaction between the two adults in the last sequence of Windows on Monday. When Nina agrees to accompany Frieder to the funeral of  the neighbour’s son, they show up late at the cemetery and decide not to interrupt the procession. Frieder parks on the side of the small road adjacent to the cemetery and gets out of the van to smoke. When he gets back in the van, Nina is in the back, lying on the mattress, and he decides to join her. Without any exchange of words, they start kissing and he touches and attempts to kiss her breasts, but he then stops and rolls away. Nina proceeds to opens his pants, moves her head to his penis, and tries to perform oral sex on him. He stops her almost immediately, and neither he nor she appears to be aroused by their somewhat awkward actions. The only release from this scene of unease and discomfort, for both the characters and the audience (which has to bear witness to the failed sexual encounter), is the final cut in the film to the rolling credits.

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While I agree with Richardson that this interaction is emblematic of the kind of sex that can be found in many Berlin School films, such as those discussed in chapter 2, and underscores not only the “emotional alienation of the protagonists” but also their “physical alienation,”20 as well as the fact that viewers are forced to watch and sit through the sequences of sex on display, I am more intrigued by how the incompleteness of the act itself (abruptly ended fellatio), in addition to the response it engenders (feelings of awkwardness and alienation), is symptomatic of the slow death of the family unit and  thus of the possibility of a heteronormative future. In other words, I wonder if it is indeed bad sex on display or rather just sex (without any adjectival qualifying modifier) that is the kind of relational or intimate encounter emblematic of the ruptured convivial structure embodied by the recently separated couple and the unfinished house. If it is just sex, then the sex act in the back of the van cannot be anything but incomplete, solidifying the slowly disintegrating relationship and rendering the two bodies untimely. On the one hand, they both attempt to rekindle their relationship through an act of coupling in the present that functions as a bridging element between their shared past and their potential future as partners. In this sense, the sex act reifies their presence in the now as timely bodies who are embedded in the normative familial unit of two heterosexual, monogamous adults with a child. On the other hand, the sex does not affirm the traditional relational patterns of sequentiality that would structure the encounter according to conventional logics of proximity and linearity – that is, it does not culminate in an orgasmic finish that is closely linked to the affirmation or revival of a monogamous, heteronormative relationship. Regardless of whether the attempted oral sex registers as eliciting pleasure for either or both parties, the oral sex act is characterized by its nonprocreative nature, a lack of connection between the two adults, and thus points to their severed sequentially established bond. Existing outside of the logics of normative familial relational structures, they become untimely and find themselves in a holding pattern that does not prescribe any particular direction. The film’s final cut to the credits is exemplary of Windows on Monday’s untimely aesthetics because it ultimately renders it impossible for the audience to know whether there is a chance for the couple to reunite. The Berlin School signature feature of an abrupt cut without any visual or auditory resolution causes viewers to remain in a holding pattern or state of incompleteness. Thus, the audience is stuck in a state of cruelly optimistic yearning for Frieder and Nina to rekindle their

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relationship in order to reunite with Charlotte as a normative family. However, the sequence leading up to the last cut and the cut itself foreclose the very possibility of viewers knowing, and they are left in suspension and with the uncertainty of having borne witness to the slow death of the (hetero)normative family without the final confirmation of its ultimate demise. Similar to the house’s state of incompleteness or unfinished development, the development of the relationsip between the protagonists in Windows on Monday is stunted, and the adults are unable to speak to each other in a manner that suggests a meaningful dialogic exchange. While the film portrays an investment in reproductive futurism and the traditional family unit, it concomitantly destablizes the hegemonic status of these monoheteronormative ideals; instead, the audience has to watch a strained relationship between the parental figures whose attempts to relate on an emotional and physical level fail repeatedly and, ultimately, end in a dissatisfying moment of intimacy. The film underscores that there is no real and sustained transformation and that the figures are stuck in an impasse that does not seem to lead them anywhere, withholding both an optimistic happy ending for the family and a complete breakup.

Broken Family beyond Repair in This Very Moment While a family features prominently in This Very Moment, Hochhäusler’s film, unlike Windows on Monday, does not provide viewers with a rendering of the slow and gradual death of that familial unit, nor, from the very outset, does it allow for the audience to create such a fantasy of the functional family. The film depicts the story of Sylvia (Judith Engel), who, after picking up her elementry-school-aged stepchildren Lea (Sophie Charlotte Conrad) and Konstantin (Leo Bruckmann)  – usually referred to as “Konsti”  – after school to take them to one of the shopping centres located just beyond the Polish border, struggles with the kids’ animosity towards her. Not knowing how to respond to Lea’s defiant behaviour, she stops the car and leaves them beside the road in the middle of nowhere. Afraid to tell her husband Josef (Horst-Günther Marx) what happened, when he comes home she avoids his questions regarding the whereabouts of the children and pretends that everything is fine. When Josef finally realizes that the children are gone, he is willing to do anything to find them. Sylvia, however, appears disinterested in and distant towards his efforts, trying to get him to focus his attention on her rather than on the missing children. While Josef is

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struggling to locate Lea and Konstantin, the children are trying their best to get home. They meet Kuba Lubinski (Miroslaw Baka), a Pole who pretends to help the hungry and thirsty children when in reality he is after the money that the father is willing to pay if his offspring are found. Willing to pay Kuba, the parents follow his instructions and head to Poland to get their children back. Meanwhile, Lea and Konsti escape from Kuba and, yet again, roam around without any food or water, not knowing where to go. Kuba eventually finds them and, after Lea tries to poison him by adding some of the cleaner that is stored in the back of his van to his water while he is driving, he, much like Sylvia at the beginning of the film, stops the car and tells the children to get out and get lost. The film ends with a long take of the two walking down the road, away from Kuba and the camera, until they finally merge with the horizon in the far distance and disappear. This final sequence mirrors the opening of the film, which has been discussed in scholarship mostly with regard to the visual of two children walking down a long country road against the backdrop of an open landscape and a big sky with nothing but light posts lining the street. When considered through the lens of time, however, this striking ending reveals the subtle forces of untimeliness, which affect the protagonists throughout the entire film.21 At the beginning of the film, viewers already find the children walking along the side of the road because Sylvia was too late to pick them up directly from school. It is indeed Sylvia’s tardiness that prevents her from registering as timely and causes Konsti and Lea to leave. Sylvia’s late arrival and the children’s decision not to wait and to leave – to leave on time – prohibits a proper meeting from happening. In other words, the woman’s untimeliness and the children’s desire to be timely do not allow for a traditional familial scene to unfold outside of the school building. The pick-up at school does not happen because Sylvia did not abide by the normative rhythm established by the school’s dismissal time and because Konsti and Lea refused to become untimely and wait for their stepmother. These two mismatched temporal patterns result in the children and the parent being temporally out-of-sync from the very start of the film. Once abandoned by Sylvia in the Polish countryside across the German-Polish border because they have been rude during the car ride (a knee-jerk reaction on Sylvia’s part as she does not know what to do and responds without considering possible repercussions), the children are forced to navigate a new reality, in which they register as untimely without the possibility of returning to familiar normative structures,

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despite the many instances in Poland when people try to integrate them into theirs. This convergence of timeliness and untimeliness, I argue, is indicative of how the family unit in This Very Moment is broken beyond repair from the very beginning and how each scene that follows underscores how modes of becoming in-sync and out-of-sync with normative timelines and patterns renders the filmic bodies untimely. The film is filled with instances of untimeliness – being late, waiting, or postponing for either too long or not long enough  – so that the filmic figures fail to meet (in the literal sense of converging physically as well as in the metaphorical sense of finding common grounds for effective communication). However, many moments also show how Lea and Konsti, as well as Josef and Sylvia, abide by normative timelines and tempos indicative of reproductive futurism and an investment in heterofamiliality underscored by the process of making a home. The children in particular exemplify untimeliness because they become symbols of the possiblity of a then while they also reject or are ejected from these very same rhythms and thus no longer appear to have a future. Additionally, the use of cuts as part of the director’s cinematographic and editing choices emphasizes how the film repeatedly shifting between the story line of the children and the parents’ attempts to retrieve them aids in the construction of the film’s untimely aesthetics and disrupts the creation of a continuous narrative and visual flow as well as a traditional teleological arc. Long shots and takes often evoke the sense in viewers that time is slowing down, while jump cuts and disjointed images seem to move time ahead swiftly, creating the effect that “the audience, rather than the characters in the film, is moved.”22 These particular choices aim at encouraging viewers to engage with the images on screen and then to move beyond them to contemplate their own investment in normative familial structures and the perpetuation of reproductive futurism. This being the case, an emphasis on time as a framework through which to read This Very Moment sheds new light on the relationship between adults and children, the heteronormative family, and the notion of futurity connected to the children, which has been discussed by various scholars predominantly in relation to space. Eric Rentschler underscores that “Hochhäusler’s forest offers neither escape nor recreation” and is a site where “strange things exist and bad things happen.”23 He identifies a focus on the locale of the forest itself and interprets it as a space that is generative of a sense of Unheimlichkeit, an uncanny feeling that emerges out of its being a home-like place that concomitantly engenders peculiar and bizarre affective responses.24 Indeed, since the

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Middle Ages, the forest has been a well-known trope in German literary production and has been tied to the Freudian concept of the uncanny due not only to its familiarity in German history and culture but also to its continuing to be an eerie and ghostly space.25 Relying partially on this understanding of the forest, Jabuk Kazecki foregrounds the Hansel and Gretel theme present in This Very Moment as well as the ways in which the filmmaker emphasizes the differences between Germany and Poland cinematographically.26 Borderland is a “space that offers unique possibilities for a filmmaker” due to Germans’ unfamiliarity with their neighbour.27 In a similar manner, Katrin Polak-Springer’s reading foregrounds spatiality and the creation of dichotomous structures and hierarchies present in the various relationships “between the two spouses, between the siblings, between parents and children, as well as between Germans and Poles in the film.”28 These various power relations within the story, as well as a constantly shifting timeline, locale, and narrative focus, construct a film world in which “the viewer is held suspended between identification with and distanciation from the characters.”29 Kazecki and Polak-Springer pay attention to the family as well as to the figures’ respective locality as important factors to discuss the emergence of hierarchical power structures in the film: they rely on the perpetuation and thus affirmation of normative dichotomies and narratives. While Kazecki’s perpetuation of a narrative that rests on a colonialist project of portraying “Poland as the Wild East,”30 as he states in his conclusion, solidifies the perception of Poland as the frontier and the other (which, in turn, masks the normative aspects of German society and its hegemonic values based on its national, ethnic privilege and socio-economic mobility), Polak-Springer leaves unquestioned the traditional family unit and its reinscription of heteropatriarchal normativity, which is tied to upholding those systems of power that Kazecki interrogates. Thus, both scholars perform analyses that continue to champion modes of relationality that hinge upon the primacy of (hetero)normativity. Indeed, the film’s introduction of its protagonists and their relationships in the opening sequence of the children walking down the road and, in particular, in its distinct formal qualities (long shots, long takes) already signal a sense of brokenness that, at the outset, forecloses the possibility of a functional family. The audience’s first encounter with the children is not linked to a scene of familial bliss but, rather, to one of distance and untimeliness. After walking by the side of the road alone for about a minute and twenty seconds, they get picked up.

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Once inside of the car, the series of medium shots reveals that both the children and the adult express very low to no affect or signs of affection for one another. All three appear distant, and Lea and Konsti confront Sylvia as to why she did not pick them up from school like they had expected her to, and she admits that she was late.31 Although viewers never learn the reason for her lateness, it is the fact that she does not show up on time that causes the three of them not to meet at the right time. Because Sylvia is unable to meet them at the school the two children start walking. This combination of Sylvia’s lateness and Lea and Konsti’s unwillingness to wait causes their eventual encounter to happen much later than it should have done and renders Sylvia untimely. She becomes a body who, although expected at a particular time, was not present at “this very moment” (to reference the film’s title), which was when the children were in need of her, and was thus unable to register as timely; rather, her absence and the children’s decision not to wait highlights the disconnection among the family members. Similar to its portrayal of the children as untimely, This Very Moment features a number of intertextual, intermedial references, ranging from Grimm’s fairy tales to the German translation of a popular French nursery rhyme, in order to construct untimeliness. Through explicit and implicit citations, the audience is reminded of familiar narratives that encourage viewers to anticipate certain characters, story lines, and temporal or teleological structures that affirm and destabilize hegemonic schemata of normative relationality and time. Indeed, the two children who are walking through the forest, lost without their parents, and attempting to return home evoke the popular story of “Hansel and Gretel” as well as the song “Bruder Jakob,” which tells the story of Jakob, who is an untimely body because he sleeps and does not hear the sound of the bells. These distinct references encourage audience members to ponder either their own childhood or their experience as parental figures. The former undertaking returns viewers to their past and animates them to examine what role fairy tales and nursery rhymes played in their lives, making them look back in time and remember their childhood, while the latter, although it might not apply to the entire audience, coaxes many of them to reflect on their own lives as parents or to envision themselves within the normative familial structures of reproductive futurism. In other words, they are made to uphold the central position of the Child as well as of chrononormativity. This disconnect and the construction of untimeliness is further underscored when Sylvia asks Konsti if he knows the song “Bruder

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Jakob.”32 The choice of song itself is linked to time since it is both a short song in the temporal sense and never ending as it is to be sung in a round with all the singers leading “off” from one another, starting in a staggered fashion and at different points in the song. In an attempt to create a familial atmosphere and to forge a connection, Sylvia starts singing and Konsti joins in. However, this moment of bliss is short-lived because Lea interrupts them and asserts that Sylvia is not their mother and therefore does not need to sing with them.33 This harsh statement ends the attempt to bond and interrupts a time of normative familiality, during which the three of them registered as present in the present moment as bodies who are oriented to one another. The unison implied by the song aligns and connects at least Konsti and Sylvia and generates for a brief period of time the sense of a functioning parent-child relationship. Lea’s comment, however, functions as a disruptor and as a force that severs the tie between the other two by articulating what Sylvia is not – namely, their mother, and, although not uttered explicitly, their biological mother. The girl verbalizes the primacy of narratives of biological essentialism linked to parenthood in general and motherhood in particular, which serves as one of the cornerstones for the perpetuation of reproductive futurism, thereby shattering the possibility of familial relationality and a linear telos. Lea’s reminder that Sylvia is not biologically related to them unhinges their relationship from an Edelmanian conceptualization of reproductive futurism since it not only destabilizes the normative course of time, which is based on the existence of a parent-child lineage, to secure their respective familial positions in the now but also forecloses the possibility of a then. Lea’s words render all three bodies in the car untimely and undoes their connectedness in ways that release Sylvia of any nurturing or caregiving responsibilities. This articulation of nonrelationality uttered by Lea is further emphasized by Sylvia’s reaction to the kids’ mockery of her at the end of the same sequence. Continuing being antagonistic, Lea instigates the situation when she kicks the back of Sylvia’s seat and is told to stop. Instead of respecting Sylvia’s wish, she starts repeating Sylvia’s words in a mocking tone of voice, agitating Sylvia while also enticing Konsti to join her and do the same.34 Growing irritated with the children to the point at which she does not know what else to do, Sylvia abruptly stops the car and tells them to get out. A long shot from inside of the car shows Lea and Konsti climbing out of the car on Sylvia’s side and shutting the door. A cut to a medium shot depicts the car’s sideview

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Figure 3.5 Lea and Konsti in the sideview mirror.

mirror in the middle of the frame, through which the audience is able to see the bodies of the children get smaller and smaller as the car drives off (see figure 3.5) until their image is no longer discernable. The following eighteen-second long take forces the audience to watch the car drive off swiftly, leaving the two children standing in the street. While the kids’ mockery is obviously an expression of their dislike of Sylvia and a manifestation of the lack of a bond among the three, these acts and Sylvia’s response have a distinct temporal quality, which renders their bodies untimely. When read through the lens of time, the kids’ verbalizations of ridicule that immediately follow Sylvia’s statements construct a cyclical schema rather than a linear one. Time does not advance forward into the future but, rather, each articulation made by the children turns them back to the immediate past and keeps them stuck in a cyclical, repetitive pattern that consists of Sylvia’s uttereance and their mockery. Their relationship is unable to develop and progress but remains stuck at an impasse that cannot be overcome unless the children are willing to move on. These repetitions underscore that at least Lea, who is the one who starts the ridiculing, is unwilling to orient herself towards a future with Sylvia and to allow for their relationship to develop, which would signal a commitment to those normative relations associated with timeliness. On the contrary, she has decided to remain in a halting position that does not enable a future but, rather, renders all three bodies untimely, stuck in a present that is a repeated evocation of the immediate past.

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This cycle is only broken by Sylvia’s decision to stop the car, make the kids get out, and drive off, and here her decision to leave the children behind is evocative of Nina’s choice not to pick up her daugther in Windows on Monday. However, Sylvia’s action, despite breaking the cycle of mockery, is a mirror image of the beginning of the sequence and an affirmation of the irreparable antagonism between stepmother  and children. It also aids in the construction of the film’s untimely aesthetics. Indeed, the two sequences consisting of a long shot and long take function as framing devices that indicate repetition as well as a telos and that emphasize the co-existence of timeliness and untimeliness. At the beginning, viewers see the car that stops close to Konsti, who tells Lea that “mommy is taking us home.”35 While this utterance establishes the familial relationships among the characters in the opening scenes, the lack of camera movement and cuts forces the audience to keep waiting to actually see the figure of the person who is addressed as “mommy” until Lea reaches the car and the camera cuts inside the vehicle. Only then do things progress so that viewers are able to gradually learn about the relationships, positionalities, and affective ties. In a similar fashion, viewers are forced to wait and endure what is unfolding on the screen after Sylvia orders the children to get out of the car. The untimely aesthetics of the long shot and long take reveal that Lea and Konsti, along with the audience, are made to witness the car driving down the road without knowing what is going to happen next. They find themselves stuck in the present moment, which seems to extend into the then without offering any possibility of imagining a future. Not knowing how to react or what to do, they stand there and are rendered untimely bodies, whose existence no longer points towards a future. Indeed, they have no other option but to stand and watch Sylvia leave, a gesture that disrupts the continuous and gradual fortification of familial connections and happiness. Instead, Sylvia’s actions make clear that Lea and Konsti are the disruptive forces that ought to be removed and abandoned in order for her to construct her idea of a proper family. Once out of sight, Sylvia pulls into a dirt road and parks the car. She gets out of the car with a burning cigarette (although it is unclear when she lit it) and takes a few steps. A medium shot of her face and torso reveals that she has an inquisitive look as she walks away from the car leaving the door open. Her facial expressions suggest that she is looking at something or someone strange or unfamiliar located ahead of her. A cut to a long shot of the road leading further into the woods shows a white stork walking through the frame from left to

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right. A cut back to Sylvia shows her smoking and watching the bird, apprearing completely mesmerized by it.36 A cut back to the children portrays them walking down the street. They did not wait around for their stepmother but stepped off the shoulder and into the ditch next to the street where they continued walking along the road. A cut back to the stepmother depicts her car pulling out of the dirt road onto the street. She appears to be headed back to the place where she left the children, and a cut to a long shot of the street with the car moving towards the camera confirms this. Lea and Konsti are nowhere to be seen when Sylvia gets out of the car and calls for them. At first, she assumes that they are hiding from her intentionally, but when she does not get a response, she gets increasingly agitated and states that she will actually leave.37 Visibly distressed, her search of the field is interrupted by her cell phone ringing. It becomes clear from Sylvia’s responses that it is Josef who is calling, but she pretends as though nothing is wrong and lies, saying that she is shopping. After Sylvia hangs up, she gets in the car and drives away. In this sequence, the presence of the stork functions as a visual reminder of its symbolic link in mainstream culture to child birth. It is the stork who is said to deliver the baby, which is a narrative that dates back to medieval times, when marriages where often tied to the summer solstice, which was believed to be a time of fertility. This coincides with the time of year when white storks migrate south to a warmer African climate. The storks return to Europe about nine months later for breeding season, aligned temporally with the birth of many babies.38 The popular legend of this bird turns it into the harbinger of Edelmanian reproductive futurism, and its presence in the sequence functions as a counterpoint to Sylvia’s actions. Indeed, both her decision to leave the children and to smoke render her untimely and uncoupled from the child as the embodiment of teleological progress and a continuation of the familial lineage. She has positioned herself in opposition to being a timely body, holding the cigarette close to her body in the close-up shot, an object that signals the passing of time (see chaptaer 2). She smokes and watches the stork walking by and then moves on, indicating that there is no alignment between her and the associations with fertility and birth that the bird evokes. Unsurprisingly, yet not discussed in any of the scholarship on This Very Moment, a cut to the next sequence shows Sylvia returning to the house without the children and making sure that their bags, which serve as both evidence of their presence and reminders of their absence, are placed out of immediate sight in the trunk of her car. When Josef

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Figure 3.6 Josef, naked, is on top of Sylvia on their bed. The latter is still fully clothed.

comes home and his first question is whether the kids are there and Sylvia answers “no,” he does not react at all.39 In lieu of a more detailed explanation, the woman starts kissing Josef passionately and tells him that she wants to sleep with him, to which he responds that he had not noticed that she had started smoking again. She offers to quickly brush her teeth, but he pulls her closer and continues kissing her. A cut to a long shot of the bed shows Josef on top of Sylvia, having sex (see figure 3.6). Another long shot and long thirty-second take underscore not only the corporeal connection between the two adults but also the barely furnished bedroom, whose atmosphere is clinical and uninviting rather than romantic and cozy. After they are done, Josef rolls to the side, revealing that he is completely naked, but Sylvia is still in the dress she wore earlier when picking up the children and, due to her facial immobility, does not communicate much affect to Josef (or, by extension, to the audience). This sex scene is crucial in my reading of the film because it emphasizes the temporal disjointedness, which, throughout the film, is one of the main reasons for the figures’ shattered relationship. This disconnect becomes clear when their initial conversation does not lead anywhere because Josef does not anticipate any issue and thus does not ask a more specific question about the children’s whereabouts. Despite Sylvia’s short and negative response – it is a simple and clear “no” – he does not inquire any further, especially not after she tells him that she wants to

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have sex. The brief response highlights the absence of the children in the present moment and undoes the potential for a future insofar as their absence insinuates the lack of a trajectory for the family configuration that includes them. Indeed, the parents’ rejection of reproductive futurism erases Lea and Konsti’s existence in the now and aids in the construction of the children’s bodies as untimely. While one could assume that Sylvia’s articulation of a “no” signals a “no” to reproductive futurism’s investment in heteronormativity and linear temporality, I argue that her desire to sleep with Josef makes clear that this “no” only extends to her stepchildren. It is Sylvia’s investment in engaging in sex with Josef rather than in telling him about Lea and Konsti that realigns their two bodies with reproductive futurity and renders them timely, orienting them away from the two missing children and towards the possibility of heterosexual reproduction that yields a new familial configuration. The sex act reorients the adults and re-ensures their timeliness, which concomitantly, albeit possibly not intentionally on Josef’s part, ensures Lea and Konsti’s untimeliness. Through the sex act, the four bodies become misaligned and the audience is left to endure the scene of heterosexual pleasure that symbolizes a certain kind of future. In this instance, viewers are directed away from an investment in Lea and Konsti, who represent two bodies in need of protection, which, in this very moment, renders it impossible for the two missing children to exist in the then. This shift and time of (re)productivity is emphasized visually by the fact that the sex between Josef and Sylvia is depicted in their bedroom in the family home, which, much like the rest of the house, is still unfinished. The house construction signals the intent to build a family and encourages viewers to project linearity, timelines, and futurity. Directed visually to heterosexual reproduction and the material evidence of the construction of a domestic realm, viewers are coaxed into embracing the kind of timeliness and future-orientedness that this scene engenders and, as a consequence, are turned away from Lea and Konsti, at least for a brief moment. The audience is expected to draw a connection between the house and the people who live inside of it, being encouraged to invest in a vision of the then that revolves around the heteronormative bourgeois family unit. Thus, the house is emblematic of hegemonic socio-cultural ideas about familiality and how it plays out on a concrete level by positioning the monogemous couple with child(ren) inside the building. In the case of This Very Moment, the moment of intimacy between Josef and Sylvia inside the house visualizes this linkage between

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heteronormativity, reproduction, and positionality, and entices viewers to yearn for domestic bliss and the “good” life. However, this yearning is cruelly optimistic, to recall Berlant, since Sylvia wants Josef to imagine a new life with her, a type of “good life” that is out of reach because of the existence of Lea and Konsti. While Sylvia is ready to move on and to start anew with Josef and with the kids from his previous relationship and to embrace a state of timeliness, emphasized by the almost complete home project and the sex she initiates with him, he does not want to participate in materializing the kind of fantasy she attempts to create. Thus, he remains stuck in the now, unwilling to imagine a then without Lea and Konsti. Once Josef realizes that the children did not show up at their weekly gymnastics lesson and starts worrying about them, he asks Sylvia if she knows their whereabouts and informs her that he contacted the police, who are going to come by the house to ask questions. When asking her if something had happened, if the two had said anything to her or if they had gotten into a fight, it is clear that Josef cannot understand why Lea and Konsti are missing, but Sylvia insists that “everything was normal.”40 Not believing her, he insists that there must be a reason for the children’s absence and he cannot understand why Sylvia acts as though nothing happened. He submits that he is unable to understand her behaviour given that she is a woman and that the children are now hers, to which she responds that he does not know “what is going on here.”41 This exchange between the two adults makes it clear that notions of reproductive futurism are closely linked to particular temporal patterns and rhythms that govern which subjects are granted a future. Josef relies on biological essentialist narratives and conventional understandings of gender roles that perpetuate the paradigm that, when children exist, being a woman automatically makes one a mother. In Sylvia’s case, the fact that she married Josef, who had children from his previous relationship, in conjunction with her status as a woman solidifies the teleological trajectory of turning a woman into a mother. The intention of Josef’s comment is to render Sylvia a timely body, one who is expected to embrace the logics of heterosexual reproduction and their concomitant socio-cultural expectations and whose orientedness towards the future rests on the sequential shift from her time as a woman to her time as a mother. However, this expectation is undone by Josef, who underscores Sylvia’s lack of explicit worry and her inaction. By acting like nothing happened, Sylvia neither acts nor reacts, signalling a sense of indifference and impassivity that renders her untimely. Contrary to Josef, who

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is deeply moved after their sexual encounter and immediately makes plans to organize a search mission in the days following Lea and Konsti’s disappearance, Sylvia does not seem to care about the fact that the children are missing (and, of course, only the audience knows that this is because she is the one who abandoned them) and appears to show no concern for the future of the family. Instead of actively participating in a conversation with Josef or showing any love or affection after sleeping with him, her motionlessness and emotionlessness call into question her positionality as a parental figure and loving wife and diminish, if not shatter, the possibility of a proper family. This mismatch of Josef’s expectation and Sylvia’s actions emphasizes the brokenness of the familial constellation and points to the impossibility of relationships developing. Much like in the earlier sequence in the car, Sylvia is both (assumed to be) embedded in and unsettling normative structures that uphold the traditional family unit. While Josef sees Sylvia as part of a linear trajectory of continuing the family line, of which the children are an integral part, her behaviour stresses the fact that she has either veered off this path or never intended on being on it in the first place. Indeed, Sylvia’s statement underlines the existence of a fissure that obstructs the telos of womanhood to motherhood due to the presence of children. In this instance, Josef’s statement underscores that he is unaware of this fissure while he is highly invested in the fantasy of a telos that does not reflect Sylvia’s day-to-day reality with the children (of which Josef is unaware). It is precisely this misalignment that points to her ambivalent status as an untimely body – that is, to the mismatch of his imagined design of the family and her lived experience. Similar to the incongruency between assumptions about the family unit and the lived actuality, two other scenes in the film focus exclusively on Josef and Sylvia and exemplify the kinds of missed opportunities and mismatched actions that render Sylvia an untimely body. In the first sequence, the woman takes sleeping pills, falls asleep, and does not hear the phone ringing downstairs when Kuba attempts to contact the parents on the children’s behalf. The second sequence is an interaction between Sylvia and Josef, during which she offers to make him food, to which he responds in an upset manner, accusing her of not really believing in the return of Lea and Konsti despite her claim to the contrary. Both sequences emphasize how Sylvia’s acts appear misguided and inappropriate, displaying a lack of empathy and affect, which suggests the improbability, if not the impossibility, of a future. The unthinkability of a then is first articulated in these two scenes through a cut inside the house while the phone is ringing. Several long shots visualize the unfinished state of the house, in which many spaces

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lack furniture while others, such as the staircase, are wrapped in clear tarp, giving viewers a sense of the current state of the building project. A cut to the bedroom depicts Sylvia sleeping in bed while the phone remains unanswered before it finally stops ringing.42 The second scene depicts Josef, who enters the home and wakes Sylvia by shutting the door. When she comes down the stairs, he sits there, looking defeated. Sylvia asks him what the matter is and he reports that the police have not found the children yet, to which she replies that they will. Her question whether Josef has eaten anything and her offer to make him something are met with an expression of disdain, and he asks her if she is going to make food if the children are dead. Frustrated and upset, Josef gets up and heads upstairs, and Sylvia, in an attempt to rectify the situation, affirms that the children will be back. “You do not really believe that yourself,”43 is his response, and, once he is out of the frame, Sylvia, who is still sitting on the stairs, turns to the side and pushes her face into the plastic tarp that covers part of the stairs, seemingly suffocating herself. Although Josef told Sylvia to monitor the phone in case anybody calls with news about the children, her decision to take sleeping pills prevents her from fulfilling that responsibility. The pills cause her to be in a state of deep, dreamless sleep in the middle of the day, thus becoming an untimely body who is disconnected from the present moment and misses Kuba’s call, curtailing the chance to have Lea and Konsti return home so that parents and children can be reunited. In fact, it is Sylvia’s misguided act of taking the pills that delays the contact between Kuba and Josef and keeps the two children out of the house and her life. She does not seem (at best) to be cognizant of or (at worst) to care about the consequences of her actions, and her body, along with Josef’s, remains the only one the audience sees as populating the house. Thus, it is only the two adults who are present in order to construct a home and to complete the unfinished building project. However, the sequence of long shots that depicts multiple spaces in the house while viewers hear the phone ringing and echoing through it serves as a reminder of the presence (albeit a ghostly one) of the children.44 These images of the unfinished house in conjunction with the sound of the phone signal to viewers that the house is in a state of disarray, much like the family. As the ringing echoes through the spaces of the house, the audience is asked to establish a connection between Sylvia and Kuba, who has the children and claims to want to help them. This linkage reinforces the audience’s awareness of the fact that

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the children are gone and that the family unit, much like the house, is “unfinished.” Yet the auditory reminder of their presence by way of the ringing telephone finds its way into the house, reverberating throughout. The combination of image and sound aids in the construction of the sequence’s untimely aesthetics with regard to viewers’ own investment in reproductive futurism and normative timelines. As the audience watches the images of the unfinished rooms, which evoke the idea of deferral and lack, the monotonous and recurring ringing allows for the children to become present without their presence and functions as an incessant reminder of their being part of the normative familial setting within the structure of the home. While the scene’s timeliness encourages viewers to invest in normativity exemplified through a linear temporal arc that represents the timeline of the construction of the family home and, from the moment of the present, projects a sense of fulfilment and consummation into the future, the repetitive sound of the telephone ensures that this image of a trajectory is disrupted and undone and, concomitantly, speaks to the scene’s untimeliness. In other words, the children’s absence renders impossible a trajectory of a future and keeps Josef and Sylvia stuck in a time of dithering in the present, being made to pause and wait for a sign or signal from Lea and Konsti. The sequence in the home ends with a close-up of Sylvia’s stomach, her hands placed on top of it, moving up and down as she breathes in and out while sleeping, and then cuts to a close-up of her head with her eyes shut. The image of both hands placed on Sylvia’s stomach suggests that she is protecting her belly and, more specifically, her uterus, which can be seen as representing a realm of possibility for reproductive futurism. In this instance, the woman’s hands function as a shield or a protective layer to safeguard her womb and the anticipated growing foetus (after Sylvia’s sex with Josef) from the rest of the surroundings and, in particular, from the ghostly presence of Lea and Konsti in the home. Thus, the close-up shot of her stomach directs viewers towards a potential future and encourages them to invest in a narrative of (re)production of a new and differently configured family unit, which, however, necessitates the absence of the two other children. In other words, this new unity is only able to form in the future if the reminder of Lea and Konsti is no longer present and Josef and Sylvia are able to move on. This ambiguity of the possibility of a future comes to the fore in the second sequence once Josef returns home and wakes up Sylvia. While he is preoccupied with his worries about the missing children and the

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so far fruitless efforts of the police search, she quickly and somewhat half-heartedly assures him that Lea and Konsti will be found and moves on to focus on him, offering to make him food. Indeed, Sylvia’s primary concern is with Josef and her ability to care for his needs in the present. By articulating a desire to nourish him, she expresses an investment in a future with her husband, and the intention to prepare food can be read as a way of affirming their bond as a couple. This affirmation directs attention away from the children and attempts to disrupt Josef’s connection with them. Unsettling the force of reproductive futurism and the possibility of a future for the family of four, Sylvia embraces a state of untimeliness and recentres the familial scene in the home on the two adults as a couple rather than as parents. Instead of emphasizing her orientedness towards a future with the children, Sylvia’s focus on Josef shows no effort to project a vision of the four of them into what lies ahead but, rather, seems to suggest a then devoid of Lea and Konsti. However, Josef’s harsh comment makes clear that he has no interest in this shift away from the children and that he continues to hold on to desiring a life with them. When Sylvia tries to please him by articulating hope and a belief in a future when Lea and Konsti will return home, Josef’s act of standing up and walking away from the conservation and his comment that she does not believe her own words articulates his incredulity. Although not stated explicitly, I read his expression of scepticism in a twofold manner: he does not believe in (1) the content of Sylvia’s statement or (2) her investment in the return of the children. Josef makes clear that he thinks her words are insincere and misguided because her vision of reuniting with the children is based on their return rather than on the parents’ active search. Sylvia anticipates that Lea and Konsti will come back and join up with the adults, suggesting a position of passive waiting or a time of dithering. Recalling Berlant’s notion of the “good life,” I argue that Sylvia’s assumption about the children appears to build a telos that extends into the present but that does not envision a future. This state of pausing and being immobile confirms her disinterest in a future with Lea and Konsti and her state of untimeliness. Sylvia’s mode of passivity and immobility in the now, which does not allow for a then to happen, ultimately prevents the parents and children from meeting. Sylvia’s actions and inactions confirm the ultimate collapse of the familial unit. After Kuba finally reaches the parents and is willing to hand over the children in exchange for a reward, they agree to meet at a rest stop in Poland. When both Josef and Sylvia as well as Kuba and the children are on their way to the meeting point, they all

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happen to stop at the same rest stop with a restaurant along the way but do not know this until Sylvia has to use the washroom. Stepping through the door that leads out of the restaurant space to the washrooms, she hears a shower run and a child repeat “cold, cold.”45 Following the voice, she arrives at a mirror that allows her to peek into the men’s washroom, where Kuba is showering a very dirty Konsti, who complains about the water temperature. Instead of interrupting the scene, Sylvia simply stands and watches Kuba before backing away from the sights and sounds that confirm Konsti’s presence and exiting the building through an emergency door. Once in the parking lot, a long shot shows the building in the back and her body collapsing without any warning. Similar to earlier scenes analyzed above, this sequence is another example of a moment of impossibility for familial bliss and for a bond to emerge in the present and to extend into the future. While one might assume that Konsti’s commentary is merely an expression of dissatisfaction with the temperature of the water, I read it as a reference to the children’s hide-and-seek game “hot or cold,” which includes one person directing other(s) in the quest to find something or somebody by giving clues. “Hot” indicates proximity while “cold” signals distance from the person or object to be found. In this particular sequence, I suggest that Konsti’s words evoke the game in viewers’ minds and thus function as guiding clues for Sylvia, who walks through the door but does not yet see him. Thus, the exclamation “cold, cold” creates a sense of anticipatory tension in the audience and encourages an investment in Konsti’s ability to successfully direct his stepmother towards him. However, it appears that she ceases to participate, halting and pausing once she is able to see the child. The long shot and take in combination with the presence of the mirror enable viewers to see all bodies present and force them to linger (see figure 3.7). Recalling Berlant’s notion of endurance as a time of dithering, the audience has to wait and see what happens next and the film’s untimely aesthetics encourage viewers to invest in timeliness and a fantasy of a reunion of the family and a normative future; however, they also withhold such a realization through Sylvia’s (and, by extension, the camera’s) immobility. Indeed, Sylvia watches Konsti just long enough (the take lasts a total of twenty seconds) for the audience to speculate about what could have happened at the rest stop had the two adults accidentally run into the children and Kuba, but then this possibility is shattered when she decides against repairing the ruptured family and walks away. This ultimate decision results in Sylvia’s inaction in the moment of potentiality, thus signalling her

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Figure 3.7 Sylvia looking at Konsti.

active refusal of normativity and a future with the children. As the camera follows her, viewers have no choice but to become untimely and stay with her as she turns away from, rather than towards, the child. This particular camera position and the focus on Sylvia rather than on the child makes her the centre of attention in this sequence. Instead of providing viewers with a narrative and cinematographic rendering that align with their expectations of witnessing a conventional kidnapping narrative that concludes with the parents’ arrival at the meeting place where the children happily fall into theit parents’ arms and the family reunites, This Very Moment forecloses this possibility by focusing on the woman. It is Sylvia who remains in the centre of the medium shots and draws the camera away from the child. The audience has no choice but to follow her as she opens the door and is left with the discomfort of not knowing what is going to happen to Konsti. Sylvia’s decision to leave the child(ren) behind is not only emblematic of the rupture of the normative familial unit but also foreshadows the film’s ending and Kuba’s decision to turn away from the children. While on the way to the agreed-upon meeting spot to return Lea and Konsti to the parents, the girl attempts to poison Kuba, who is then barely able to safely stop the truck. Investigating and concluding that it was Lea who poured cleaning solution into his water bottle, Kuba orders the children to get out of his truck and to get lost.46 The two climb out of the truck, barefoot, turning away from the man, and a

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long shot of the road depicts them walking steadily towards the horizon until their bodies disappear. This walking sequence echoes the scene with Sylvia, Lea, and Konsti at the beginning of the film, which I discuss above. Much as in the previous scene, the untimely aesthetics of this sequence ultimately affirm the rupture of the normative family unit and undo the possibility of a future with and for the children. As the static camera reveals the long road ahead of them, viewers are left with no choice but to sit through the two-minute and twenty-four-second take and watch the bodies of Lea and Konsti disappear in the distance. They have to embrace a state of untimeliness, of halting and waiting, only able to hope for a car to come along to pick up the children. However, the final cut to the credits of the film prohibits any kind of resolution, reunion, or return, and the audience has to contend with its own affective response engendered by the disappearance of the children. By beginning and ending with a long shot and long take of Lea and Konsti walking alone along a street, with no cue for the audience as to how long their journey will take or where they are headed, This Very Moment neither starts nor ends with stereotypical depictions of an intact family. Instead, the film visualizes instances of lateness, inactivity, or delayedness that cause Josef’s search for the children to be unsuccessful and thus prevent the familial unit from coming together. The absence of the children and, throughout the film, the lack of one single moment that depicts all four characters united in one frame, underscores that the family is divided and broken and that any reparative attempts to change this relational configuration is futile. Instances of untimeliness in Windows on Monday and This Very Moment focus on the construction of the normative family unit and its entanglement in reproductive futurism, which centres on teleological progress narratives, monoheteronormative constructions of familiality, and the embeddedness of the child as the symbol of a then. However, the films underscore that, at times, the adults are either caught in states of passivity and immobility or engage in incomplete actions and conversations in the now in ways that do not allow for a future to unfold. Thus, the protagonists emphasize the impossibility of a future with and for the child(ren) and normative family unit, and foreground familial relationships that are disconnected from the dictates of normative relationality as married couples with child(ren). Indeed, Windows on

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Monday emphasizes that the stability of the dyadic unit is slowly coming undone and appears to no longer exist in its idealized constellation, while This Very Moment shows that the normative family unit is already broken beyond repair despite its potential for nonnormative familiality embodied by the figure of the stepmother. Considering the focus on the demise of the family, this chapter, albeit differing slightly from chapter 2, can be read as a continuation of the exploration and ultimate foreclosure of the possibility of nonnormativity with regard to the dyadic couple with child(ren). In particular, Hochhäusler’s film extends to its audience a promise of an alternative familial configuration – that is, it depicts a family unit that is already uncoupled from traditional narratives of biological parenthood by featuring the figure of Sylvia. While this is a well-known trope in fairy tales (and the film certainly plays with this genre and its conventions), the stepmother also offers the potential of a destabilization or an undoing of the hegemonic narratives and linear temporal frameworks of the creation of a family. However, This Very Moment shows that normativity is reinscripted within the logics of the alternative family unit and thus emphasizes that the possibility of nonnormative familial configurations is, in fact, a figment of the cultural imagination of the early twentyfirst century. Shifting the focus from the family unit to the figure of the child, chapter 4 is grounded in the notion of the queer child and of growing sideways as configurations of untimeliness. Desiring and attempting to forge alternative bonds inside and outside of the family unit, the three films in the following chapter call into question normative ideas of (hetero)normative relationality and underscore the protagonists’ yearning for alternative bonds and familial connections that exceed conventional understandings of intimacy and relationality.

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The figures of Armin Steeb in Hochhäusler’s I Am Guilty, Nina in Petzold’s Ghosts, and Lynn in Speth’s The Days Between exemplify a tendency in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century German-language texts to question normative rhythms and tempos in service of a critique of the assumed normalness of heteronormativity and normative familial relationships. Praised by film critics and scholars alike for their unsettling cinematic aesthetics and their refusal to offer a cathartic ending to their audiences, the three films star young adults – two teenagers and one twenty-two-year-old – who wander through life without direction. They appear detached from and passive and indifferent towards family and friends; are either unable to get a job or to have a traditional nineto-five job; engage in nonheterosexual acts; and display an unsettling awkwardness and ineptness when interacting with others. Even as all three films share these features, they also display distinguishing characteristics. While Armin is part of precisely the type of family unit that provides a traditional sense of home and can be “considered an authentic expression of ‘German-ness,’ ”1 Nina desperately desires such a familial setting. She is introduced to viewers as an orphan and lives in a home for troubled youth. Finally, Lynn, although legally an adult, has a small room in her brother’s apartment, but she does not contribute to the household financially or participate in those activities that constitute normative family life, such as eating meals together or doing household chores. What they all have in common is their desire for and embeddedness in monoheteronormative family structures. As explored in the preceding chapter through a focus on displays of impassivity or lack of responsiveness, the cinema of the Berlin School offers startling studies of characters’ detachment from traditional relational structures such as the family unit. Thinking alongside Kathryn

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Bond Stockton’s concept of the queer child or, rather, her claim that “queer temporalities haunt[] all children,”2 this chapter focuses on the figure of the young adult who struggles to foster and maintain proper interpersonal relations: Lynn sets a stack of boxes on fire in her boyfriend’s bedroom when he refuses to wake up after she crawls into his bed in the early morning hours and wants him to be intimate with her; Armin struggles to have even a brief superficial conversation with the girl in whom he is sexually and romantically interested; and Nina saves a woman who is sexually harassed in a park but does not know how to express her infatuation with her. In reading Armin, Nina, and Lynn as having grown or as still “growing sideways,” as Stockton has it, they exemplify different versions of the queer child. While they are expected to demonstrate that they have undergone a gradual process of maturation following a “vertical movement upward (hence, ‘growing up’) toward full stature, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness,”3 the three young adults struggle with their desire for, and orientation away from, these traditional goals. Indeed, at times, they resist the need to get and have conventional employment, to express “proper” heterosexual attractions, and to participate in family life by embracing queerness as it pertains to life trajectories and temporal structures as well as modes of exploring and asserting their sexual identity and desires,4 but, at other times, they also display a yearning for normativity. As Armin, Nina, and Lynn defy the usual sense of growing up in a linear trajectory that moves towards embodying a productive adult with normative employment and a heteromonogamous, reproductive, and committed relationship, they also exemplify Berlant’s notion of attachment to and desires for the “good life,” particularly in its portrayal of the ambivalent longing for physical and emotional closeness to another human being and inclusion in a traditional family. Good-life fantasies, as outlined in this book’s introduction, can take multiple forms and seemingly produce feelings of happiness that mask the ways in which they impede the individual’s thriving. In this final chapter, using both The Queer Child and Cruel Optimism as frameworks for theorizing temporality, I foreground how the three young adults favour connections and foster bonds that render them untimely through their embraces of odd rhythms, deliberate delays, and strange detours. Indeed, Armin’s, Nina’s, and Lynn’s respective ways of attaching and detaching themselves from conventional timelines and tempos come to the fore during interactions with potential lovers or sexual partners as well as with family members. As these figures

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embrace moments of timeliness and untimeliness at various intervals and junctures in time and become untimely bodies, this chapter shifts the analytic focus from the monoheteronormative couple (chatper 2) and the heteronormative family unit (chapter 3) to the child – or young adult – itself. The three filmic texts emphasize critiques of the hegemonic socio-cultural conceptions of meaningful and proper relations, (hetero)normative sexual encounters, and interpersonal interactions that champion the traditional model of the loving, monogamous, heterosexual family unit in contemporary society. As I seek to show in conversation with Stockton and Berlant, the “good life” for Armin, Nina, and Lynn represents, at times, a desire for timeliness and inclusion in the embrace of normalcy and, at other times, a wish to become untimely and to escape the very same. In what follows, I analyze both the content and the aesthetics of I Am Guilty, Ghosts, and The Days Between in light of the characters’ untimeliness in order to focus on moments when the protagonists embrace the fantasy of the “good life” as well as on moments when they reject it. In so doing, I suggest that the cinema of the Berlin School provides a sense of alternative, of hope, and of futurity but that, ultimately, it returns the protagonists to the normative structures in which they were embedded in the first place and thus stops short of suggesting that a liberation from normative rhythms is permanent or even to any degree sustainable.

Queer Potentials in and of the Present in I Am Guilty Much like the previous sections of chapter 3, this one attends to the construction of intimacy and relational bonds tied to and divorced from the normative family. Hochhäusler’s I Am Guilty portrays Armin Steeb (Constantin von Jascheroff), who epitomizes a set of characteristics that can be found in many of the characters discussed so far. Akin to Gitti in chapter 2, Nina and Sylvia in chapter 3, and Lynn and Nina in this chapter, Armin is aimless, nihilistic, bitter, and disillusioned. He has recently graduated with a mediocre degree from a secondary school and still lives with his middle-class parents in their family home. Like Lynn, Armin embodies the concept of the queer child since he is unemployed, but he is also relatively unperturbed about the fact that the few job interviews he is able to secure are completely unsuccessful. While he appears attracted to Katja, he is unable to connect with her, and, at the same time, he also fantasizes about or engages in anonymous sexual encounters with members of a biker group in public restrooms along the highway.5 When he reads about a fatal accident in the press,

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he becomes a pseudo confessor,6 sending anonymous letters to a local newspaper and claiming responsibility for the collision and other violent events that have occurred near where he lives. Armin appears to drift through life, emotionally detached and without orientation, until the film culminates in his arrest by local police and he is driven off in a police car. Armin is captured by the police and transported off while he sits in the car and smiles at the camera instead of trying to escape. This highly ambiguous final scene leaves the audience wondering about Armin’s strange affective response and whether he will face the law and receive some kind of punishment. Indeed, Marco Abel understands the film’s final scene as the pivotal moment that signals Armin’s escape from the “comfortable yet boring life afforded him by his suburban, provincial upbringing” and a world that is divided into rigid binaries.7 While I agree with Abel’s assessment, I question from the outset the very existence of a strict division of binary structures, particularly as they relate to Armin’s subjectivity and his positionality vis-à-vis his parents and the biker gang. Instead, I propose that I Am Guilty is filled with moments that break down the stark dividing lines of normative and queer intimacies and repeatedly infuse private spaces that are emblematic of hetero-patriarchal normativity with interactions that are marked as queer on the levels of both content and form. Operating under the premise that normative and nonnormative tempos are constantly encroaching upon one another and affect how subjects understand their positionality in the world as well as their orientation and relationality towards and away from others, I offer a reading of I Am Guilty that attends to moments of intimacy and pleasure that are connected to the unfolding of time in a different way. I foreground instances in which desire and pleasure affect and determine Armin’s position as an untimely body in a world governed by the doctrines of chrononormativity. Thus, the interruption of a traditional teleology and the possibility of experiencing pleasure and intimacy become available to Armin only when he detaches himself from normative cadences and becomes untimely.8 Indeed, the film is filled with moments and instances of temporal and identitarian fluidity, which are underscored by its untimely aesthetics. To be precise, the film’s cinematographic and editing choices place a strong emphasis on repeated shifts between normative and nonnormative rhythms and cadences of time, which are sutured in order to call into question the hegemonic status of the nuclear family, hetero-romantic feelings and relationships, and the adherence to a traditional life trajectory and that allow for a different experience of the now as a means of envisioning a potential then.

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The strangeness or, better, estrangedness that Armin exhibits and his inability to forge connections are exemplified in a scene halfway through the film when his family – father, mother, and older brother Martin (Devid Striesow) – stages a job interview in the living room of their home. While Armin is the applicant and Martin the employer, the parents watch the situation and provide comments. The sequence begins with a medium tracking shot, with the camera focused on Armin, who is in the centre of the frame as he walks down the stairs. The camera halts and lingers on him when he reaches the bottom. Before he is able to react in any way, a voice immediately tells him to start over, which helps us realize that Armin is failing to perform although not yet revealing what is being staged and who is involved in the scene. This editing choice creates a sense of apprehension by withholding what is in Armin’s field of vision and by not providing any contextual clues. However, Hochhäusler does not grant any immediate relief to his audience. Armin turns around and walks a few steps back up, where he stops and knocks on the handrail. Finally, he gets the desired response – “come in”9 – which grants him the right to move beyond his initial position at the bottom of the stairs, whereupon he bows slightly and walks to the right. Only once his body is out of the frame does the camera cut to a long shot, depicting the living room. The ensuing “interview” between Armin and Martin is portrayed via a sequence of shot reverse shot close-ups in order to visually replicate its repeated back-and-forth question-and-answer structure. Even when Armin’s father makes an audible noise to express his discontent with his son’s answer, causing a brief moment of disruption, the camera stays with Armin. With a subsequent cut to a medium shot of the parents and then back to Martin, during which Martin is out of character and both reflect on Armin’s performance, the interview is interrupted for a brief moment before Martin moves back into his role as the employer. Cinematography and editing throughout the performance of the mock interview in conjunction with the notion of the queer child serve as a new point of entry into the film that allows for a reading of Armin as an untimely body. His affective responses to the situation highlight his discomfort and unease about the unnaturalness of the situation and his feeling as though he is on display. In order to perform his role successfully, he is required to relinquish his childish mannerisms in the present and to perform the nonchildish employee that he is supposed to become in the future. He is expected to become timely and to embody a particular self in the now that exists merely as his family’s

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vision of his self in the then. Thus, Armin is tasked with embracing his parents’ fantasy and staging the legibility of his body as the proper child in order to ensure that he is on the right path. Performing the employee in the present functions as a way to embed him in chrononormative structures of the now that shape his desire to pursue a linear temporal life narrative, to become timely, which ought to prevent him from growing sideways. Since the camera remains with Armin, viewers stay with him as he descends the stairs, participating in a rehearsal of a particular situation that functions in a twofold manner: it familiarizes him with the process and directs him towards a normative future. In this sense, the mock interview renders him a timely body in the present moment who fulfills the demands of the proper child. Indeed, I read the camera movement and focus on his path down the stairs as a way to symbolize Armin’s orientation towards the highly anticipated next step in his life, which is to register as a conventionally productive subject – one who has employment after graduation – and thus as a body to whom is extended the ability to belong to normative socio-cultural structures. However, the sequence begins with the display of Armin’s improper performance and failure to do what is required of him. Although it is unclear whether he does not know how to act properly or deliberately refuses to do so, the situation reveals a moment when the progression of the mock interview is disrupted. Rather than being allowed to proceed and move forward towards the interviewer, Armin is forced to stop, pause, and return to his starting point. This act of halting and repeating makes him aware of his inability to behave properly in order to forge proper relations, even if these are linked to a mock interview and are clearly staged. Although not freely choosing to do so, he is jolted out of the linear unfolding of the scene and its temporal progression and made untimely for a brief moment. As he is headed up the stairs again, he is oriented away from the family embodied by his parents and brother as well as from the proper future destiny that he ought to pursue. However, this liberation is only momentary since he walks, turns yet again, and, in so doing, redirects his gaze and the orientation of his body towards the family and the scenario at hand. In submitting to and momentarily rejecting the demands of registering as timely and as a productive subject – in the figure of the proper child – Armin embodies untimeliness. Indeed, he attempts to rehearse normative scripts but does so in a manner that suggests that some of his actions do not register as proper. He agrees to conform to those expectations that engender the linear progression of chrononormativity:

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that is, he participates in the mock interview to increase his chances of successfully getting one of the jobs for which he is supposed to write application letters. However, he fails from the very beginning, getting stuck and having to adjust his improper behaviour in order to be able to enter and continue. Instead of following the teleological arc of the interview process, Armin is forced to amend his actions and to return his body to the beginning, temporarily reorienting himself and dislodging the temporal rhythm and momentum of the interview. In this sense, moments of untimeliness punctuate and interrupt the linearity and normative succession of the teenager’s actions that champion his legibility as timely and thus render him an untimely body. In a similar manner, the cuts to Martin and Armin’s parents, who discuss the teenager’s failures during the mock interview process, construct a moment when the linear unfolding of time is disrupted, which emphasizes Armin’s untimeliness. In this case, it is Armin’s father and, in particular, his reaction to his son’s answer that unsettles the progression and underscores that, based on his answers and responses throughout the interview, Armin is not legible as properly fulfilling socio-cultural expectations. While the three family members start discussing Armin’s shortcomings, the camera stays with him, creating a sense of temporal pause. This moment of lingering interrupts the rhythmic cadence generated by the back-and-forth pace of the interview, rupturing the sense of timeliness with its normative tempo, and renders Armin untimely since he is the only one visible to the audience within the frame of the medium shot. This moment of untimeliness is further emphasized when the film cuts to a series of medium shots of the parents and Martin while they are evaluating Armin’s failed performance throughout the interview. Instead of maintaining its focus on the teenager, the film, and, more specifically, its editing, redirects the audience so that it is now with the other three family members  – both literally and metaphorically. By cutting to the three adults after lingering on Armin, the camera places the spotlight on them, their statements, and their reactions since they are the ones who appear in the frames. This particular shift of the focal point after lingering on Armin creates the impression of a dynamic rhythm and momentum that stands in opposition to the young man and encourages the audience to side with his family. To be more precise, viewers are coaxed into moving along, relishing the relief from the awkward moment of stasis while with Armin, and embracing the film’s aesthetic, which galvanizes them out of a moment of untimeliness into becoming timely again.

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Based on these shifts throughout the mock interview sequence, the scene’s untimely aesthetics enable the audience to become acutely aware of Armin’s inability to relate throughout the scenario and to witness moments when the queer child disrupts the linear progression of the interview: first through the improper signal to begin the interview and then through the improper responses that engender delays and disruptions. Indeed, the oscillating pace of the scene established through its untimely aesthetics does not allow for the emergence of a consistent cadence that could engender a passive viewing experience; rather, modifications of the film’s tempo encourage an active and engaged audience, prompting viewers to reflect on their own investment in chrononormativity and desires for the child to be oriented properly and to grow up instead of sideways. Through interruptions due to failed performances, pauses, and repetitions, the interview becomes exemplary of a destabilization of normative temporal trajectories and Armin’s refusal to function within the normative parameters set forth by his parents. He becomes untimely due to his embodiment of the queer child who resists growing up and desires to grow sideways, exploring different modes of being in the world and relating to others. In this vein, the mock interview sequence sets up the audience for Armin’s sexual encounters with the motorcyclist. As the present moment is overshadowed with various rhythms that blur the temporal patterns that render Armin timely and untimely, the difference between these two distinct temporal segments crumples until it ultimately collapses completely. Indeed, Armin’s sexual encounters with one of the members of the motorcycle gang underscore how his subjectivity is shaped by his desires and experiences of pleasure. Particularly, the construction and performative acts of his sexuality are not depicted as stable or permanent but, instead, are constantly shifting and render his identity malleable and fluid. Although he stages rather traditional heterocentric romantic attractions – he desires and pursues Katja (at least to a certain extent) – viewers are never exposed to any of Armin’s fantasies involving her or any kind of physical contact between the two. Rather, the only sex acts in I Am Guilty pair Armin with an anonymous biker with whom he practises both active and passive oral as well as anal sex. While Sascha Harris reads Armin’s sexual encounters with the motorcycle gang members as aggressive attacks on the gang’s part and as the young man’s acts of “self-punishment,”10 the film supplies no visual or auditory cues that would encourage and support such a claim. Instead, it is precisely these moments that reveal nonnormative pleasure and

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enjoyment rather than punishment. Although a close-up of Armin’s reaction to the first contact during which he performs oral sex on the motorcyclist (see figures 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) appears to emphasize astonishment, novelty, and alienness, a close-up of his facial expression during the second of these sex acts – this time he is the recipient of oral stimulation – underscores my claim that the film does not depict the moment as one of punishment. Notwithstanding his initial look, which appears stern and tense, and evinces a mixture of affective responses such as defiance, fear, hesitation, and apprehension (see figure 4.4), Armin’s facial expression changes drastically as the camera cuts from one medium close-up to the next (see figure 4.5). While the majority of the bystanders, whose faces are mostly hidden behind their motorcycle helmets, gaze downward, the man without a helmet who stands next to him and has his arm around Armin’s shoulder moves slightly to the left and tilts his head to the left and forward so it is no longer covered by Armin’s head. While Armin has his eyes closed and his mouth slightly ajar, smiling in a way that suggests he is experiencing a sexually charged and highly pleasurable moment, the motorcyclist’s look and slight grin communicate a sense of approval and pride, as if Armin’s response to receiving oral sex marks a type of initiation or rite of passage. Furthermore, the multiplicity and variation of passion and lust reflects Armin’s fluid subjectivity as he destabilizes any conventional concepts of sexuality. It also requires a transformation and redefinition of identity that reaches beyond the reliance on binary structures of sexual desires and practices. My reading of Armin echoes queer theorist Licia Fiol-Matta’s claim that queerness and normativity are sutured insofar as individuals both reproduce and trouble dominant cultural formations and power structures through an insistence on freedom and boundaries, on disorder and structure, and on autonomy and governance.11 Indeed, Armin’s first two sexual encounters not only accentuate the malleability and fluidity of his sexuality as gay and straight, and of his position as giver and receiver of pleasure, but they also point to and culminate in providing the possibility of forging an alternative bond alongside the heteronormative family constellation epitomized by his relationship with his parents and brothers. This initial opening or undoing of fixed identity categories is linked to the mouth, the orifice crucial for giving and receiving oral sex. Foregrounded aesthetically in both sequences as the central element of the close-up shots, Armin’s mouth performs bidirectional operations. Thus, it represents a site of alternative potentialities. Akin to, yet different

Figure 4.1 Armin looking at the motorcyclist’s pelvic region.

Figure 4.2 Armin starting to perform oral sex.

Figure 4.3 Armin performing oral sex while looking up.

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Figure 4.4 Armin facing the motorcyclist.

Figure 4.5 Armin’s changed facial expression.

from, Bersani’s seminal conceptualizaton of the rectum as a locus of power in homosexual sex acts (rather than a body part typically associated with excretion, penetration, and submissiveness),12 Hochhäulser’s filming of the mouth presents it as an orifice that, like the rectum, allows for penetration. However, it is not a closed cavity or a Bersanian “grave” but, rather, an opening or a site of exchange, of in and out, of ingestion as well as ejection, and thus an orifice emblematic of the ability both to consume and to disgorge.13 Theorizing the mouth in this way, I understand it as the point of convergence that grants Armin access to a heretofore unexperienced form of pleasure and sexual practice that destabilizes and redefines his identity. Through exploring the potential of his mouth, he engages in nonheterosexual sex acts that defy a clear categorization; rather, he has become an assemblage of normative and queer desires, practices, and figurations made visible through his involvement with both the

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biker gang and his family. On the one hand, Armin rides on the back of the motorcycle of the man with whom he had sex as a sign of queer solidarity and intimacy; on the other hand, he continues to enjoy the comfort of his life in his parents’ home as they embrace norms and values that grant the family particular privileges within the traditional hegemonic framework of German society. These two seemingly separate worlds are fused temporally through Hochhäusler’s use of jump cuts. Hochhäusler’s editing choices in both sequences produce this particular duality, suturing private and public on a formal level. In the case of the first of the two scenes mentioned above, the close-up of Armin’s performance of oral sex is followed immediately by a jump cut to a medium shot of the parental kitchen with Armin and his brother, Stefan (Florian Panzner). While Stefan is packing a bag, Armin, still in his coat, leans against the kitchen counter, talking and holding a carton of milk. By moving from the sequence of Armin performing oral sex to the family kitchen, the film condenses – or rather completely collapses  – the linear unfolding of time and fuses the two separate spheres: public bathroom and family home. This suturing effect of time is further intensified through Armin’s actions in the home, which reference his performance of oral sex on the motorcyclist. While he is talking to his brother, he drinks milk out of a carton, bends over sideways towards the sink, and lets the milk slowly trickle out of his mouth. In this particular instance, the white liquid references not only the potential presence in his mouth of semen from oral sex but also the primary food source for newborns. Thus, it also foreshadows the end of the film, which later I discuss in further detail as a birthing sequence. When questioned about his action by his brother, Armin responds that he has a strange taste in his mouth (see figure 4.6) and, in so doing, not only references the oral sex but also reminds the audience of its immediacy and temporal closeness. This particular cut between the two sequences and their respective content not only encourages the viewer to wonder whether the encounter in the highway restroom is merely Armin’s fantasy but also affects the linear unfolding of temporality – moving time ahead swiftly. Since the audience does not know precisely when the second scene with Armin’s brother happens, this cut condenses time and makes it seem as if the two sequences in the film are no longer isolated from one another; rather, they appear temporally fused, making visible how heteronormative family time is tightly connected to, or even already fused with, the time of nonnormative sex acts, with the result that the former becomes illegible and thus loses its dominant essentialized and essentializing status.

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Figure 4.6 Armin bent over the sink, spitting out milk.

In this regard, Hochhäusler’s film ultimately ruptures the heretofore shielded boundaries of the home and creates a sphere of contact in which the traditional logics of normative identity, private space, and straight time are infused with elements of nonnormativity. This spherical force field that encompasses different and seemingly disparate potentialities allows for the emergence of untimely aesthetics, exemplified in the film’s fusion of family and corporate time and suturing of queer sex acts with family gatherings. In turn, this pairing constructs a realm of possibility in which identity emerges as an amalgam of energies, and queer time becomes palpable as a figuration of normative temporal routines and vice versa. This dissolution of discrete tempos and temporalities, coupled with the disintegration of the private space of the traditional family unit, culminates in the final sexual encounter between Armin and the motorcyclist, which takes place prior to the scene of Armin’s arrest at the end of the film. This scene portrays Armin opening the door for the motorcycle rider, who is outside of Armin’s family home. The man enters and, for the first time in the film, takes off his helmet. However, he is positioned in the medium shot in such a way that his back is turned to the camera, denying the viewer even a brief glimpse of his face. Armin, facing the man, simply responds, “My room is upstairs,”14 and he leads the motorcyclist up the stairs to his room. Another cut accelerates time yet again, and we see Armin and the man engage in anal sex. It is crucial that Armin takes the man to his room  – the all-toofamiliar German Kinderzimmer,15 with a small bed, a desk with a computer, and posters on the walls that reflect Armin’s interest in cars, music, and film stars – and not any other place in the house. In contrast to the domestic spaces shown earlier in the film, Armin’s room possesses a unique and unfamiliar aesthetics. With its lack of lighting,

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Figure 4.7 Armin bent over with the motorcyclist standing on the left side of the frame.

Figure 4.8 Armin’s hand appears from behind the motorcyclist’s body.

the room is so dark that it is difficult for the audience to discern the figures of the two men. As the audience hears loud electronic music blasting, Armin is bent over as the motorcyclist penetrates him from behind (see figure 4.716). As the camera pans from right to left and past the two bodies, the left portion of the room is much lighter than the right, which makes visible Armin’s hand, which, in the midst of their sexual encounter, suddenly and almost violently appears from behind the biker’s body (see figure 4.8). The atmosphere transforms the room from the stereotypical room of a teenager into a realm that is highly ambiguous. On the one hand, the room’s dim lighting and the diegetic sound evoke the impression of a dark room in a gay club or bar  – that is, a backroom typically reserved for anonymous sexual encounters and sadomasochistic fantasy play – and thus a space that both Bersani and Edelman could possibly characterize as a realm of no futurity. It is a sphere in which bodies are confronted with being absolutely timely and expected to obey the

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tempo and beat of the electronic music, a sphere in which subjects are split asunder in the pursuit of raw physical pleasure and sexual gratification by the destructive – since nonreproductive – force of both oral and anal sex. On the other hand, the addition of a diegetic sonic element to the visually dark frame allows for a different way of reading this sequence. As the two figures step into the Kinderzimmer, the Chicks on Speed song “Universal Pussy” is heard playing in the room. In this instance, the song turns the room into a womb-like space, which Armin and the biker enter together. Thus, the young man’s room turns into a productive and fertile realm from and in which the sex act between the two men can signify differently. Instead of possessing a shattering and destructive impetus, the sex act is reinscribed in a way that echoes Paul B. Preciado’s conceptualization of the anus as a “workspace” that “is not directed toward reproduction, nor is it founded on the establishment of a romantic nexus. It generates profits that cannot be accounted for in a heterocentric economy.”17 Rejecting precisely the necessity for the sex act between Armin and the biker to figure in the heterocentric economy, I understand their encounter as a moment that enables new subjects to emerge and thrive, and that provides room for the possibility of the development and gestation of untimely bodies amidst the domain of the heteronormative family. By creating this sphere of fluidity and mobility, I Am Guilty serves as a commentary on Edelman’s notion of no future, which I outline in chapter 1. By taking Edelman’s claim to “fuck the social order and the Child”18 verbatim by literally fucking the child – in this case with a lowercase “c,” represented in the figure of Armin  – as well as the family structure in which it is embedded, the sex act between the two men critiques the linear progress narratives traditionally attributed to heteronormative family relations and procreation as symbolizing the possibility of a future. As Armin is bent over, facing the wall and being penetrated from behind, the camera is positioned at a medium close-up and pans from right to left. With the room barely lit, for a few seconds it is difficult for the audience to discern any details about the two bodies, until the camera moves far enough so that both bodies appear on the far right of the frame. Upon the completion of the camera movement, the lighting changes and the audience is able to bear witness to how, from behind, the motorcyclist incessantly thrusts into the child. While the audience’s attention is focused on the man’s rhythmic pelvic motion, Armin’s hand, appearing from behind the body, interrupts the man’s steady motion. This abrupt emergence of the hand leaves the impression that, through this act of anal sex inside the realm of the “universal pussy,”

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Armin is birthed by the other man, emerging hand first, suddenly and unexpectedly, as if ejected from the man’s pelvis. However, the film’s untimely aesthetics prevent a reading that would allow Armin to become a queer, heroic subject, embodying resistance and liberation from all restrictive socio-cultural structures. While the Chicks on Speed song is still playing to create acoustic continuity, a cut to a medium shot of the front door of the house reveals Armin’s parents returning home, looking confused as to why the door is open. As they slowly walk upstairs, viewers are not only reminded of the subtle yet ineradicable presence of heteronormative structures embodied by the parents but also have to contend with the fact that Hochhäusler’s editing choices have thrust them out of the “universal pussy” and into the world, where they are forced to follow the heteronormative couple. With each step towards Armin’s room, the parents come closer and closer to disrupting this moment of queer intimacy and potential. This approach slowly heightens in viewers not only a sense of tension and discomfort but also possibly of curiosity and voyeuristic pleasure at witnessing the parents’ reactions to the encounter with Armin and the motorcyclist. The parents never reach the top of the stairs because the film cuts abruptly to the next scene of Armin walking through a parking garage at night and looking for an oil spill on one of the empty parking spots. Nevertheless, before the film moves on to the next scene, viewers have to endure a brief alignment with the camera and thus with the parents. This succession of cuts from Armin’s room to the entrance of the house and then to the parking garage introduces a type of untimely aesthetics that makes it difficult for the audience to create a sustainable bond, either with the sights and sounds of queerness in Armin’s room or with a certain notion of heterofamilial normativity epitomized by the parental couple. Thus, I Am Guilty refuses to privilege, and thus to ascribe more value to, either scenario, and, as the one scene is undone by a cut to the next, the film not only denies its audience the possibility of the emergence of a sense of identification with the characters but also points to the instability of both heteronormativity and queerness within the story world. This unreliability of identity in the filmic characters in turn encourages active spectatorship, coaxing the audience to question the dominant socio-cultural narrative around the stability of identity categories. Ultimately, I Am Guilty provides a response to both antisocial negativity and heteronormative hegemony. The film’s instances of queer intimacies that infuse the normative create a sense of mediated immediacy. These allow or even demand that the audience inhabits a

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self-reflective viewing position from where we reflect critically upon our investments in and resistances to both normative and queer figurations and formations. Thus, the film encourages us to ponder the possibility that, as the late Muñoz might say, “queerness is always in the horizon,”19 but it avoids its glorification and thus its reification. We are reminded that the figure of Armin asks us to re-examine our expectations and values in regard to normative familial models and to revisit our very own desires for constructing and romanticizing the figure of a queer hero. This being the case, I Am Guilty encourages us not only to ponder the possibilities and modes of being that allow us to explore queer intimacies and to forge bonds that unsettle heterofamilial relations but also to reject them altogether.

“Good Life” Fantasies and Desires of (Non)Belonging in Ghosts Akin to Hochhäusler’s film and true also of Speth’s film, as I discuss in the next section of this chapter, Petzold’s Ghosts centres on the figure of the queer child. Indeed, repeated references to Marie, a girl who was kidnapped as a two-year-old in broad daylight at a Berlin supermarket ten years prior to the time in which the story world is set, shape both the narrative structure and the relationships of the filmic characters. To be more specific, it is not her physical body but a mediated one, constructed through a sequence of computer-generated (Cg) photographic images, that Marie’s mother Françoise (Marianne Basler), who is desperately looking for her child, uses as references. These visuals, of whose existence viewers do not know until they first see them approximately eighty-five minutes into the movie, serve as the basis for the audience to construct an artificial telos or a series of biometric bodies,20 which serve as blueprints to legitimize the existence of the by-now teenage girl Marie and hold particular significance for the ways in which the film constructs and comments on familial relationships. Based on this central function of the Cg images and Françoise’s fantasy about reuniting with her child, Ghosts engages with desires of relationality and belonging to a normative family unit as well as with the yearning for traditional life trajectories.21 Thus, it takes a critical stance towards whether one’s embeddedness in this type of familial configuration is representative of the Berlantian “good life” and ostensible happiness.22 Ghosts is the second film of the so-called Ghost Trilogy, along with The State I Am in (2000) [Die innere Sicherheit] and Yella (2007). In the vein of various other Berlin School films, Ghosts’s narrative begins in

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medias res and introduces the viewer to Nina (Julia Hummer), a teenage orphan who lives at a home for troubled youth. Nina meets Toni (Sabine Timoteo), with whom she experiences a fleeting moment of intimacy, and Françoise (Marianne Basler), a woman in her early forties who comes to believe that, in Nina, she has found her lost daughter, Marie, who was kidnapped as a child. Because Nina possesses the specific physical markers – a scar on her left ankle and a mole on her back – that could identify Nina as Marie, Françoise offers Nina the promise of hope that she has a family and a place of belonging. However, it is not entirely clear whether Nina really believes in this fantasy. Although she follows Françoise and encourages the woman to tell her about her life and her past, Nina continues to appear affectless, which makes it difficult from the perspective of the audience to tell whether she buys into Françoise’s fantasy throughout the film. The possibility of Nina’s connection with Françoise is ultimately ruptured when her husband Pierre (Aurélien Recoing) forces her to leave Berlin, and Nina leaves the hotel where they met and walks through a seemingly empty and lifeless city. When the viewer is initially introduced to Nina, she seems to epitomize many of the characteristics of an impassive and detached teenage girl. She lives at a public foster home, has no clear direction in life, and, as many Berlin School scholars have noted, embodies a ghostly presence. A number of scholars, such as Abel, Anke Biendarra, Clarke, Jaimey Fisher, Petra Löffler, Beate Ochsner, and Johanna Schwenk, identify a lack of presence in all of the film’s characters.23 Negotiating personal and collective identity, subjective as well as national memory, the film’s protagonists appear ghostly as they interact with others and the urban cityscape in the post-unification capital Berlin.24 Returning to Berlant’s notion of the impasse as a time of halting, hesitating, and refusing to continue to move along or allow time to unfold at its regular pace, Petzold’s film suggests that there is potential in the moment of stuckness for Nina to embrace untimeliness. This duality of interruption and progress as a way of becoming untimely is visualized particularly in Ghosts’s final scene. Nina returns to the park to retrieve Françoise’s wallet, which Toni earlier stole and, after emptying it of money, discarded in a trash can. The sequence is introduced to the viewer through a long shot that depicts Nina walking up to the fork of a gravel path that is positioned approximately at the centre of the bottom third of the frame, where she stops. While she has entered the frame via the left trail, the right one points towards the back right of the frame, a place unknown to the viewer. Following the tilt of her

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Figure 4.9 Nina standing at a crossroads.

head and the direction of her gaze, it appears that she is looking down at the other path (see figure 4.9). Nina has several options as to how to continue her journey, both in the literal sense as she walks through the park and in the metaphorical sense as she tries to manoeuvre through the trials and tribulations of life. She is positioned at a fork that allows her to select one of two different paths and to resituate her body in a different direction, and she is depicted at a standstill in the now for a few moments. This initiation of a time of inertia foregrounds the shift in Nina’s progressive forward movement and draws attention to her body in a way that asserts its presence in the present. At the same time, her stop and state of rest while time progresses allow her to become untimely – untimely in the sense that she is detaching from the present moment and contemplating the possibility of moving towards what lies ahead in the future. By pausing, she becomes hyper-visible and present in the now while at the same time lingering in this moment as a body that can potentially be oriented towards a then. As she looks down at the trail, viewers are forced to pause and become untimely with her. While time moves on, the audience has to contend with the fact that it is stuck with Nina. As the long shot positions her in the centre of the frame, she becomes the anchor point of untimeliness: that is, viewers stop with her and have to accept that, while filmic time continues, these moments do not signal any clear intent, offer any explicit resolution, or indicate any progress. Rather, the film shows Nina as she is presented with several options and forced to

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make a decision – a decision that will either turn her spatially towards the unknown future that lies ahead of her beyond the camera or that will redirect her towards what lies behind her. This second return then denies her any forward movement, any progress, or any future distinct from her past. Taking either path would leave her with two choices: she could either continue on the path and, in so doing, remain within its known linear trajectory, or she could turn and head to an unknown place that is spatially located at an angle and behind her, which is what she seems to be contemplating. This move away from the current position of the camera, away from the screen, and thus away from the viewer would turn her away from the now and return her – despite the difference in angle – to the place from where she departed. In this sense, she would return to a cycle of what Valerie Kaussen calls “compulsive repetitions, rituals that depend upon the ghostly status and the quasi-invisibility of the homeless teenager”25 – a life of relationships that never fully grants her a way of belonging and of asserting her place in the world through bonds to other human beings. This is a life in which she functions as a temporary placeholder  – a corporeal being that does not register as meaningful to others and whose sole purpose is to fill a gap or a void. After pondering for a few seconds at the fork, Nina looks up and into the distance and starts moving fairly briskly towards a place that is located to the left of the camera, somewhere beyond the frame. As she passes the camera, the film cuts to a shot of her walking towards the garbage can, reaching in, and taking out the wallet Toni had earlier stolen and discarded. An over-the-shoulder close-up allows the viewers to see Nina open the wallet and take out some pictures that were stored in one of the inside pockets. By way of positioning the camera behind Nina’s left shoulder, the film introduces the audience to two pictures: first, the image of a roughly two-year-old girl, presumably Marie, sitting on a picnic blanket in a park, and then a black-and-white close-up of the head of the same child printed on a piece of paper. As viewers gaze at the image while Nina’s hands unfold the paper, the process gradually reveals four images of a young girl: the first one is on the far left and depicts Françoise’s daughter, while the subsequent ones appear to be Cg progression shots of the girl’s aging process. This particular act of unfolding the paper unveils the final image of a teenaged Marie, who looks very similar to Nina. A cut to a medium close-up frontal shot of Nina’s upper torso and her head tilted downward looking at the images depicts her hair and face – particularly her mouth – in a way that enhances the resemblance between Nina and

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Figure 4.10 Cg images of Marie.

Figure 4.11 Nina looking at the images of Marie.

Marie (see figures 4.10 and 4.11). By cutting back and forth between the teenage girl looking at the images and the pictures of Marie, the sequence establishes a consistent, circular rhythm as its shot and counter-shot editing draws the viewers closer in. The close camera distance (a rather slow frequency of transition between each shot) and the long shot duration (of roughly five seconds per image and a total of twenty-eight seconds combined) generate a sense of elongation of the present that simultaneously transports us back to various concrete

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moments in the past and creates an untimely aesthetics through the specific combination of these components. By lingering on either Nina’s face or the four faces in the images, this particular sequence forces the audience to halt and to adapt to a different tempo of narrative progression and invites it to bring a range of stories to bear on the scene. While the shots being arranged in this circular fashion encourages viewers to ponder whether Marie is no longer alive, whether Nina is Françoise’s kidnapped daughter, and whether or not she was indeed robbed of a traditional family life, these shots also repeatedly jolt their audience out of and pull it back into the present. Moving back and forth between the actual person and the Cg images that index different moments in the past, spectators find themselves both present in, and encouraged to detach from, the now – a detachment that breaks with the telos of the narrative through the creation of its own telos. As the resemblance is indeed striking, the editing choice of the shots in this final scene – shots and reverse shots that seem to visually reinforce a connection between Nina and the images of Marie – and the use of these Cg images makes visible a particular temporality and the  unfolding of time in a distinct way, allowing the viewer to construct Nina as untimely for a brief moment. While both the linearity of the images on the paper and the specific camera position depicting the way in which Nina unveils the photo progression emphasize a sense of linearity and teleology, the images and the physical presence of Nina blend past and present. In this sense, the sequence of shots constructs a complex temporal structure that not only questions and defies but also affirms and perpetuates the normative sequentiality of time that is evoked through the progression displayed in the images. This particular defiance aids in constructing Nina as untimely in that the presence of the images keeps her stuck in the now and point to a before. Thus, these photos serve as indexical referents to a past that can only emerge through Nina’s engagement with the images in the present moment. In other words, the presence of Nina’s body serves as a material foundation unfolding an alternative world – one in which Nina is given the opportunity to entertain the idea of being Marie and is integrated into the normative rhythms of family life. This promise of being not only allows Nina to construct a past that she might have experienced but was too young to remember but also establishes a sense of her belonging to Françoise and Pierre’s heteronormative familial configuration in/for the then. In this regard, affective attachments and a familial bond to the couple are only made possible if Nina is able to invest in a particular segment of time and its linear unfolding, as

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suggested by the progression of Cg images. In order to receive the status of a family member. However, Nina must rehearse a fictitious past that lacks any connection to the present. This narrative of Nina as Marie concomitantly affirms her presence in the present by giving her a past and denies her the ability to materialize as a subject because of its lack of substance; it relies on the acceptance of a linear progression of time from two-year-old Marie to teenage Marie but can only transform Nina into Marie through Nina’s reversal of this very same temporal sequence. She must move backward in time in order ultimately to become the two-year-old girl and then move through a past she never had. After contemplating the possibility of this past and her connection to Françoise and Pierre, Nina crumples up the pictures and tosses them back into the garbage. Through this act, Nina – regardless of whether she is Marie – actively unhinges herself from the fantasy of and attachment to having a family, from having a fixed life narrative materialized through the Cg images, and, along with that, from having a distinct and concrete past. In so doing, she becomes an untimely body, appearing to uncouple herself not only from the restraints of the necessity of lineage and linearity for defining her subjectivity but also from conventional desires of belonging. Instead, she seems to reject Françoise’s good-life fantasy in favour of inhabiting a position in the now, a position that turns her away from the normative familial narrative but that does not automatically engender the possibility of forging alternative bonds in the then. Akin to Nina, viewers are also placed in a state of untimeliness – a position that forces them to negotiate their own wishes for both Nina and themselves. As they reflect on the resemblance between Nina and the picture, they find themselves entangled in their own compulsion to construct the image of a traditional family unit; to sentimentalize Nina’s state of longing for belonging based on their own socio-culturally, emotionally, and psychologically overdetermined desires and practices; and to link identity to concrete and discrete units as evidence of constructing a heteronormative lifeworld. Thus, the film’s final sequence suggests that it is only of secondary importance whether or not Nina believes herself to be Marie, whether or not Françoise truly believes Nina is Marie, or whether Toni was aware of Nina’s infatuation with her. The main questions that all these relationships and bonds raise are whether or not the audience finds itself entangled in the demands for consumable fantasies, desires, and pleasures; whether or not viewers tend to envision and fashion their lives in such ways that detach them from teleological structures; and whether or not they are capable of

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Figure 4.12 The view of Nina’s body is obstructed by the branches of the shrubs and trees.

embracing these moments of being in the now. Akin to Marie, viewers find themselves in this now as a moment that offers two options from which to choose. In this sense, the audience is given the opportunity to pause and then to continue in the same vein as it has done thus far or to take a different path and discover, test, and modify a new mode of being in the world. Upon discarding the pictures and, with them, the possibility of participating in the narrative of belonging to Françoise and Pierre’s family, Nina continues down the same path that led her to the garbage can and appears to be headed towards an indefinite point in the distance. This transition from engaging with the images and walking away is emphasized on a formal level through the cut to a medium shot of Nina’s face, which then pans away from the young woman and transitions gradually into a long shot as the camera stops its movement while Nina keeps on walking with her back turned to the camera. The viewer is left behind to watch as the dark colours of Nina’s clothes blend more and more with the dark green leaves of the trees, whose branches droop and partially obstruct the view (see figure 4.12). While Abel identifies Nina’s desires and pursuit of a seemingly “good life,” of belonging, and of forming and maintaining relationships to be an overarching theme in the entire oeuvre of Petzold, the final sequence of Ghosts supports a different reading. When she has ultimately turned away from any connections to others and dissociated from the fantasy of being Marie, Nina seems to have no other choice but to turn away

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from the images that epitomize her longing for a bond. She is left with no option but to direct her physical body and her gaze towards a vast grassy area devoid of any other human beings with whom she could interact. Cook, Koepnick, Kopp, and Prager describe this particular kind of emptiness as “urban landscape [as] a desert,”26 a claim that implies that Nina is headed towards a life that keeps her pursuing the dreams of a seemingly “good life” – that is, an existence motivated by striving, by hoping, and by longing, in spite of a present life that offers nothing but loneliness and isolation, lacking any relationships with which she might construct a shared or collective future or past. Although this final sequence appears to accentuate Nina’s unfulfilled yearning for conventional and normative family bonds and to emphasize her stuckness, certain aesthetic characteristics of the Berlin School allow for a reading of the film’s ending that is not only in conversation with the Berlantian concept of cruel optimism but also considers the importance of audience members as active participants in the viewing experience. Ghosts’s final sequence permits an alternative reading, despite, or maybe because of, its negotiation of notions of physical and emotional attachment to what constitutes the “good life.” Rather than valorizing Nina’s act of resistance and her refusal of the “good life” as progressive and liberated, Petzold underscores viewers’ own investment in her dismissal of normative fantasies. In other words, the film seeks to make visible the audience’s tendency to idealize struggle and opposition. In this sense, Nina’s act of wadding up the images and throwing them away can be read as signalling her active and conscious decision to relinquish the desire to be a part of Françoise’s family. As the medium shot of Nina’s face before she discards the pictures urges the audience to construct a fantasy that ties the girl to Françoise and her husband, the subsequent over-the-shoulder close-up of Nina’s hands tossing the wallet and the images foregrounds her action rather than her body and her surroundings. The downward tilt of the camera encourages viewers to align with Nina’s point of view: they watch the items dropping into the garbage instead of inhabiting a position from which to observe Nina. To be more precise, viewers bear witness to the moment when Nina decides to face the images directly one last time before she lets go of them completely, turns away, and walks off. Through the deployment of long takes and long shots, the film portrays Nina’s body as it moves through an area of the park that does not have any signs of the Berlin cityscape in the background and suggests complete social isolation. She has her back to the camera and the

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audience can hear only some ambient noise, such as the wind rustling the leaves of the trees in the park. This final sequence invokes an affirmative rejection and abandonment of the “good life” represented by the pictures, while both the lack of extra-diegetic sound and the abrupt ending of the movie deny viewers the chance to sentimentalize this moment. Rather, the fairly long duration of the shot – thirty-eight seconds, to be precise – and Nina’s blue T-shirt and jeans, which create a stark contrast to the soft green grass and foliage of the trees, make her hyper-visible and emphasize her presence in the present. As her body moves forward, the camera stays with her. The audience is forced to linger and watch her figure gradually become smaller and smaller without any references that indicate the potential of an existence in the then. While walking away could be read as a sign of Nina’s determination to abandon normative conceptions of heterofamilial bonds and modes of procreation and reproduction so as to embody complete detachment and freedom and to move on, the scene’s untimely aesthetics complicate such an attempt to idealize the film’s ending. In particular, the combination of the shot duration and Nina’s slow movement challenges her mere glorification as ultimately becoming an independent subject; rather, the interplay between formal aspects and mise-en-scène and filmic characters evokes a sense of the extension of the present moment, or of a now that creates a force field in which Nina registers as present but is not able to assert her presence. Without any reference to other objects or subjects in the story world in that final sequence that might point to a potential future or relational bonds, Nina’s existence is reduced to her presence in that now, which renders her both timely and untimely at the same time. On the one hand, she registers as timely due to the fact that her clothes and her presence in the park echo her work of picking up trash in a park at the beginning of the film and her subsequent exchange of her own shabby, ill-fitting clothes for more mainstream, mass-produced garments. She exists in this very moment of the present, which is a temporality of neoliberal capitalism with its regulatory scripts for proper subjects. On the other hand, the lack of buildings or other people suspends her from the present and its normative patterns and cadences and allows her to embrace an alternative tempo. This type of untimeliness thus extends the promise of envisioning a tangible then, although it might never be realized on a concrete level. In this regard, Nina becomes present as an untimely body both in the present and vis-à-vis the present. While the final sequence calls into question Nina’s attachment to and repudiation of desires for the “good life,” an earlier sequence in

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Figure 4.13 Nina naked and alone on the couch in Oliver’s house.

Ghosts already confronts viewers with the film’s untimely aesthetics. It does so by emphasizing the gravity and urgency of contemplating investments in narratives that function in a twofold manner. They construct (often queer) alternatives to what is traditionally considered a “good life” within the frameworks of heteronormativity and/or they present homonormativity as offering possibilities of detachment and escape. At a party hosted by the television producer Oliver (Benno Fürmann), Nina and Toni have a sexual encounter during which they share a moment of intimacy and connectedness. The next morning, Nina wakes up on a fold-out couch, covered with only a blanket, naked and alone. After a medium shot of Nina’s torso as she is lying on the couch, the film cuts to a long shot. Nina is positioned in the centre of the frame, sitting on the sofa with her arms wrapped around her knees and her legs tucked in. She has covered her legs and the front of her torso with a blanket while her bare back and part of her right breast are exposed to the camera. Sitting on the couch, she turns her head to the left and the right with an anxious expression on her face, as if she were trying to orient herself in the unfamiliar location and to look for Toni (see figure 4.13). When walking through the house that, aside from the rooms that were used for the party, is under construction, Nina discovers Oliver’s wife upstairs in the bathroom. Throughout the brief exchange, presented through a medium long shot and reverse shots sequence, both women stand in a doorframe. To be more specific, Oliver’s wife is positioned in the frame of the balcony door, while Nina is located in the frame of

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the bathroom door. When Nina inquires as to where Toni is, the other woman bluntly responds: “You don’t get anything, do you?  – Why? Where’s Toni? – She’s gone off with my husband for a fuck. Now get out of my house.”27 After the wife crudely indicates that her husband and Toni left together – and thus forming yet another ostensibly nonnormative relation that dissolves both the bonds between Toni and Nina and the bonds between Oliver and his wife, respectively – Nina turns around and exits through another door located behind her. A subsequent cut to a frontal long shot as Nina walks away from the house through a field of tall grass that is surrounded by trees and shrubs – a shot that is later repeated in the final sequence (as I describe above) – evokes the idea of untimely aesthetics and suggests her lack of belonging, solitude, and isolation from urban spaces as well as from other human beings. At the same time, the long shot of Nina might insinuate that she has turned away from the very location where she experienced the momentary fulfilment of her cruelly optimistic yearning for intimacy with Toni. She is present in the present, which, due to its lack of reference, concomitantly unhinges her from the now and could be either a dream, a fantasy, or a cut to a different moment during that same day or even the following day. Although Nina is still wearing the same outfit, we cannot be sure when or if the scene takes place. Regardless of whether this scene represents an illusion or a temporal jump ahead or back in time, it does constitute a particular rupture of the linear unfolding of time – one that provides evidence of the untimely aesthetics of Ghosts. In this sense, Nina can be viewed as a subject that comes into existence in the now, which simultaneously indexes a time that may or may not be the present moment. What the untimely aesthetics of this sequence allow and potentially even encourage the audience to do is to consider its own investment in discourses of normalcy and resistance. As the viewers watch Nina depart the premises, the long take and the sparseness of sound forces them to linger in the moment. This state of endurance allows viewers to contemplate what conclusions to draw from this depiction of Nina and to consider how their own ideas of desire, coupledom, and commitment inform their reading of the sequence. As in the final scene of the film, the formal aspects of this morning-after scene enable the audience to critically interrogate whether Nina is merely walking away from the site of the party or whether she is rejecting the types of fantasies and desires that her encounter with Toni might have engendered. Such a critical reading suggests that their relationship was only temporary, that it was not founded in any sense of commitment or loyalty, and that longing

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does not guarantee a transformation into belonging. It also signals that the short-lived gratification of desires can sometimes camouflage impasses only to stimulate, over and over again, a yearning for exactly those situations and the resulting affective responses. While such interpretations are valid ways of looking at the sequence, they nonetheless valorize very particular, normative ideals of intimacy, compassion, and care. More specifically, they foreground the understanding that Toni’s abandonment of Nina to run away with Oliver returns her to the realm of heterosexuality, which is – within the confinements of conventional German socio-political and cultural hegemony  – sanctioned as preferable, proper, and stable: a world from which Toni departed only momentarily during her night with Nina. This rejection and abandonment not only leave Nina stuck in the present moment, as she is rejected and isolated, but also foreclose the possibility of the fulfilment of Nina’s desires. Such a foreclosure is also suggested in the previous sequence when a series of medium close-up shots of the two women dancing and kissing creates a sphere of intimacy. Led to invest themselves emotionally in the emerging bond between Nina and Toni at Oliver’s “work party” – people are there to network and are not really enjoying time off from work – viewers are, literally and metaphorically, cut off from that fantasy through the film’s deployment of untimely aesthetics. As the audience is connected to Nina and Toni kissing in the present, their moment of intimacy is abruptly shattered when the film cuts to the shot of Nina lying on the sofa alone. Akin to Oliver’s provisionally furnished house, whose purpose is to create an illusion of style, opulence, and grandeur for the party, Toni’s charm and attention to Nina merely serves her own interests and personal benefit and is her way to attract the attention of Oliver (see figure 4.14). While one might assume that Nina is becoming an untimely body in this sequence, forging an intimate connection with Toni in a part of the house that is separate from the main part where the party is being hosted, this kind of becoming is complicated by Toni’s actions. Although the two women seem to have escaped the realm of the work party, they are entering another sphere in which their bodies perform a certain type of labour. Nina, albeit unknowingly through Toni’s repeated looks at Oliver, is participating in Toni’s performative work of creating a visually pleasurable moment for Oliver. As they hug tightly and kiss passionately, their bodies stage a type of homoeroticism that is done for Oliver’s benefit and thus renders the two women timely. Their performance becomes an act of corporeal labour and allows Oliver

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Figure 4.14 Nina and Toni kissing while Toni looks at Oliver.

to indulge in gazing at them. In this respect, this scene echoes Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze” and embeds the scene within the highly gendered hierarchal notion that women exist merely for male pleasure.28 Oliver’s gaze read through the lens of Mulvey is all the more significant since he is the producer of some type of TV show about friendship and interviews Nina and Toni at the casting. In this sense, the encounter between the two women is staged for him by Toni, while Nina is unaware of her involvement in the situation; or, better, the encounter is produced by and for him, which firmly fastens the two women in the now as timely bodies rather than granting them the opportunity to become untimely. Furthermore, this sudden change from the kiss to Nina on the sofa propels the audience back into the now and prevents the romanticization of the sexual encounter between the two women. Just as Nina experiences yet another moment of crisis in her life in which she is abandoned and left behind, viewers are confronted with their own almost compulsive impulse to construct good-life fantasies for the character  – fantasies that are deeply rooted in the creation and reiteration of both hetero- and homonormative images and plots. By abandoning these notions, the audience might be able to understand Nina’s solitude as one mode of existence and her departure as simply that: Nina moving on without forging any meaningful connections. She is neither the abandoned victim nor the progressive subject who actively resists socio-cultural norms. Deconstructing and revisioning cruelly optimistic pursuits of desires that seemingly promise a “good life,” the above-discussed sequences

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emphasize one of the main aims of Ghosts: the film makes its viewers aware of their own potential cruelly optimistic attachments to good-life fantasies. While it is only of secondary importance whether or not Nina believes she is Marie, whether or not Françoise truly believes Nina is Marie, or whether Toni was aware of Nina’s infatuation with her, the main questions that all these relationships and bonds raise are whether or not viewers expect their everyday desires and fantasies to be represented on screen,29 whether or not they tend to envision and fashion their lives in ways that keep them stuck in impasses, and whether or not they are capable of embracing these moment of stuckness to create, test, modify, and rewrite to ultimately discover a new presence in the present.

Finding and Forging Connections in The Days Between Maria Speth’s 2001 debut film The Days Between centres on Lynn (Sabine Timoteo), a twenty-two-year-old woman who, despite her age, embodies the notion of the queer child. She appears audacious, capricious, and uninhibited, and does not seem to adhere to heteronormative dictates of sexual and gendered conventions, despite having a boyfriend. She works as a cashier at the university cafeteria and as a dancer in night clubs. Lynn lives with her brother and sister-in-law Antonia (Nicole Marischka) and their two children, where she enjoys the comforts of having her own room without having to contribute financially or to participate in family life.30 Contrary to her boyfriend David (Florian Müller-Mohrungen), who is a professional swimmer and has a highly structured life due to his training regimens and competitions, Lynn lives in and for the moment, as the literal translation of the film’s German title In den Tag hinein ( “in/into the day”) suggests. At her day job, she meets Koji (Hiroki Mano), a Japanese student who is taking German courses. The two are unable to communicate verbally due to their linguistic barrier, which renders any spoken exchange beyond banalities impossible. After a night of drinking, Lynn goes home with Koji. On their way, she is hit by a car but seems fine despite the blow. After they engage in sexual relations, they fall asleep. The next morning, Koji awakes to Lynn’s motionless body, face down, on the bed. Indeed, the unfolding of time, cadences, and rhythms is at the heart of The Days Between, to which the film’s English title already alludes.31 It bespeaks a state of transition and of being neither at the beginning nor at the end but, rather, somewhere in the middle and, thus, points to a state of being that is impermanent. In other words, it

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is a time of changes often marked by major shifts and transformations, of adjustments and modifications  – intrapersonal, interpersonal, or social – and of being located temporally between a past that no longer is and a future that is not yet. This being the case, I understand the phrase to denote a condition of untimeliness – that is, of observing a teleological arc and directedness and thus registering as timely while, at the same time, embracing an untimely mode of being by enduring in a nondiscrete temporal stretch of the now that holds the potential for an unfamiliar then. This ambiguity of being bound to and unbound from normative temporal cadences and trajectories is one of the main characteristics that shapes Lynn’s legibility and illegibility as a “proper” body and renders her untimely, regardless of whether she adheres to normative or nonnormative temporal schema. Indeed, she seems to display a desire for and attachment to conventional familial structures such as living with her brother’s family and having a relationship with David, which are, however, cruelly optimistic insofar as they fasten her within a hegemonic heteronormative socio-cultural system. She is a timely body who participates, or at least attempts to participate, in fostering and maintaining traditional relational attachments. At the same time, however, Lynn repeatedly embraces moments of growing sideways and becoming untimely when she refuses to be present for mealtimes, share the financial responsibilities for the apartment, or forge intimate emotional and physical connections with somebody other than her boyfriend. Based on this attention to shifts in Lynn’s attachments, a reading of her as an untimely body allows for a different understanding of relationality and, akin to the analyses in chapters 2 and 3, asks viewers to interrogate their own investment in mono- and heteronormativity and which modes of relating and intimate connections count as significant, sincere, and valid. As such, untimeliness offers an engagement with The Days Between that places the emphasis on temporality and relationality, adding to Landry’s analysis, which foregrounds mobility and movement, exemplified through Lynn and her nocturnal bicycle rides through Berlin as well as by Speth’s use of fast-tracking shots.32 My reading of the film also differs from Jennifer Creech’s reading of the protagonist. Creech identifies a parallel between “Lynn’s inability to meaningfully relate to others … [and] the viewer’s inability to relate significantly to her,”33 suggesting that the protagonist’s way of being prevents her from connecting with others as well as preventing viewers from connecting with her, thus constructing her as an isolated figure who is unable to

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establish bonds and with whom bonds cannot be established. Instead, I take a cue from Creech and pursue the question of what this perceived “inability to relate significantly” can mean and show whether such a statement can be applied unilaterally to all viewers. Rather than identifying Lynn as unable to relate in ways that register as meaningful when considered through the lens of a hegemonic socio-cultural framework rooted in normativity regarding both the story world and viewers’ engagement with the film, I submit that Lynn is indeed relating to others and constructing spheres of intimate bonds. These connections are, however, repeatedly changing throughout the film and thus resist a static understanding of the protagonist’s ties to others within the story world as well as a consistent and uniform viewer experience. Thus, the shifts in relationality that I identify in this section bespeak Baer’s claim that Lynn is a figure, who, like other characters in films produced by female filmmakers in German-speaking Europe and beyond, embodies the “single-minded pursuit of attachments and goals” that are cruelly optimistic.34 Indeed, Lynn repeatedly articulates and displays a desire for normative good-life fantasies that render her a timely body while concomitantly exhibiting behaviours that undermine these and mark her body as untimely. Thus, Speth tasks her audience to withstand the urge to apply normative concepts of relationality to the filmic figures and encourages spectators to explore the possibility of encountering new modes of being, of being with others, and of being in the world. Lynn’s intelligibility as a proper subject who has grown up and continues to pursue this trajectory is tied to her desire, willingness, and ability to participate in normative familial structures and to register as a timely body. This attachment to normativity comes to the fore when Lynn shows up at David’s apartment and declares that she wants to sleep with him. After their sexual encounter, to which viewers are not privy, Lynn gets up from the bed to get dressed while David is still lying on it on his stomach, naked. While she is putting on her clothes, Lynn mentions her sister’s upcoming wedding and suggests that they could attend the event together. When David does not respond, she asks if he will marry her, a question to which he responds by looking up and at her but remaining silent.35 Although it is unclear how serious Lynn is about her suggestion that they get married and when she imagines that might happen, her questions towards the end of this sequence are a clear and direct articulation of her desire to have a wedding and underscore her attachment to a certain type of good-life narrative. This particular articulation not

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only inscribes her life within the heteromononormative,36 Christian institution of marriage but also ensures David’s validation of her desirability. That is, her question is an attempt to secure their relationship in the present and orients the couple towards a future of continued togetherness legitimized by those normative events that render them proper subjects. In this case, the prospect of marriage as a good-life fantasy that Lynn articulates functions in a twofold manner: it is both an end point and a straightening device.37 Regarding the latter, it ensures that the only valid form of relationality is a heterosexual relationship. As far as the former is concerned, marriage operates as the ultimate objective in the teleology of normative coupledom and ensures that the child grows up properly. It situates Lynn within a particular life trajectory and serves as an aspirational good-life fantasy that eradicates the possibility of growing sideways and embodying the queer child. In this sense, the prospect of and desire for marriage secures the status of heterosexuality and monogamous coupledom and situates Lynn within a hegemonic teleological framework of straight time. Thus, she articulates a yearning for certain life events that make her legible as a proper subject and render her a timely body – a body that follows normative timelines and socio-culturally dominant notions of what constitutes a “good life.” David’s silence, however, indicates a lack of willingness or readiness to commit to Lynn, who functions as the direct embodiment of certain heteromononormative fantasies, or at least the possibility of realizing their fulfilment. It is indeed David’s pauses that hamper the linear flow and create breaks in the momentum of the conversation. While Lynn is moving things along – the content of their conversation and, by way of asking questions, their trajectory as a couple – his reactions disrupt her impetus to construct a future of relationality and intimacy, force her to endure, and render her untimely. As she is lingering in these moments of silence, his actions (or lack thereof) ultimately turn her into an untimely body, whose normative desires are clearly articulated but not reciprocated. Thus, her attachment to this good-life fantasy keeps her stuck in a present and holding on to fantasies of a future that do not extend the promise of fulfilment and togetherness, despite their shared physical intimacy. Indeed, it is precisely the cinematography and editing choices during this sequence that support a reading of Lynn as untimely. The sequence post-coitus begins with a long shot of David’s bedroom, with the bed in the bottom middle of the frame; furniture such as a lamp, a chair, and a shelf on the right side; and a row of windows with the

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Figure 4.15 David naked on the bed and Lynn standing to the far left of the frame.

shades halfway down in the back. The daylight coming in through the windows backlights the front of the room where Lynn is positioned and thus makes it difficult for viewers to discern her facial features and her naked torso. Lynn continues to get dressed while sitting on the front edge of the bed, remaining in the dark. Once she is almost completely dressed, she stands up. Since the camera remains in place, Lynn’s head moves outside of the frame and only her upper body and her skirt are visible. Turning away from the camera and towards David’s body on the bed, she finishes fixing her skirt and utters the question: “Will you marry me?”38 Rather than responding verbally, David turns his head to look up and towards Lynn, and the camera lingers on him for a few seconds, emphasizing the immobility of his body and his upward gaze (see figure 4.15). The film then cuts to a medium shot of Lynn’s head and shoulders. Her body remains still and in the dark for a number of seconds, but her head is clearly tilted down slightly so that viewers assume that she is looking at David. After six seconds, Lynn turns her body to the left side of the frame, staying still for about a further six seconds before she abruptly turns her head (but not her torso) towards David again and then looks away. The film cuts to a long shot of a sidewalk with a number of bikes chained to four green metal bike racks. On the one hand, the formal choices throughout this sequence establish a sense of linkage between the two characters as viewers’ attention is directed towards the respective filmic figures to foreground their actions and reactions. The audience stays with the couple and is encouraged

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to draw a connection between them  – that is, David and Lynn are visually and intimately linked to one another by initially appearing in the same frame. On the other hand, this particular sequence of cuts creates distance between the two once they are not in the same frame, and the position of David’s body, the direction of his gaze (which is away from Lynn for the majority of the time), and her head positioned outside of the frame prohibit a visual bond between them. This tension between establishing closeness while also preventing the development of a clearly articulated and directly visible bond renders both bodies present in the present moment and suggests the affirmation of their relationship without permitting the unfolding of a relational bond and the potential of a future articulated in the question that Lynn poses. Just as Lynn articulates her projection of normative desires for the then in a scene of intimacy and registers as timely, her fantasy is undone, and she is made to pause and endure as an untimely body by David’s silence and his refusal to share her vision of a “good life.” This ambiguity between timeliness and untimeliness is underscored by Speth’s decisions in regard to camera position and editing. In lieu of employing, for instance, a fast-paced shot and countershot sequence, the slightly longer static shots highlight the scene’s untimely aesthetics and make palpable the anticipation and tension during the time of waiting for David’s response. As the camera resides with Lynn significantly longer than it does with David and thus highlights the time of endurance before cutting to him, viewers are forced to wait as well. These instances of delay and of having to withstand the silence between Lynn and David are constitutive of the film’s untimely aesthetics and generate the desire for a response to overcome the sensation of stuckness created by David’s lack of response, which affects this particular moment in the present as well as the couple’s relationship in the future. The pauses disrupt the linear momentum of the film and force viewers to become untimely and to endure with Lynn as her fantasy of monoheteronormativity is undone by David’s silence. Contrary to Creech’s claim that viewers seem to be unable to relate to Lynn due to her own inability to relate, I argue that the formal aspects of this sequence focus the audience’s attention on Lynn and her desire to relate and to pursue a normative life trajectory while David appears unwilling to forge a connection. As viewers are left with no other choice but to stay with Lynn and await David’s answer, the untimely aesthetics of The Days Between encourage viewers to pause and to interrogate their own desires for relationality, teleological life narratives, and affective responses that emerge in response to Lynn’s articulation of

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monoheteronormativity. Furthermore, this scene functions as a commentary on society’s hegemonic understandings and cultural expectations of growing up and engaging in “proper” relationships. Disruptions of moments of intimacy and failures to create instances of relationality between David and Lynn already emerge at the beginning of the film and are indicative of David’s inability or unwillingness to relate when expected to be timely. One such example is the sequence in Lynn’s bedroom with both of them on the bed. While Lynn is lying on her back, wearing a top that covers her upper torso, David is naked and kissing and licking her stomach, moving his head towards her pubic area, presumably in order to perform oral sex on her. While she remains in the same position, he stops abruptly, sits up, and gets dressed because his watch beeps to remind him that he has to leave, thereby ending the moment of intimacy for the couple.39 Although it is unclear for what exactly the alarm serves as a reminder and where David has to be, it functions as a signal of time  – that is, it makes both the filmic figures and the audience hyper-aware of the existence and significance of temporal structures and timeliness. The presence of the sonic element clearly indicates the end and subsequent beginning of two different units of time and causes David to move and to move on or, rather, to move back into the predetermined daily routine that organizes his life. Thus, the alarm renders David a timely body because it serves as a reminder to keep to a particular schedule and adhere to a fixed temporal structure. In other words, becoming timely forecloses the possibility of the fulfilment of sexual desire and physical closeness and disrupts the time of intimacy that contributes to affirming the couple’s bond. In contrast to David, Lynn keeps lying on the bed and does not move even when he sits up and puts on his clothes, visibly signalling his intention to stop what he was doing and to move on. Since she articulates neither a verbal nor a nonverbal response and viewers only see her pelvic area in the frame, it is unclear whether Lynn exhibits any reaction and, if so, what it is. Regardless of her affective expressions, signs of approval or disapproval, or complete indifference to the situation, her body remains still, inert. Occupying the centre of the frame, viewers’ attention is directed at Lynn, who is motionless, waiting, and lingering. While David’s actions drive forward the perpetual continuation of time, the immobility of Lynn’s body constructs a stark contrast and keeps her arrested during this time of intimacy, rendering her body untimely. Given that there are no contextual clues provided during this scene, this time of lingering can be read in a variety of ways. If we assume that

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the stillness is deliberate, Lynn’s immobility can be read as an act of passive resistance akin to Jack Halberstam’s theorization of passivity and failure in The Queer Art of Failure, where he argues against the glorification of actions as the sole and genuine expression of resistance.40 Indeed, Lynn’s refusal to move on from the time of shared physical closeness during the impending sexual encounter, as well as the relationality that their shared intimate experience established and affirmed, can be interpreted as such a resistance to David’s regulated schedule and to becoming timely. In the context of this sequence, halting and not falling in line with David’s actions might elicit a host of negative affective emotions, ranging from a sense of disappointment, hopelessness, and even irritation to anxiety or anger, that appear to diminish Lynn’s ability or willingness to act. Or, rather, to call on Sianne Ngai, a set of “ugly feelings” might accompany and “index these suspensions” and accompany Lynn’s inertia in lieu of becoming timely.41 In this case, pausing in a state of untimeliness can function as a recognition that the idea of a “good life” with David is merely a cruelly optimistic fantasy – that is, a dream of a relationship and intimacy that is contingent upon the desires and routines that define him as a proper and productive subject. David’s status as the one who acts and determines the intensity and duration of his (sexual) interaction with Lynn is reiterated in a scene in her bedroom, during which cinematography and editing construct scenes of untimeliness. The sequence begins with a medium shot of David who is lying on his stomach with his head facing Lynn’s naked upper body. The camera follows his head as he moves down Lynn’s torso, pushing up her tank top and kissing and licking her genital region. This moment of physical pleasure and intimacy is interrupted by the beeping sound of an alarm clock, which causes David to stop immediately and to focus his attention on the disruptive sound. Reorienting his body away from Lynn, he reaches to the right, beyond the bed, and picks up his wristwatch to disable the alarm. While the camera remains in the same position, he puts on this watch and sits up on the edge of the bed, having his back turned to Lynn. The camera is positioned in such a way that viewers see Lynn’s partially naked torso and pubic hair in the front and David’s naked torso in the back right, partially outside the frame. A sudden cut to a long shot of the room depicts Lynn’s body in the centre of the frame, still lying on the bed naked, while David is to the right, putting on his underwear and his shirt. Upon hearing the off-screen sound of a door opening, Lynn moves and quickly covers up her body with the duvet cover. David stands up and moves outside

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of the frame while the camera is still focused on Lynn, sitting up in bed, as the person in the centre of the frame. Viewers hear the noise of zippers and see a dark body (presumably David) sitting down on the side of the bed. A cut to a medium shot of a door where a girl’s head appears ultimately disrupts the couple’s time of intimacy. Much like the sequence at David’s apartment, this scene is emblematic of an untimely aesthetics that is established not only through the moment of interrupted intimacy between the couple but also through the jump cut that takes viewers from Koji’s apartment at night, where he masturbates to the sounds of his next-door neighbour having sex, to Lynn’s room in the morning. It is unclear whether the latter is temporally connected to the former  – the scene with Lynn is the following morning  – or whether there is a temporal gap of at least one day between these two scenes. Regardless of how much time passes, the editing choice creates a sense of temporal ambiguity and renders  the two sequences temporally connected yet disjointed. On the one hand, the sequential relationship of morning to night evokes a sense of linearity for viewers, whose normative cultural understanding of time encourages them to link the two scenes, and affirms the ideas of timeliness. On  the other hand, the jump cut does not provide any contextual clues that would suggest that the two sequences are indeed happening in immediate succession, rendering the sequence untimely. Another scene that foregrounds Lynn’s desire for familial belonging and for normativity occurs shortly after Lynn’s conversation with David, in his apartment, when she asks him if he intends to marry her. The sequence begins with Lynn trying to get into her brother’s apartment, where she is unable to unlock the door because her keys do not seem to fit. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts, she gives up, sits down in front of the door, and starts crying. When the elevator door close by opens, Antonia comes out with grocery bags in her hands and walks past Lynn without acknowledging the presence of the clearly distressed young woman in front of the door. Antonia unlocks her door, walks in, and shuts the door behind her. A few seconds later, the door swings open and viewers see Antonia walking down the illuminated hallway in the apartment. A cut to the next scene shows Lynn cleaning the bathroom in her brother’s apartment.42 Since David does not provide Lynn with a clear answer, her return to her brother’s apartment can be read as her active pursuit of her desire for normative relationality – that is, she elects to enter the sphere of the home, which stands in for and endorses monoheteronormativity, when David withholds his participation in her articulation of a fantasy of just

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such a realm with him. Thus, the shift from Lynn’s being locked out to Antonia’s reluctant invitation to allow the young woman to enter the apartment indicates the sister-in-law’s willingness for Lynn to access the space and to join the normative familial structures, which is affirmed by the film’s immediate jump cut to the bathroom. Although it is again unclear how this sequence at the apartment door is temporally connected to the one in the bathroom, the jump cut encourages viewers to read the latter as a confirmation of Lynn’s acceptance within and integration into the nuclear family unit of the brother, sister-in-law, and their two children. While the sequences analyzed thus far speak to Lynn’s desire to forge normative bonds and to register as a proper subject, The Days Between is also filled with moments of nonnormative relationality as well as instances when the normative and the nonnormative collide and untimeliness comes to the fore. One such instance involves Marie, Lynn’s coworker at the cafeteria, when David picks up his girlfriend at that establishment. The entire sequence is a long shot of a hallway in the middle, framed by a tiled wall and David, who walks into the frame on the right side. It appears that he is arriving at the meeting spot, but Lynn is not there yet. Visibly irritated, he paces up and down in the entryway. He stops and turns his head to the hallway to watch two figures walk towards him – based on the silhouettes and the hair styles, it is Marie on the left and Lynn on the right. The two women come down the hallway, and Lynn walks up to David to hug and kiss him. He does not reciprocate this greeting in the same manner and pulls away slightly. Marie stands to the left of the couple, turns her head towards them, and then turns away immediately, making a slightly perturbed face. While Lynn seems to kiss David passionately, his body language does not reflect the same kind of passion (see figure 4.16). He proceeds to ask if she has been smoking again and states: “it makes me nauseous,”43 implying that he does not like the taste (the “it” in this case) that smoking leaves in Lynn’s mouth. Lynn responds affirmatively to David’s assertion, laughs, and turns away from him and towards Marie.44 While Lynn faces Marie and puts her hand to Marie’s cheek, whom she is about to kiss, David turns his gaze away from the two women and looks irritated (see figure 4.17). Then the film cuts to a long shot of the outside of the building, where Lynn’s bike is chained to a metal handrail. In the case of Lynn in The Days Between, the act of smoking can be read as an expression of resistance to being legible by others as a proper subject and as one way of growing sideways by embracing a mode of being that does not register as productive. Indeed, David’s question

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Figure 4.16 Lynn kissing David.

Figure 4.17 Lynn kissing Marie.

and statement, accompanied by his reaction, underline that Lynn has not stopped smoking despite, or maybe because of, his complaints. In his eyes, her choice is about engaging in an act that she knows results in a rift between them because it turns him off and away from her and makes her less desirable to him. By doing what she wants but what revolts him, Lynn picks what affects the ways in which the two of them express intimacy as a couple to solidify their relationship. This conflict that turns the couple’s bodies away from one another is further underlined by Lynn’s kissing Marie, which seems to be the

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consequence of David’s lack of affirmation. Although it is unclear whether Lynn has exchanged any type of physical intimacy with Marie before, whether kissing is Lynn’s typical way of saying goodbye to Marie, whether David’s statement elicited the kiss, or whether it occurred in that particular moment because Lynn simply decided to kiss Marie, the brief instant of intimacy between the two women marks a moment of Lynn’s turning away from David and of David’s turning away from her. This being so, Lynn’s decision to kiss Marie can be read as an active uncoupling from the “good life” and “proper” heterosexuality embodied by David. In this sequence, Lynn epitomizes the kind of queer “child” who refuses to perform those actions that signal progress, growth, and betterment as well as socio-cultural normative expressions of intimacy  and relationality. Instead, she connects with Marie through her touch and kiss in a way that is received markedly different from David’s. He asserts that he finds Lynn’s behaviour disgusting and dislikes her expression of affection for him under the given circumstances, rejecting precisely the act that demonstrates their intimate relationship. As he turns away from her, Lynn responds by directing her attention and affection to Marie to connect with her for a brief moment. Contrary to David, who clearly disapproves of Lynn’s desire to connect through a kiss, Marie’s body language and facial expression underscore that she enjoys Lynn’s attention and intimacy. Although the film never explicitly states Marie’s sexual preferences, this particular kiss between Lynn and Marie is an expression of a nonnormative bond and disrupts the established normativity embodied and  affirmed through the presence of David and the kiss between him and Lynn before the film returns to a shot of the couple. While I do not wish to argue for the ways in which one could read this kiss through the lens of identity politics or claim that Marie and/or Lynn identify themselves or can be identified by the audience as lesbian, the aesthetics  – and, more specifically, the mise-en-scéne  – of the scene allows me to read it as a moment when queerness unfolds and Lynn is an untimely body. What mobilizes my reading here is precisely the combination of time, filmic figures, cinematography, and editing choices. In this instance, timeliness is established by David when he arrives at the cafeteria. Pacing back and forth and looking at his watch underscores the fact that he is forced to wait and makes the audience hyper-aware of the present moment and the importance of time rather than space. Indeed, David registers in this scene in particular, and throughout the film in general, as a timely body who adheres to a set

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of normative routines and schedules and serves as the foil to those filmic figures who embrace moments of unhinging themselves from those cadences and become untimely. During this specific sequence, it is Lynn who invites a reading of her body as untimely when she kisses both David and Marie in succession. While the kiss with David is short (roughly three seconds) and his reaction immediately creates distance between the couple, Lynn’s kiss with Marie functions as a counterpoint. The time of the kiss with Marie (close to six seconds) is longer than the one with David, and when Lynn puts her hand on Marie’s cheek, it becomes legible as more than a brief and casual kiss to say goodbye. Instead, the length and the accompanying gestures signal intimacy, passion, and reciprocity and render the two women, in the presence of David’s timely body, which actively turns away from them, untimely, even if this temporary unhinging only lasts for the duration of the kiss. Indeed, David’s existence in the frame at the conclusion of the sequence that marks the end of the kiss functions as a reminder that the film moves on, and Lynn is jolted out of the moment of untimeliness. Throughout the entire sequence, the lack of camera movement and cuts establishes a sense of duration and a realm in which both kisses happen in rather short succession, which constructs temporal continuity and a connection between the three figures and allows for the emergence and co-existence of timeliness and untimeliness. In so doing, both framing and positioning of the protagonists construct a sphere of untimeliness, which encourages viewers to draw connections between the two intimate encounters and to position the normativity associated with David vis-à-vis Lynn’s queerness. This instance of nonnormative relationality does not extend beyond the time of the kiss and is terminated as soon as the film cuts to the next long shot of Lynn  and David, undoing the possibility of nonnormativity and returning her to the straight path. A similar moment of intimacy that unsettles the normative formation of the couple emerges when Koji shows up at Lynn’s home unannounced.45 He rings the doorbell and one of the kids opens the door without engaging with him while Antonia is hanging up laundry on the balcony. A cut to the door reveals Koji, who seems confused that no adult figure is at the door to greet him. He opens it and walks slowly and inquisitively into the apartment. The camera is positioned in front of him and he is walking towards it until he reaches it. Once he is in line with the camera, it pans to the left and changes to a tracking shot following Koji. He says hello and asks Antonia if Lynn is at home, first

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in English and then in a somewhat incorrect and broken German, and introduces himself. Antonia nods slightly and walks out of the frame to the left. While the camera stays with Koji, viewers hear her steps and a door open. After a few seconds, Antonia reappears in the frame. She asks her daughters where Lynn is, but they do not know. Antonia walks out of the frame again and heads down a different hallway. A cut takes the audience into the bathroom with the camera facing the door. Although Lynn is not in the frame, the sound of water splashing suggests that she is taking a bath. Antonia enters and tells Lynn that she has a visitor and then leaves once Koji appears at the door and enters the space. He appears to be nervous, unsure, and uncomfortable to be in the bathroom with Lynn, who is naked in the tub but does not seem to be too perturbed by the situation. Not knowing what to make of all of this, he awkwardly asks her how she is doing. In lieu of a verbal response, she turns towards him, reaches out her arm to gently touch Koji’s, pulls him closer to the bathtub, and kisses him tenderly. This moment of intimacy is interrupted by a knock on the door and by Antonia’s opening it and entering. Koji stands up and moves back so that Antonia can come over and hand Lynn the telephone, speaking the word “David” to let her know who is on the line. Lynn takes the call with Koji still standing in the bathroom next to her, but does not say more than hello and yes before the film cuts to the next sequence. What is important here is that Lynn is not in her own room in the apartment but in the bathroom, a space that appears several times in the film and functions as a realm able to signal both her belonging and nonbelonging to the normative family unit. This dualism is linked to how Lynn inhabits the bathroom and the kinds of tasks she performs in it. In other words, it is linked to her actions, which are linked to the dichotomy of clean versus dirty, signalling either integration or separation. The former is achieved when Lynn cleans the bathroom, a task that embeds her in the traditional familial structure as it manifests her desire and willingness to belong. She becomes legible as a productive member of the family, or a “good” child who behaves “properly” and takes on chores that are associated with maintenance of the shared space. The latter comes to the fore when she steals a bottle of champaign from the fridge and viewers watch her taking a bath while drinking the alcohol and smoking, leaving the cigarette butts on the edge of the tub. During this sequence, Lynn’s actions emphasize a disregard for  the  shared space and, by extension, for the other family members and turn the room into a realm that appears to be disconnected from the rest of the apartment. She does not exhibit any regard for participating in

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the familial structures and protocols that evince care for others and an inclination for fostering conviviality. Thus, the bathroom becomes a realm that allows nonnormative intimacy to erupt while also foreclosing its possibility beyond a temporary existence, in which Lynn becomes legible as the queer child with its unproductive and self-centred modes of refusing normativity. What allows me to read this sequence through the framework of untimeliness are its distinct cinematography and editing choices, which enable an intimate bond to emerge once Lynn invites Koji into the bathroom. This simple articulation of “come in” encourages him to move closer, moving directly towards the camera and then stopping. Although viewers know that Lynn is present as well, this particular perspective and the focus on Koji forecloses the possibility for relationality. Unsure what to do, he takes a few steps and leans again the wall while the camera follows him and remains focused on  his head at medium shot distance. His head is tilted downward and his gaze is directed at the floor. He looks up briefly twice and smiles but is unsure how to respond and what to do. Since the camera is positioned in a way that withholds an inside view of the bathroom and stays exclusively with Koji, he is made present. Thus, the camera perspective renders him timely in the present without hinting at the possibility of a future, while the audience is forced to endure and linger with him in this moment. Only a cut to a reverse shot of the bathroom with the window in the centre, the bathtub with Lynn in it on the left, and Koji against the wall on the right finally moves the sequence along and allows viewers into the room, initiating the creation of a connection between the two protagonists by allowing them to reside inside the frame. When Lynn removes a towel from a small stool and looks at Koji in an inviting manner without speaking to him, he finally moves closer and sits down, bringing their bodies into closer proximity (see figure 4.18). When he asks her how she is doing, she turns towards him, reaches out her arm to gently touch his, and pulls him closer to the bathtub to kiss him tenderly – a kiss that Koji reciprocates. Although performed with a man this time, Lynn’s kiss again functions as a way to construct an intimate bond that allows her to temporarily escape her world of mononormativity. However, much like before, this encounter and brief moment of intimacy is interrupted by a knock on the door. Antonia enters swiftly to deliver the phone because David is on the line, serving as a reminder and proxy for the monoheteronormative relationship structures connected to David and undoing this instance of intimacy.

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Figure 4.18 Koji sitting in Lynn’s bathroom while she is in the tub, taking a bath.

Akin to other sequences in the film, the long takes create a sense of stillness and ask viewers to endure in the present and to always read for affectivity and to watch the film with a sense of anticipation regarding what the future might bring. This being the case, my reading adds productively to Landry’s analysis of the film, which foregrounds mobility and the circulation of desire between Lynn and “her kinetic kin” Koji.46 Instead of focusing on movement, I foreground Speth’s editing choices and, more specifically, her use of long takes and long shots over a quick succession of cuts and short takes as a kind of untimely aesthetics to generate a feeling of continuity and to draw viewers’ attention to the connection and the affects that emerge between the two characters in the bathroom. Indeed, the audience is invited to enter the room, pause, and stay with the figures, reading for affectivity rather than affect making impossible a reading in the way that Brinkema suggests.47 Thus, viewers contemplate their attachment to not only the possibility of and desire for intimacy between Koji and Lynn but also to their own investment in affective ties to the “good life” and the importance of forging connections in their own lives. However, The Days Between underscores that relationality is tenuous and fleeting, regardless of whether or not those bonds affirm or resist monoheteronormativity. Overall, Speth’s film is filled with instances in which Lynn wavers between growing up and sideways and seeking attachments to and detachments from others. Through its unique aesthetics, character development, and storyline, it constructs moments during which

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intimacies are exchanged, paused, or withheld from its various subjects. The Days Between presents viewers with normative progress narratives and traditional relational figurations of coupledom or family units and confronts its audience with possibilities of formations that do not glorify and reify normative modes of being in the world. Lynn as the figure of the queer child destabilizes hegemonic socio-cultural expectations and encourages spectators to explore the potentials of encounters that render bodies timely and untimely and that also unsettle a romanticized vision of both normativity and nonnormativity. My readings of the three films reflect, in the words of queer theorist Annamarie Jagose, “the as-if inevitable clash of the normative and the antinormative.”48 While this chapter focuses on the category of time as a means to suture the nonnormative and normative in the figures of Armin, Nina, and Lynn, respectively, the films’ untimely aesthetics more generally create a sense of mediated immediacy that allows or even demands that we reflect critically upon our investments in and resistance to both normative and queer figurations and formations. What Armin, Nina, and Lynn demonstrate is that, when they grow sideways and embrace modalities of an alternative temporality, which possess the potential to undo the hegemonic rhythms of normative life, they are able to glance into the future to perceive a form of existence in the then, which, in turn, allows them to gaze back and recognize, retrospectively, possible moments of pleasure that they might not be able to see in the now. Overall, I Am Guilty, Ghosts, and The Days Between demand that their viewers re-examine traditions and values and ask them to revisit and revise their own ways of longing and belonging in this world. In this sense, the protagonists encourage us to ponder the possibility of getting stuck in a present moment that weighs us down or exposes us to violence and a political or economic insecurity that renders us materially and psychologically precarious. However, as the films also show, we also have the opportunity, and possibly the responsibility, as conscientious citizens, to interrogate the present or the now. If we do so, we may be able to envision the potential of a then to embrace opportunities of relationship-making that allow us not only to explore queer affinities and forge bonds but also to reject them altogether.

Conclusion

Championing the Now and/or Moving Onward towards a Then?

Throughout this book, I demonstrate how various filmic characters must contend with conceptualizations of linear as well as nonlinear temporality and how these are linked to notions of intimacy and relationality. As my discussion of monoheteronormativity in chapter 2, of familial (re)configurations in chapter 3, and of reimagination of nonnormative relational bonds in chapter 4 evince, this book emphasizes how the films at times represent affirmations of, and at other times interventions into, the rhythms of what Muñoz deems “the coercive choreography of a here and now.”1 The filmic figures, I contend, are indeed embedded in the restrictive structures of the now and its coercive cadences and temporal patterns of time that render them timely, even as they also challenge the system as untimely bodies – expressing their longing for a queer utopian then when they refuse to relate, engage in reproductive and nonviolent sexual acts, and register to others as productive citizen-subjects. In other words, the films portray what Clarke deems characteristic of many Berlin School films – namely, a sense of liberation that is accompanied by a further subjection to the dominant social order.2 They depict characters whose particular sexual and gendered gestures, performances, and practices create alternative forms of knowledge, affect, and belonging that exist beyond the dominant logics of heteronormativity, yet they ultimately foreclose the possibility of the permanency of these alternative modalities. As the protagonists’ actions point to what is at stake when an individual’s behaviour disrupts notions of traditional socio-cultural relationality and (mono)heteronormative intimacy, the cinematic texts analyzed in this book make visible and critically interrogate the persistence of those norms and regulations that fuse and unite but that also separate and estrange subjects. As exemplary works of what Abel

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calls the “counter-cinema of the Berlin School,”3 the films discussed undermine normative expectations associated with the kind of narrative development and flow, as well as its cinematographic rendering, that are emblematic of depictions of monoheteronormativity in post-2000 mainstream cinema. This being the case, they encourage their audience to examine their own attachment to the “good life” in ways that do not allow viewers to immerse themselves in the film-worlds for the sake of entertainment and to abstract themselves from their empirical reality.4 Indeed, the four chapters of Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics pay close attention to attachments to and detachments from coercive normative matrices and how moments of stuckness allow for a glance towards the horizon of futurity without proposing that the then is within reach. By titling this conclusion as a question rather than as an affirmative statement, I seek in these final pages to encourage my readers to become active rather than to propose fixed answers and concluding thoughts: it is a call to reflect on the present state of affairs in the now and to ponder where to go from here. In introducing the concept of untimeliness, I hope to provide a new approach to the cinema of the Berlin School and thus to add to a robust corpus of scholarship on contemporary German film. In its emphasis on the word “time,” the term “untimeliness” visually underscores my focus on temporality rather than on space and allows for an analysis of select works of contemporary filmic production that engage with the depictions of heteronormative patterns and rhythms of straight time that structure the lives of the protagonists. While the films portray different types of possibilities for intimacy and relational connections that can emerge from either upholding or refuting normative routines and tempos, these texts also paint a bleak picture of their protagonists’ lifeworlds – a gloomy and negative image that is only occasionally lightened by temporary moments of hope and potential in which the characters are able to establish bonds with others. I thus uncover in these works not only a sense of cruel optimism, stuckness, and impassivity but also a potential that is directed at the cultural, economic, and political conditions of twenty-first-century German society. I offer a way of reading post-2000 filmic texts that resists the bifurcation of intimacy as either normative or nonnormative and underscores that relationality is complicated by the desire to be embedded in or resistant to chrononormativity. This sense of hopelessness and cynicism regarding the present moment is characteristic and particularly prevalent in the two Berlin School films I analyze in chapter 3: Köhler’s Windows on Monday and Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment. While all the filmic figures featured in

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this book display a sense of awkward disconnectedness from the world around them, the various members of two nuclear families appear to be unable to relate to one another, which is linked to the slow disintegration and crumbling of the (hetero)normative family unit and the suspension of an investment in the child as the symbol of futurity and linear progress narratives. Thus, my analyses draw attention to the ways in which pausing and holding, as well as incompleteness, cause shifts and changes to the normative tempos and rhythms of straight time. As the characters find themselves in the midst of their respective renovation projects that never achieve completion, they resist and embrace stuckness or impassivity and become untimely bodies. A lack of hope and potential, although in a different sense, is also at the heart of Hochhäusler’s I Am Guilty, Petzold’s Ghosts, and Speth’s The Days Between (see chapter 4). In their respective protaganists, all three films display examples of failed and nonnormative existences that register with viewers as estranged and detached. Although they seem to fail in their efforts to establish bonds with others, these characters also display a desire to become and remain visible within the dominant structures of society. Thus, they oscillate between becoming untimely and yearning to become timely, while never fully embracing either mode. Ultimately, the figures persist in their lifeworlds without substantive connections to others. Heteronormative coupling is also central to my analysis in chapter 2, in which I engage critically with the notion of mononormativity in the cinema of the Berlin School. Ade’s Everybody Else, Hochhäusler’s The City Below, and Grisebach’s Longing present different modes of forging intimate connections that call into question the dominant status of traditional heterosexual coupledom and the related temporal rhythms and cadences, which render bodies timely. By offering different yet temporary ways of forging bonds with others that suggest untimeliness, the three films feature protagonists who embrace moments and momentums that register as attempts to temporarily misalign them with the scripts of monoheteronormativity. In my analysis of these films and their contribution to and commentary on twenty-first-century cinematic production, I show that post-2000 Berlin School filmmakers are preoccupied with time and its correlation to the establishment and enforcement of dominant power structures. These works compel their audience to think about the impact of normative temporal patterns and structures on subjectivity and relationality and to question how they all attempt to encourage

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viewers to detach from a reliance on normative lives and linear narration. By defying conventional modes of filmmaking, the works urge their respective audiences to halt, endure, and possibly even rewatch in order to make sense of the story-worlds. In the process, these works further prompt viewers to think through potential attachments to normative routines and patterns not only as these shape filmic texts but also as they shape their own lives. In so doing, all of the works of Berlin School cinema that I discuss challenge the receivers to examine their desires to become timely or untimely. I focus mainly on relationality and intimacy and their impact on the regulation of bodies, desires, and subjectivities. Of particular interest is how bodies are aligned with or turned away from normative temporal rhythms and tempos as they find themselves navigating the tricky waters of normative familiality, partnerships, and even friendships. Given the fact that traditional social relations are changing, a closer investigation of these transformations and the impact of neoliberal notions of self-transformation and the optimization of life, capitalism, and (mass) consumerism on Berlin School films might shed additional light on the representations of twenty-first-century social ties and relational bonds. In this conclusion, I want to offer a few thoughts on the ways in which neoliberalism determines and regulates the definition and formation of a “proper” citizen body and plays a role in the figuration of different intimate relational attachments and familial configurations. Indeed, progress and advancement have increasingly been coupled with certain notions of economic status and cultural standards that coerce individuals into believing in false narratives of independence and self-optimization. Rather than forging bonds, collectives, and coalitions, subjects desire to experience a high degree of freedom and independence. These ideal neoliberal subjects, like the protagonists in the films discussed, do not exclusively rely on the existence of connections and lines of support: they are also driven by striving for personal gratification and achievements instead of championing solidarity and relationality. In order to think about the coercive mechanisms of neoliberalism and their impact on the ways people connect, I want to make a case for the linkage among temporality, heteronormativity, (economic) inequality, and precarity. While the former two are integral to my theorization and analyses, a consideration of the latter two is at the heart of the rest of this conclusion. Being confronted with the dialectic dilemma of being in-sync and out-of-sync with straight time and registering as a proper body, I speculate about what happens to those subjects who are

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privileged and not bound by any restraints and what happens to those forced to fall in line with the temporal patterns of the system to register as acceptable, as proper citizen-subjects. Is this kind of acceptability contingent upon becoming a body “in time” who has adapted to the changes of the logics of neoliberal paradigms? What about those who seek to embrace a sense of being in-sync with the temporal structure of the larger system and those who choose escape? What about those who are not able to afford to make such a choice? And, if they can afford to do so, is getting away a valid possibility? Who are those bodies that are unable to enjoy such liberty?

The Neoliberal World of the Twenty-First Century In order to address these questions as to what bodies register as “proper” within contemporary structures of chrononormativity, it is important to consider the promises and potential moments of self-optimization and “freedom” that neoliberal fantasies perpetuate. The term “neoliberalism” emerged in the 1980s and has been used to describe a set of economic theories that advocate practices of privatization, deregulation, and free trade. Drawing upon the major principles of free markets and minimal government participation of the classical Anglo-European liberalism of the seventeenth century, neoliberal economic policies seek to “free” the market through the removal of regulations and restrictions in order to create an atmosphere that stimulates growth. This has commonly included the limitation of government subsidies such as social welfare programs, the removal of exchange rates, an opening and deregulation of economic markets to encourage global trade, the privatization of state-run businesses, and the endorsement of private property.5 While it might appear that neoliberal polemics and policies are mainly concerned with the increase of corporate profit and growth, Lisa Duggan emphasizes the intimate relationship and close correlation between neoliberalism and identity and cultural politics as well as the intersections of class, race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender.6 This interrelatedness becomes ever more apparent when we consider that “class and racial hierarchies, gender and sexual institutions, religious and ethnic boundaries are the channels through which money, political power, cultural resources, and social organization flow.”7 These “flows” and movements not only foster and uphold the upward redistribution of resources but also create sharp and striking inequalities which, in turn, frame and shape the conditions “of life and death, of hope and harm, and of endurance and exhaustion” of particular individuals,

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groups, and/or communities.8 Based on a plethora of imbalances, discrepancies, and disparities in the economic, cultural, political, and legal sectors, society becomes increasingly divided into those who possess goods, means, and prospects, and those who do not. As the ones on top continue to shuffle assets, capital, and supplies to their advantage, those on the bottom face a life defined by precarity and dispossession. Generally speaking, the term “dispossession” describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property, and, more broadly, a sense of belonging to the world. “Dispossession,” Athena Athanasiou aptly observes, “carries within it regulatory practices related to the conditions of situatedness, displacement, and emplacement, practices that produce and constrain human intelligibility. [It is] … mapped onto our bodies, onto particular bodies-in-place, through normative matrices, but also through situated practices of racism, gender, sexuality, intimacy, able-bodiedness, economy, and citizenship.”9 In other words, being dispossessed and having lost one’s place in the world signifies that one’s “proper place [of being] is nonbeing.”10 Thus, dispossession resembles a state or positionality from which one is rendered unintelligible, disposable, or precarious. Precarity emerges out of a robust discussion of neoliberal capitalism and is marked by insecurity and an exposure of the individual to a hegemonic system. This system establishes a hierarchy that produces and perceives some bodies as nonnormative and other. Thus, precarity, as Butler notes, characterizes a body that possesses an “invariably public dimension” and is “a social phenomenon in the public sphere [that] is and is not [one’s own].”11 In other words, Butler understands the subject to be embedded in a nexus of communal, collective, and social relations – “the public sphere.” Based on the existence and importance of these alliances and bonds for the fashioning and formation of the body, they are concomitantly part of the subject proper and the larger realm of the public. In a similar vein, Berlant gives prominence to precariousness and its relationships to the physical body and society, which in their analysis is multifaceted and can refer to a variety of correlations and interconnections, such as the relation between its (i.e.,precariousness’s) materiality in class and political terms, its appearances as an affect, and its existence as an emotionally invested slogan that circulates in and beyond specific circumstances.12 It is a rallying cry for a thriving new world of interdependency and care that is not just private but also an idiom for describing a loss of faith in a fantasy world to which generations have become accustomed.

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What distinguishes these scholars and their approaches to precarity can best be underscored through a single word from each quotation: Butler’s “phenomenon” versus Berlant’s “materiality,”13 or, in other words, their differences in the theorizations of the dialogic exchange between body and bodies, or individual and society. Not only here but also in many of their other works, Butler critically engages with what they call the metaphysics of substance14 and proposes that “socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility” are constitutive of one’s identity.15 In this sense, they are less interested in the carnality of the body and how the individual experiences being in the world on a concrete physical, mental, and affective level and is much more concerned with relationality itself and the discursive practices that govern one’s being and being-in-the-world. Contrary to Butler, Berlant is very much invested in the felt corporal effects and responses of individuals to their surroundings. Berlant foregrounds precisely how the relationship between individual and society shapes the body somatically, affectively, and emotionally and the impact that events can have on the subject. Thus, Berlant’s primary concern is everyday life and how belonging is mediated in what they call the “intimate public sphere.”16 In other words, they address how one’s intimate, sexual, and personal life is sustained and valued in the political and public realm. Understanding that, while the crumbling of the “faith in a fantasy world” is experienced through dispossession and precariousness, it also carries with it a productive potential, an understanding that Butler and Berlant share, is crucial for the analysis of the filmic subjects in Berlin School cinema. This book attends to the seemingly unintelligible incoherence and opaqueness of nonnormative subjects in ways that emphasize that these states of being do not merely disenfranchise and marginalize them. In other words, unintelligibility can be understood as a generative and valuable force that allows these social bodies and minds to form alternative bonds in order to resist becoming “expendable and disposable by forces of exploitation, poverty, machismo, homophobia, racism, and militarization.”17 In this sense, many of the characters in the films examined demand to be acknowledged and to be recognized as persons and, thus, repoliticize belonging. Indeed, their ideas and actions suggest that it is “not just about being and having but also about longing: perhaps longing for a different way to cohabit the political,”18 either as timely or untimely bodies. This kind of longing for untimeliness can ultimately affectively mobilize feelings of despair, rage, or anxiety into a promise of different possibilities and a sense of nonsentimental hope.

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Neoliberalism in/and German Cultural History Since the majority of scholarly works engaging with neoliberalism have been published in the United States and have used this context as their point of reference, one might argue that neoliberlism is either less applicable to German culture than to North American culture or, indeed, not at all applicable. However, scholars in various disciplines, such as sociologist Myra Marx Ferree, political scientist Thomas Meyer, and films scholars Baer and Helga Druxes, challenge the assumption that neoliberalism as a concept is more closely tied to North America than to Germany. They reject the notion that Germany’s social democratic policies are at odds with neoliberal policies and argue that so-called technologies of the self intervene in and affect people’s lives.19 While Ferree investigates the development of the German feminist movement and the impact that liberalism and neoliberalism have had on how German feminists mobilize politically, Meyer underscores how the Social Democratic Party-led government has implemented a host of “liberal” policies that not only secured the welfare state (at least up until 1998) but also fostered relations with business leaders and the rise of globalization.20 This trend, according to Meyer, has continued in the early twenty-first century, as becomes ever more clear when one reviews what kinds of reform proposals for the economy, the health care system, and the labour market have been part of the party program.21 Thus, even the SPD has now supported and called for the ratification and implementation of policies that are shaped by neoliberal governmentality and capitalism. Furthermore, the fact that contemporary artists and writers are engaging with neoliberalism, precarity, and the construction of subjectivity is evidence that certain sets of practices and beliefs play an important role in contemporary cultural discourse in German-speaking countries. These topics are not only central to the works interrogated in this book but are also key to works by many contemporary filmmakers.22 This portrayal of particular issues includes many Berlin School filmmakers, such as Maren Ade, Dominik Graf, Benjamin Heisenberg, and Angela Schanelec, who are deeply committed to addressing current affairs and their impact on individuals and society at large (both in Germany and beyond). All of these writers and directors explore the rise of neoliberal capitalism and how it uses a rhetoric of equality, citizenship, and freedom of choice to mask the actual constraints it produces.

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Contributing to the scholarly discussion of neoliberal capitalism and its ramifications for the construction of contemporary subjectivity, Germanists such as Baer and Druxes to a lesser extent not only deem neoliberalism applicable to the German context but also underscore how neoliberal financialization has penetrated other spheres of everyday life. In her various scholarly contributions on contemporary literature and film, Druxes shows that many of the works by female authors who grew up in the former gDr express a sense of scepticism towards neoliberalism and the subjugation of women or posit an exaggerated depiction of women as the ideal neoliberal subject who willingly embraces the “credo of self-optimization along with their consumerism and their work ethic” at the expense of not having much of a personal or family life.23 Women are thus exposed to the scrutiny of failing as mothers and being noncompliant with traditional gender roles in the corporate world while at the same time being expected to further their careers and be professional without being perceived as too efficient and alienating to their male colleagues. Indeed, neoliberalism has encouraged women  to partake in the globalized system of embracing a career-driven 24/7 work life as well as capitalist consumerism while perpetuating the normative gender roles and expectations of traditional motherhood. In a similar fashion, Baer’s latest book on the cinema of neoliberalism, German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (2021), and numerous journal articles on Berlin School films and filmmakers demonstrate how the neoliberal marketplace allows for the proliferation of feminist cinema and women’s films that take an intersectional approach in the portrayal of their protagonists navigating everyday life and successfully masks its sexist practices and the misogyny that many female directors face. In fact, many Berlin School films, according to Baer, “are firmly embedded in the same neoliberal mediascape that they also place on display.”24 Additionally, Baer affirms Druxes’s observation that contemporary German film can be read as a commentary on neoliberalism as a “highly gendered cultural formation,”25 which seeks to regulate women’s actions more so than men’s under the guise of freedom, self-optimization, and self-transformation. Both Druxes and Baer identify what I understand to be the pervasive presence of the spectre of neoliberalism: it masks itself as an indiscernible force, believed not to exist within Germany’s socio-political and cultural landscape and thus often not included in scholarly analysis. However, it nevertheless haunts the lives of many subjects who perceive it as a form of progress and advancement, and not as an eerie presence of

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normative forces and dictates. In twenty-first-century Germany, ideas of identity and selfhood have become coupled with certain economic and cultural modes of thinking that coerce individuals into believing that today’s world is one in which “competition is the primary virtue, and solidarity is a sign of weakness.”26 In this world, individuals are duped into understanding themselves to be independent decision makers who experience a high degree of freedom and superiority over others and thus reject any type of unionization or formation of collectives to consolidate their political power when, in reality, many people are caught in the invisible web of normative power structures enforced and perpetuated by various institutions and individuals, which isolates them from others. In a study published in 2012, political scientist John Peters draws on recent statistics published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (oeCD) and trade unions in order to outline the rise of neoliberalism in North America and Western Europe and its connection to the decrease in industrial unions and the decline of workers’ influence on socialist parties in Western Europe. While he does not point to a direct correlation between neoliberalism and heteronormativity, I would argue that the shift in votes to right-wing populist parties in the 1990s and early 2000s not only affected the bargaining power of labour unions but also resulted in those “public sector reforms” that hinge on the kinds of conservative socio-cultural values that these parties typically endorse and propagate.27 Thus, neoliberal power structures not only shaped the labour market and work practices, but its regulatory ideologies, such as heteronormativity and misogyny, also guided the ways in which subjects are expected to operate within narrowly defined socio-cultural structures. Keeping this reciprocal nature of economic and cultural neoliberalism in mind, I understand the films discussed in this book as critical examples of the rise and prevalence of (mono/hetero)normative ways of existing and relating to one another in the German-speaking world in the twenty-first century, which are indeed affected by the neoliberal narratives of productivity and efficiency. While many of the texts can be read as expressions of or responses to a certain type of pessimism and evince a sense of desolation due to a growing awareness of how many of neoliberalism’s promises have failed its citizens, their impassivity and  apprehensive perspective also allow for the emergence of potential and possibilities. Therefore, I contend that the films can be understood as attempting to shape the discourse of German cultural history in much the same way that Smith and Stehle maintain that

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“feminist politics and pop culture are reliant upon neoliberal mechanisms even as these are radically rewritten, manipulated, leveraged, and/or clash.”28 Underscoring the duality of adhering to and resisting normative, neoliberal power structures, the filmic texts paint a cynical picture of the contemporary world – a world in which subjects often elect and even desire to conform to the normative temporal rhythms of “straight” time or are coaxed by neoliberal narratives into a faith in self-optimization and progress, a world in which many individuals are confronted with a reality that forces them to act in accordance with the cadences and rhythms of the system. However, this is also a world that provides opportunities for different and unfamiliar ways for individuals to connect and forge bonds.

Untimeliness in/and the Neoliberal World Extrapolating from the idea of a concurrence and flux of temporal realities, I also understand timeliness to characterize the state of abiding by the regulatory temporal norms and rhythms of the capitalist system. More specifically, timeliness is closely tied to work and its highly regimented temporal patterns, and hinges on the paradox inherent in neoliberalism  – namely, the convergence of economic and sociocultural factors. As Isabell Lorey argues, the majority of citizensubjects experience a lifeworld in which the circulation and prevalence of a narrative of privatization, (self-)optimization, and “freedom” in public discourse overshadows and distracts from the fact that many lives are ever more controlled and rendered precarious.29 Central for the successful execution of this ostensibly liberating and empowering (self-)management under neoliberal capitalism is the reshaping and reconstruction of the traditional segmentation of time understood as distinct blocks of work time and free time into a form of time in which these discrete units become indistinguishable and continuous. Additionally, neoliberalism relies on the ratification of a range of social policies that have dismantled the social safety net and have led to an upward redistribution of power and resources along with biopolitical regulation and the alignment of bodies with heteronormativity. Under neoliberalism, all time is work time – even as neoliberal capitalism perpetuates the fiction of independence as well as self-managed and organized daily rhythms. Work time is all pervasive. Modern technology and shifts to project-based, more flexible work hours do not require the individual to abide by the traditional nine-to-five model and allow people to structure their day more freely. As a result, for many

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the formerly discrete units of work time have dissolved completely and have blended seamlessly with what used to be known as leisure or free time. This amalgamation fuels the engine that sustains the mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism: many subjects are given the “freedom” to determine their work hours however they desire. A cell phone and a five-minute ride on the subway allow people to write a short e-mail and a café with Wifi can, at any moment, turn into one’s “office.”While neoliberal capitalism rests on and successfully perpetuates the existence of work time as an all-pervasive yet invisible force, it also presents consumption and mass consumerism as desirable activities that bestow on subjects a sense of individualism and self-determination. As Daphne Berdahl emphasizes, people perceive the experience of purchasing those consumer goods that they desire not only as an indicator of personal freedom but also as an expression of their “fundamental rights and democratic expressions of individualism.”30 In this sense, the culture of neoliberalism assures us that “self, identity, and labor are defined primarily in relation to consumption,”31 so that work, consumerism, and subjectivity cannot be understood as separate entities under neoliberal capitalism. Instead of existing as individual categories, work, consumerism, and subjectivity have become interlocking concepts of one system in which many people are blinded by the fantasy that they are capable of actively shaping and determining their lives both professionally and personally. In other words, flexible work hours and constant access to a vast variety of consumer goods appear to transform individuals into, and legitimize them as, the ultimate self-optimized and self-directed citizen-subjects within the marketplace and, by extension, the nation. In this sense, those who possess enough purchasing power become both consumer and national bodies while others might be (partially or fully) excluded from becoming legible and from affirming their status as members of society. Given this oxymoronic, dual nature of neoliberalism and the fact that timeliness, with its synonyms, is typically positively connoted, timeliness characterizes precisely the idea that the routines and cadences of individuals are regulated and directed by neoliberal capitalism. This is not to say that all subjects perceive these routines as restrictive or that they have the freedom to choose an alternative order. Indeed, close examination of my core cinematic works indicates that there is a range of ways to relate to timeliness. Individuals can embrace their embeddedness within regulatory systems of power and can even be content with their position inside the system, despite their exposure to

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injustices. These subjects may desire to embrace the system when this very same system repeatedly attempts to prevent them from entering the normative temporal structures or seeks to eject those who have inhabited and claimed their position inside. Others might desire to escape the system but are forced to exist within oppressive structures in order to survive. In contrast, untimely signifies the potential to detach oneself from those cadences and rhythms that neoliberal capitalism prescribes and reinforces. In this sense, untimeliness describes moments when subjects are out-of-sync and foregrounds individuals who actively pursue lives apart from market value, corporate profit, and socio-economic status. As they are able to free themselves from the shackles of a highly routinized and regulated work time, they demonstrate the possibility of being out-of-sync. In this sense, the concept uncovers a temporary promise or a fleeting hope of breaking away from the hegemonic social structures emerging from capitalist-driven work. At other times, becoming untimely is not a matter of choice for subjects. Regardless of whether it is chosen or imposed, however, untimeliness emerges during those moments of stuckness, impassivity, and endurance  – moments that produce tempos that index unboundness from normative temporal rhythms but that do not exclusively direct the subject towards a then as a time that allows for the fulfilment of desires. However, becoming untimely does not necessarily indicate a complete liberation from the precarious circumstances subjects experience when embedded within the system. Individuals might be able to escape the restrictive structures of neoliberalism temporarily and become untimely bodies in ways that do not automatically render them free and signal an absolute detachment. This being so, I attempt to resist the glorification of abandoning the system and fully detaching oneself in order to inhabit a position outside of the social order. I seek to avoid the pitfall of overvaluing untimeliness, which would suggest that this mode of being might be seen as radical, liberated, and thus more desirable. Instead, I argue that, on the one hand, untimeliness indicates a potential to disconnect from neoliberal capitalism and enables bodies to persist and forge connections, while, on the other hand, it may create moments of heightened precarity for certain bodies when they are extracted from those structures that shape the socio-cultural and economic fabric of their lifeworlds. Based on these particular ways in which many subjects are always in flux, moving in and out of regimes of normative rhythms and nonnormative temporal formations, the filmic characters in my corpus

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demonstrate that it is not only impossible fully to escape the cadences and structures of neoliberal time but also that one’s rootedness within the system can render one precarious. Indeed, the three young adults – Armin in I Am Guilty, Nina in Ghosts, and Lynn in The Days Between – serve as prime examples of how their lives are structured by social and cultural expectation and that they are willing to work and organize their lives according to the mandates of normative work time. While Armin struggles to obtain employment, Lynn has a part-time job as a cashier in the university cafeteria, which renders her timely but does not alleviate her state of precarity. While Ghosts does not reveal much about Nina’s life and the audience is supposed to assume that she is a high schooler, work plays a key role from the very beginning of the film, when viewers are introduced to the two women during Nina’s work assignment, which is to pick up litter at a local park – part of her community service sentence for having been caught shoplifting. While this is a fairly standard form of punishment for minor offences, it is nonetheless striking that the corrective measures of the justice system revolve around routinized work details. In lieu of being removed from society in a juvenile prison or detention home, where the offenders’ daily routines are often restructured, work in a public place like a park is commonly understood as an act of retributive justice. It is seen as a disciplinary measure due to the fact that the tasks are often menial and dull. The emphasis is, quite literally, on putting in the time, which is thought of as correcting teenagers’ behaviour and attitudes because the work forces them to engage in something unpleasant, tedious, and beneficial to the community. While one might question the value and effectiveness of such a punishment, in order to analyse this sequence in regard to temporal regimes and work it is more frutiful to focus on the specifics of the practice itself that is, on those aspects of it that are less overtly discussed, potentially overlooked, or even obscured by the state. Regardless of what task the offender has to complete, it consists of organized and scheduled work that is deemed appropriate for the rehabilitation of the delinquent. This type of punishment suggests that the introduction and rehearsal of distinct practices situated within a temporal routine is part of the process of transforming the individual from an improper to a proper member of society. Understood in this vein, subjects are embedded in a highly regimented work program and made timely. Since compulsory in nature, this inscription of timeliness registers as oppressive and, by extension, renders the normative rhythms of everyday daily life or ordinary citizens comparatively liberating.

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Given the linkages among work, time, and punishment, at first glance Nina might register as an untimely body – appearing detached from the temporal routines and patterns that would render her a proper subject. Instead, she is a teenager who does not know her parents and has moved in and out of foster families, is a social outsider, does not attend school regularly, and has come into contact with the law at various times. A second and closer look, however, reveals that Nina is anything but disconnected from such regimes and, in fact, is embedded in them. This duality of appearing to be detached from the system when Nina is actually firmly embedded within its normative structures is reminiscent of a sequence in I Am Guilty, which I discuss in chapter 4, when Armin’s family makes him practise a job interview with his older brother Martin Jr as the employer in the living room of the family home. The film shows them as overlapping: the private is constantly encroaching upon what is considered public or corporate, and vice versa, and the scene infuses family time with interactions that are typically marked as belonging to corporate time. Later, Armin’s actual job interviews at various firms resemble a personality test or questionnaire that Armin has to complete as quickly as possible. Instead of inquiring about the sorts of professional qualifications important in a corporate environment, Armin’s future employer asks the young man to identify personal preferences and emotions with regard to colours, flowers, and the like. One interviewer even goes so far as to reveal information about his own family history. By sharing intimate family details, the employer blurs the lines between private and corporate.32 These examples demonstrate that the tempos and cadences of Armin’s life follow a nontraditional and nonlinear or, to reappropriate Freeman’s term, a chronononnormative pattern. There is no clear division between corporate and family time, or what I term labour and leisure time; rather, the two are interspersed and  – at least partially – overlapping. On the one hand, family time with his brother is turned in the mock interview into scenes of simulating time within a corporate environment; on the other hand, the allegedly necessary fast-paced rhythm of the job interview to measure Armin’s aptitude is disrupted by the personal account of the employer’s family history, slowing down the progression of the interview and unsettling the steady pulse of work time. In this sense, the interviews become exemplary of an erosion of discrete moments of time within neoliberal systems and sets up the  audience for Armin’s sexual encounters with the motorcyclist.

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As the present moment is overshadowed with various rhythms that blur the temporal patterns and sequences of work and leisure time, and the difference between these two distinct temporal segments crumples until it ultimately collapses completely. I Am Guilty suggests that moments of desire are connected to the unfolding of time in a different way. Thus, the interruption of corporate time and the possibility of experiencing pleasure during private time become available to Armin only when he detaches himself from normative cadences of chrononormativity and becomes untimely. These two examples also speak to how Gitti in Everyone Else attempts to stage and refuse normative socio-cultural expectations of desire, intimacy, and coupledom. Akin to Nina, Svenja in The City Below seems to be able to free herself from the shackles of a conventional nineto-five job and the kinds of daily routines that such a life requires – the basic temporal demands include waking up in time for one’s morning duties, getting to work prepared and on time, having lunch during regulated hours, and ending the day at a specific time. When she goes to her job interview, Svenja also desires employment that is aligned with the neoliberal mantras of self-optimization and individualization; however, she shows up with a CV that contains lies, signalling a desire to fulfill normative expectations about productivity and success. Nina has to abide by the rules and schedule of the foster home or the social worker who monitors the park, and, like Sylvia in This Very Moment and Nina in Windows on Monday (see chapter 3), is only tolerated and able to participate successfully in society when she makes herself legible as a timely body. What all the subjects in the films have in common is a cruelly optimistic attachment to the fantasy that they are capable of actively determining the structures that determine the shape their lifeworlds and the ways in which they relate to others. Each subject expresses a sense of self-apprehension that is connected to belonging, belonging to others, or being recognized as a “proper” body either by the dominant system or those who reside outside such normative formations. If it is indeed the case that, under neoliberal capitalism, work time pervades all aspects of an individual’s life, and notions of freedom and privatization disguise the dominance and pervasiveness of hegemonic, normative socio-cultural structures, then all the films analyzed here serve as reminders that all forms of intimacy and relationality are always already commodified for monoheteronormative reproductive purposes and dyadic arrangements of coupling. However, alternative modes of carnality, attachment, and conviviality register as “warm illumination[s]

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of a horizon imbued with potentiality”:33 they are within our field of vison, concretizing in the distance, and come into reach temporarily without manifesting a state of permanency. This book can ultimately be read as an invitation, or as a temptation, to interrogate the now in an effort to examine the coercive structures of the present moment and potentially to move onward and to turn towards a then. Untimeliness, as I characterize it throughout, is about the refusal of absolutes – of both the control and fatality of neoliberal capitalism in the present moment and the euphoric, unrestricted optimism and possibility in the future. This book is an assessment of a few samples of the cinema of the Berlin School and a companion for engaging in filmic analysis through the lens of (queer) temporality; it is, I hope, also a resource to enable my readers to use the framework of untimeliness to critically interrogate their own embeddedness in and attachment to “straight time.” This book is thus meant to be not only an analytical tool but also a potential political guide – a compass of and through the now to direct us neither here nor there. From this mode of being present in the present moment we are given the opportunity to look up and around and shape the then accordingly.

Notes

Introduction 1 Longing, DVD, directed by Valeska Grisebach (Rommel Film, 2006), 43:00. 2 For further reading, see Abel, Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School, 234–45; Mukhida, Sensitive Subjects, 158–71. 3 Over the course of the last three decades, scholarship on the Berlin School has grown so much that it is now a well-established subfield in (German) film studies. For example, there are books by Marco Abel, Olivia Landry, and Roger Cook et al. on the movement at large; an edited volume by Abel and Jaimey Fisher; a number of single-director or -film books by Fisher on Christian Petzold; Gerd Gemünden’s book on Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann; and Brad Prager’s work on Phoenix and Yella (both by Petzold). Furthermore, the Museum of Modern Art published a book to accompany its retrospective of the group’s films. There are a handful of shorter books published in Germany, a special issue in Sense of Cinema, and an ever-growing number of essays and book chapters on the filmmakers and films associated with the Berlin School. 4 In its 2016 spring issue, the feminist zine feral feminisms published an issue titled “Untimely Bodes: Futurity, Resistance, and Non-Normative Embodiment,” which establishes a similar link between time and subjectivity. As the title suggests, the issue focuses on how an engagement with temporality offers ways to conceptualize bodies and their strategies of resistance. While similarities between this issue and and what I argue in this book certainly exist, my analyses move beyond the idea that acts of resistance possess a higher value than conforming to the status quo or the notion that opposition to normativity has to be exclusively tied to a future. See St Pierre and Rodier, “Untimely Bodies.”

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Notes to pages 5–8

5 This impetus is in line with other projects on queer cinema and bespeaks the ways in which Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt envision queer world cinema as a type of cinema that “enables different ways of being in the world and, more than this, that it creates different worlds.” See Schoonover and Galt, Queer Cinema in the World, 5. 6 Abel, Counter-Cinema; Mukhida, Sensitive Subjects. Olivia Landry offers a reading of the car crash scene in Longing and argues that it is a site of transformation whose “unsettling destruction resounds throughout the film.” See Landry, Movement and Performance, 149–50, 151. 7 Baer, German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism, 230, 234. 8 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 37; Landry, Movement and Performance, 133. 9 Richardson, “Bad Sex,” 45–8. 10 This kind of unsettling of monoheteronormativity through the portrayal of what, in scholarship, has been deemed bad sex or the lack of depictions of good sex features also in films like Ulrich Köhler’s Bungalow (2002) and Jessica Hausner’s Hotel (2004). 11 While my focus is on post-2000 Berlin School films, contemporary Austrian and Swiss filmmakers, such as Michael Haneke, Ursula Meier, Ulrich Seidl, Andrea Štaka, Arman T Riahi, and Sandra Wollner, are invested in similar topics. 12 Biendarra, “Ghostly Businesses,” 466; Clarke, “‘Capitalism,’” 139, 151. David Clarke and Anke Biendarra both point to the impact of global capitalism and economic insecurities on the stability of family networks and people’s understanding of Heimat and underscore how life is increasingly measured according to efficiency, progress, speed, and mobility. 13 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 22; Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 16. This emphasis on space and the disregard for time in current scholarship on German-language literature and film echoes both Michel Foucault’s claim in his lecture “Of Other Spaces,” in which he asserts that an obsession with time was prevalent in the nineteenth century while the twentieth century is mostly concerned with space, as well as Frederic Jameson’s argument that categories of space predominate the experiences of everyday life and culture in the postmodern world. 14 Germanists such as Leslie Adelson, Katharina Gerstenberger, Valerie Heffernan, Alice Kuzniar, Gillian Pye, Katrin Sieg, Faye Stewart, and Stuart Taberner analyze contemporary literature with an emphasis on places and space as emblematic in the negotiation of identity politics. Exemplary of employing spatial analysis in the context of contemporary film are Germanists such as Jaimey Fisher, Sabine Hake, Barbara Mennel, Eric Rentschler, Marc Silberman and Leanne Dawson, Leslie Adelson, Friederike Eigler, Anne Fuchs, and Nancy Nenno, among others, in the broader context

Notes to pages 8–12

15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23

24 25 26 27

28 29

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of German-language literature and film. In this sense, these scholars stand in for a wider preoccupation with space in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century scholarship. See, for example, works such as Space, Place, and Gender (1994) by Doreen Massey; BodySpace: Destablizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality (1996) by Nancy Duncan; Gender, Space, Architecture (2000) by Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden; and “Sexuality and Space: Queering Geographies of Globalization” (2003) by Jasbir K. Puar, Dereka Rushbrook, and Louisa Schein. Butler, “We, the People,” 62. Honig, “Difference,” 272. Ibid., 271. Ibid. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. I define the contemporary sovereign subject to which I am referring here as heterosexual, cis-gendered, white, middle to upper class, able-bodied, and in possession of a legal citizenship status. Roudometof, Glocalization, 39. Glocalization is a term first introduced by social scientist Roland Robertson in 1992 and has since been taken up by various scholars as a way to discuss contemporary transnational phenomena by “reconcil[ing] the global and the local instead of setting them in opposition to each other.” According to Deleuze and Guattari, the minor names a form of cultural production from within a dominant culture and calls forth a collective that exists already but is masked by dominant representational models. See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka,16–17. Abel, Counter-Cinema, 7 (emphasis in original). Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess,’” 57–8; Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 802. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 143, 229, 293. Rentschler, Use and Abuse of Cinema, 289. Eric Rentschler points out that Berlin School films, despite their diversity as far as influencers, themes, affiliations to film schools, and the like is concerned, display a shared preference for “an aesthetics of reduction and restraint, a penchant for image-focused rather than plot-driven constructions, a veristic resolve marked by an investment in the here and now, and a desire to negotiate the quotidian spaces as well as the less charted places of contemporary Germany and Europe.” Petzen, “Queer Trouble,” 299. Smith and Stehle theorize awkwardness in contemporary feminist activism and (popular) culture as an avenue for exploring relatability and uncover “new spaces for feminist community and joy.” See Smith and Stehle, Awkward Politics, 81.

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Notes to pages 13–20

30 Baer, “Berlin School and Women’s Cinema,” 27. While Baer shows these topics to be prevalent in contemporary women’s film productions, I expand her focus to include cinematic productions by the Berlin School’s male directors and read them through the lens of queer theory.

Chapter One 1 See works by Elizabeth Freeman, José Esteban Muñoz, Heather Love, Alison Kafer, and Jack Halberstam, among others. Many of these texts are discussed in this chapter. 2 Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns, 211–13. In the late 1990s, the spatial turn emerged as a way of highlighting space as a way of apprehending the world in favour of time, which had dominated people’s conceptualization of themselves and their lifeworld since modernity. Proposing an alternative to time, space as a category of analysis is thus a way to approach issues around the construction of identity, the impact of the materiality of places and spaces on individuals and society, and the expansion of global capitalism and consumer culture. 3 Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” 8–9. 4 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 2. 5 Freeman, Time Binds, 3 (emphasis in original). 6 Ibid., 3. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 4. 9 Ibid., 3. 10 Ibid., xxii. 11 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 4, 9. Muñoz extrapolates from the German idealist tradition of the Frankfurt School and, in particular, Ernst Bloch, who offers an approach to “combat the force of political pessimism,” as well as Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “potentiality” – “a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense” – that differs from possibility insofar as potentiality is not a thing that “simply might happen.” 12 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 26. 13 Aside from its investment in theorizing the future, Muñoz’s work also seeks to critique Edelman for having a relatively limited focus on a particular kind of group – that is, white and middle-class subjects – and for excluding particular subjectivities from discourse based on their embodied identities. 14 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 11. 15 Ibid., 16. 16 Kafer, Feminist, 27. 17 Ibid., 44. 18 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xxii.

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19 In regard to the nonlinearity of time, Puar quotes Elizabeth Freeman’s insistence on the resistance of chrononormativity, which I mention in more detail above. 20 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xxi. 21 Ibid., xix. 22 Love, Feeling Backward, 147. 23 Ibid., 71. 24 Throughout I put quotation marks around the phrase “good life” in order to indicate that the notion of having a “good life” is highly constructed and typically based on socio-cultural, normative ideals around coupledom, kinship relations and formations, job stability, and social security. These ideals are, however, unattainable fantasies for many individuals in contemporary Western societies. 25 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2. 26 Ibid., 3. 27 Ibid., 1. 28 Ibid., 5. 29 Ibid., 7. 30 Less relevant for my project here is how Berlant couples the collapse of the “good-life” fantasies in the “crisis of the present” – the moment of precarity – with the rhetoric of trauma. Trauma, they contend, “shatters the biohistory” and “can never be let go of: it holds you”: that is, it keeps subjects stuck in the present, it denies them any attachments to others, and it blocks their vision of a future. This particular rhetoric, which Berlant employs in the first part of their book and bespeaks the aims of their project more generally, links them to figures such as Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Ann Cvetkovich. Berlant specifically evokes Bersani when they describe trauma as an experience of shattering, as an event that makes identity construction possible rather than impossible – that transforms without falling into the trap of embracing normative frameworks. Akin to Cvetkovich, Berlant locates trauma on two levels: on the one hand, it is felt on a personal level in the everyday; on the other hand, it is also experienced on a larger, global scale and is related to socio-economic and political precarity in a trans-national, neoliberalist system. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 81, 126. 31 Ibid., 59. 32 In their works, Butler emphasizes that social and political institutions induce precarious bodies through disappearing, collapsing, or inadequate social and economic networks of support rather than minimizing it. As a result, these bodies “become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.” See Butler, “Performativity,” ii. 33 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 262. 34 Ibid., 263.

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35 The notion of failure as a springboard to construct and reimagine the world features prominently in Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. Halberstam’s work engages with the ideas of finding alternatives (1) to success that is defined according to the conventional frameworks of heteronormativity and capitalism, (2) to “academic legibility and legitimization” as well as academia’s function in the “circulation and reproduction of hegemonic structures,” and (3) to archives that reaffirm the status of certain cultural artefacts as “high” culture. Failure, as claimed by Halberstam, “may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” See Halberstam, Queer Art, 11, 2–3. 36 By interventions I mean that these films serve as examples that encourage active viewer engagement. In this sense, the works have a mediating function insofar as they encourage us to pause and reflect. 37 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 162. 38 Freeman, Time Binds, 3. 39 Abel, Counter-Cinema, 5. 40 Ibid., 15. 41 Ibid., 229. 42 I want to note here that, from the standpoint of English grammar, the future perfect tense refers to a time in the future by which an action will have been completed. It indicates completion of the task rather than an openendedness of what is yet to come, as Abel has it. 43 Abel, Counter-Cinema, 22. 44 Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 18 (capitalization in original). “Wesen ist nicht Ge-Wesenheit; konträr: das Wesen der Welt liegt selber an der Front.” 45 Duggan and Muñoz, “Hope and Hopelessness,” 281. 46 My notion of untimely bodies is evocative of Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998) and Oskar Negt’s Labor and Human Dignity [Arbeit und menschliche Würde] (2001) in regard to how neoliberal capitalism imposes a new time regime on individuals that does not allow for the formation of the narrative of a coherent subjecthood and agency. See Sennett, Corrosion of Character; Negt, Arbeit und menschliche Würde. 47 Bentham, Panopticon Writings. 48 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 96. 49 Ibid., 1. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 53 Edelman, No Future, 2. 54 My use of quotation marks signals that the kind of autonomy and selfdetermination that a neoliberalist system promises to its subjects relies on

Notes to pages 25–32

55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65

66

67 68

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their embeddedness in a society that interpolates and constrains its subjects. This claim echoes a dynamic visible in Michel Foucault’s works on control and authority in pieces such as Discipline and Punish (1975) and “The Subject and Power” (1982), and Elizabeth Povinelli’s notion of the relationship between “autological subject” and “genealogical society.” Further, this notion reiterates Wendy Brown’s argument that freedom appears as a utopian articulation of a potentiality that functions as a regulating principle – “neoliberal subjects are controlled through their freedom … because of neoliberalism’s moralization of the consequences of this freedom” – as it conceals society’s power over its members. See Povinelli, Empire of Love, 4; Brown, Edgework, 44 (emphasis in original). Deleuze and Guattari. What Is Philosophy?, 112. Ibid., 112. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 2–4. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” 94 (emphasis in original). Fritzsche, “1989 and the Chronological Imagination,” 17. The portrayal of these crucial events or references to them underscores the international nature and appeal of many Berlin School films beyond the national context. Halle, German Film after Germany, 7. Garland-Thomson, “Misfits,” 592. Berdahl, “Spirit of Capitalism,” 235. Ibid., 241. Wendy Brown’s essay on untimeliness and political criticism introduces the notion of timeliness in the context of the importance of raising political criticism at times that might appear inopportune to many. Although my approach differs from hers and is linked to neoliberal capitalism and chrononormativity, Brown’s understanding of timeliness as linked to “appropriateness, mannerliness, or civility,” or to the notion of “temperateness about when, how, and where one raises certain issues or mentions certain problems,” is precisely what supports this idea of being timely as being a positive attribute or quality. See Brown, Edgework, 4. In the German context, the term recalls Friedrich Nietzsche’s collection of essays published in 1873 and translated by Reginald Hollingdale as Untimely Meditations. The work was supposed to contain a series of essays, but Nietzsche only finished four, which outline his development of thought in his later writings. Most broadly, these texts address topics such as the relationship between popular and genuine culture, possibilities of undertaking cultural reforms, goals of the discipline of philosophy, education, and the connections among life, art, and science. See Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations. Kafer, Feminist, 46. Puar, “I Would Rather,” 50.

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69 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 94–5, 107. 70 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka; Braidotti, Posthuman. This critique of the notion of linear, straight time has been as much a part of queer studies as has the awareness of the biotechnological interfaces that constitute the posthuman. 71 Braidotti, Posthuman, 174. 72 Kaussen, “Ghosts,” 156. 73 A number of Berlin School directors studied at the Academy for German Film and TV (Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin) and got to know each other there. But the Berlin School is not specifically a Berlin-based phenomenon. Christoph Hochhäusler, for example, studied at the Academy for TV and Film (Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film) in Munich, Ulrich Köhler at the Academy for Fine Arts (Hochschule für bildende Künste) in Hamburg, and Valeska Grisebach at the Filmacademy Vienna. Some of the directors work together, while some of them don’t know each other personally and some reject any Berlin School collectivism altogether in order not to obscure the individuality of its supposed members. See Lim, Berlin School, 89. 74 Cook et al., Berlin School Glossary, 8. 75 Ibid. 76 Clarke, “Capitalism,” 135. 77 Ibid. New German Cinema (German: Neuer Deutscher Film) is a period in German cinema that lasted from 1962 to 1982. As a reaction to the artistic and economic stagnation of German cinema, a group of young filmmakers issued the Oberhausen Manifesto on 28 February 1962. ngC saw the emergence of a new generation of directors. Working with low budgets, and influenced by the French New Wave, such directors as Harun Farocki, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Ulli Lommel, Wolfgang Petersen, Volker Schlöndorff, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Werner Schroeter, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Margarethe von Trotta, and Wim Wenders made names for themselves and produced a number of “small” motion pictures that caught the attention of art house audiences and enabled these directors (particularly Wenders, Petersen, and Schlöndorff) to create betterfinanced productions that were backed by the big US studios. However, most of the films were commercial failures, and, by 1977, 80 percent of a budget for a typical German film was ensured by a subsidy. 78 Abel, Counter-Cinema, 16. 79 Gemünden, “Film and Media Studies,” 547; Prager and Rentschler, “Introduction,” 3. 80 See, for instance, Marco Abel’s comments. Abel, “Clouds over Berlin.”; Abel, “Il Faut Souffrir.”

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81 French film critic Michel Ciment used the phrase “cinema of slowness” for the first time in his speech titled “State of Film” at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2003. He posited that slowness is one of the main features of contemporary art cinema to provide a counterpoint to the ways in which mainstream Hollywood cinema-goers have been “made impatient by the bombardment of sound and image.” Ciment, “State of Cinema.” 82 Luca and Jorge, “Introduction,” 4. 83 Koepnick, On Slowness, 3. 84 Ibid., 4. 85 Flanagan, “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow.” 86 Çağlayan, “Slow Cinema in Context,” 4. 87 Quandt, “Sandwich Process,” 76–7. 88 Romney, “In Search of Lost Time,” 43–4. 89 Bordwell and Thompson, “Good and Good for You.” 90 Abel, Counter-Cinema, 8. 91 Cook et al., Berlin School Glossary, 14. 92 Ibid., 8. 93 Ibid. 94 Abel, Counter-Cinema, 15; Koepnick, “Long Takes,” 195. 95 Abel, “Intensifying Life.” 96 Other examples include films such as Maren Ade’s The Forest for the Trees (2003) [Der Wald vor Bäumen]; Angela Schanelec’s Orly (2010); and Grisebach’s Longing (2006). 97 Baer, “Berlin School and Women’s Cinema,” 27. Baer cites an interview with Maria Speth during the DVD release of Madonnen at Filmgalerie 451 in Berlin in 2008.. 98 De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender 141 99 Abel, Counter-Cinema 20, 17–21. See also: Baer, “Affectless Economies,” 77; Fisher, Christian Petzold, 15–17; Kopp, “Christoph Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment,” 285; Roy and Leweke, Berlin School, 20–2. 100 Kopp, “Christoph,” 286. 101 Ibid., 289. 102 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 12. 103 Ibid., 67. 104 The term “double bind” was coined by Marilyn Frye and designates a situation in which an individual has very few options, all of which “expose [them] to penalty, censure, or deprivation.” This notion of the double bind parallels Butler’s concept of precarity. See Frye, Politics of Reality, 2. 105 Rancière, Dissensus, 32. 106 Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, xv (emphasis in original).

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Notes to pages 40–50

107 Ibid., 19 (emphasis mine). 108 Eng and Puar, “Introduction,” 1–24. 109 Schoonover and Galt, Queer Cinema, 286.

Chapter Two 1 Everyone Else, DVD, directed by Maren Ade (Komplizen Film, 2009), 1:08:50. 2 Ibid., 1:09:37. 3 See for example Emens, “Monogamy’s Law”; Kean, “Relationship Structure”; Schippers, Beyond Monogamy. 4 Spade, “For Lovers and Fighters,” 39. 5 Barker and Langdridge, “Whatever Happened to Non-monogamies,” 750. 6 Farvid and Braun, “Casual Sex,” 361. I want to note here that nonrelationality is also a viable mode of being; however, it does not fall within the scope of the analyses provided in this book. 7 Finn, “Monogamous Order,” 124. 8 Rothschild, “Compulsory Monogamy,” 29. 9 Ibid. 10 Cook et al., Berlin School Glossary, 1–25. 11 Haegele, “Gender,” 32–3. 12 Ibid., 33. 13 Butler, Bodies That Matter, ix–x. 14 Butler, “Performative Acts,” 520. 15 It must be noted here that Olivia Landry’s focus on performance is distinctly different from Haegele’s analysis and use of the term “performativity.” Everyone Else, Landry astutely points out, portrays a number of instances when performances are linked to the destabilization of normative gendered expectations or gender roles. See Landry, Movement, 72. 16 Haegele, “Gender,” 33. 17 Cormican, “Willful Women,” 102–27. While Cormican’s focus is on the female protagonists and the construction of their femininity in neoliberalism in Ade’s three major films, emphasizing how all three women seem to reject or fail to participate in “consumerism, makeovers, and the feminization of their bodies,” my analysis centres primarily on the ways in which the filmmakers comment on the dissolution of the normative couple through the film’s content and aesthetics. 18 Baer, “Berlin School,” 28. 19 Ibid., 28. 20 Cormican, “Willful Women,” 122. 21 Baer, “Berlin School,” 28. 22 Everyone, 0:02:30–0:02:43. “Ich hasse dich!” “Ich verabscheue dich!”

Notes to pages 50–76 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

203

Ibid., 0:02:48. “Ruf mich nie wieder an.” Ibid., 0:31:43. “… mit irgendwas festzulegen” Ibid., 0:31:59. “… ständig … überlegen” Ibid., 0:32:03. “… totaler Stillstand!” Ibid., 0:32:25. “Atelier, Fahrrädern und Büchern” Ibid., 0:32:33. “… wie sehr er seine Freiheit wegen seiner Familie vermisst” Ibid., 1:00:04. “überhaupt am richtigen Berg” Ibid., 1:01:22. “Was du hier alles hochschleppst.” Ibid., 1:01:34. “jetzt hier aber nicht betrinken” Ibid., 1:03:39. “Komm weiter.” Ibid., 1:03:49. “Weil wir falsch sind. Ich kann nicht noch mal 5 Studen laufen.” Ibid., 1:05:58. “Musst du so gestört rennen?” Ibid., 1:06:24. “so’n Arschloch” Ibid., 1:55:00. Ibid., 1:57:30. Landry, Movement, 97–106. Ibid., 102. Farvid, and Braun, “Casual Sex,” 359–78. This particular linkage between monogamy and heterosexuality even in casual sexual encounters speaks to Heckert’s 2010 analysis of the compulsory nature of heteronormativity and the institutionalization of (heterosexual) monogamy. See Heckert, “Love without Borders,” 255–65. In “Thinking Sex,” Gayle Rubin establishes a sex/gender hierarchy, which she coins as the “charmed circle,” to posit which sex acts and gendered expressions are deemed socially acceptable based on the fact that normative heterosexuality serves as the point of referent. This particular understanding of certain sex acts as “proper” and others as deviant or “improper” also extends beyond Rubin’s concept. In his book, Michael Warner suggests that “hierarchies of respectability” even exist within queer communities that view certain forms of nonnormative and casual sex as more acceptable than others. See Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 153; Warner, Trouble with Normal, 67. The City Below, 6:56. Ibid., 38:30. Ibid., 56:00. Ibid., 1:04:06. Ibid., 1:04:38. “nicht aus Zucker.” Fisher, “Hotels,” 158. The City Below, 1:05:28. Ibid., 1:05:36–1:07:16. Ibid., 1:25:00–1:27:30.

204

Notes to pages 78–87

51 Ibid., 1:41:19. “Es geht los.” What is crucial to note here is that the English translation provided to viewers in the subtitles, which renders the German present tense as a present perfect tense, is false insofar as it does not reflect the temporality that the German expresses. The German sentence does not express any sense of pastness, whereas the translation points to a pastness. The “proper” translation should be “It is beginning” or “It begins.” 52 Romney, “Far Country,” 42–4. Romney argues that Western grapples with the topic of masculinity from the perspective of a female filmmaker and is thus similar to films that deal with the military and war, such as the 2008 war thriller The Hurt Locker directed by Kathryn Bigelow and the 1999 French film Beau travail directed by Claire Denis. 53 Baer, German Cinema, 234. 54 Ibid., 229; Mukhida, Sensitive Subjects, 160–1; Baer, German Cinema, 227. 55 Abel, Counter-Cinema, 16. 56 Baer, German Cinema, 232. 57 Ibid., 233. 58 Ibid., 227. 59 Catherine Wheatley, Mukhida, and Baer all comment on the similarity between the two women, emphasizing how they “disorganize[]conventional depictions of women on screen.” Baer, German Cinema, 232; Mukhida, Sensitive Subjects, 163; Wheatley, “‘Not Politics But People,’” 138–9. 60 Longing, 21:00–23:00. 61 Ibid., 23:40. According to the Urban Dictionary, the phrase describes the act of returning to one’s “place of residence wearing the same clothes you had on the night before” after a sexual encounter with a stranger. The meaning of this popular expression informs the narrative of a 2014 movie of the same name about an aspiring female news anchor who jeopardizes her career after a night of partying and a one-night stand. “Walk of Shame,” Urban Dictionary, 13 April 2008, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Walk%20 of%20Shame. 62 Longing, 32:03. “Morgen is alles wie geträumt.” 63 The two bodies are positioned differently than Svenja and Roland’s in the hotel scene, but the camera is positioned at a similar angle. Unlike the two bodies in The City Below, who are sleeping on their backs, Markus and Rose are actively engaging with one another and thereby affirming their connection. 64 Longing, 41:15. 65 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology,1–3, 84. 66 Longing, 42:30. “Ich muss so oft an dich denken. An uns.” 67 Ibid., 57:42. 68 Ibid., 58:42. “Irgendwie bist du nachts ganz anders als am Tag. Ich liebe dich.” – “Ich liebe dich so sehr.”

Notes to pages 88–103

205

69 Ibid., 1:01:00. “Du bist do weit weg. 70 Ibid., 1:03:15. “dürfen uns nicht mehr wieder sehen. Das ist das letzte Mal, dass wir uns sehen.” 71 Ibid., 1:10:40. “Bitte lass mich nicht allein. Ich wollte dich nicht verletzen.” 72 Ibid., 1:11:03. “Ich hätte nie gedacht, dass ich solche Gefühle für dich empfinden würde.”

Chapter Three 1 In his contribution in The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule, Christoph Hochhäusler contends that “Köhler’s Montag kommen die Fenster (Windows on Monday, 2006) could be understood as an (unconscious) alternative take on my Milchwald,” identifying a thematic connection between the two films in their focus on the portrayal of failed maternal duties and unfinished home projects. See Hochhäusler, “On Whose Shoulders,” in Roy and Leweke, Berlin School, 27. 2 Kapczynski, “Renovation,” 224. 3 Baer, German Cinema, 195 (emphasis in original). 4 Edelman, No Future, 2. 5 Ibid., 2–3. 6 Sicinski, “Bifurcated Time,” 93. 7 Matthias, “Home Away,” 326. 8 Heathcott, “Reading the Accidental Archive,” 240–1; Smith, Revolting Families. 9 Quandt, “Resistant to Bliss,” 26; Sicinski, “Bifurcated Time,” 90. Sicinski points out that Weerasethakul’s films present multiple worlds – realms of the common material world and the spiritual world of ghosts. In order to highlight shifts between these different realities, Weerasethakul uses temporal cleavages as a way to make visible to viewers the change between worlds. 10 Windows on Monday, 6:20. “Ich würd da einen Teppich hintun.” 11 Ibid., 14:00. “Du hast mal Urlaub und gibst gleich das Kind weg.” 12 Ibid., 18:30. “Ich komm nicht zurück.” 13 Ibid., 58:50. “Ich rede mit dir! Bist du betrunken?” 14 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 95, 96. Berlant’s analysis offers a reading of the Dardenne films, which explore the lives of people living at the margins of society, especially in terms of their socio-economic status. While the characters in Windows on Monday enjoy certain privileges as members of a normative white, middle-class family, Nina and Frieder’s marriage and their estranged relationship exemplifies Berlant’s concept and shows how the two figures are worn out by maintaining their relationship. 15 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 253–4. 16 Ahmed, Willful Subjects.

206 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44

Notes to pages 104–22

Ibid., 175. Windows, 1:15:00. “Ich hab nichts gefragt.” Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 95, 96. Richardson, “Bad Sex,” 43. See, for instance, Katrin Polak-Springer, “On the Difficulties,” 9–10. Polak-Springer, “On the Difficulties,” 6–7; Abel, “Intensifying Life.” As is the case with many other Berlin School films, This Very Moment, so Abel asserts, asks for and even demands a participatory audience in lieu of being an entertainment movie. Rentschler, “Surveillance Camera’s Quarry,” 637; Rentschler, Use and Abuse of Cinema, 306. Franzel, “Forest,” 131. Classen, “Role of the Forest,” 149–64; Johnson, “Geography in German Literature,” 236–7; Hacken, “Into the Imagined Forest.” Kazecki, “Border,” 216. Ibid., 222. Polak-Springer, “On the Difficulties,” 8. Ibid., 6. Kazecki, “Border,” 222. This Very Moment, 2:50. “Ich dachte du holst uns von der Schule ab. –Ich weiß. Ich bin spät dran.” Ibid., 4:15. Ibid., 4:32. “Du bist nicht unsere Mutter. Du musst nicht mit uns singen.” Ibid., 6:45–7:30. Ibid., 1:48. “Lea, Mami bringt uns nach Hause.” Ibid., 8:18–9:14. Ibid., 10:29. “Ich fahr jetzt; ich fahr jetzt wirklich.” “The Stork.” This Very Moment, 17:00. “Die Kinder sind nicht da? – Nein. – Hallo.” Ibid., 26:10. “Nein, es war alles normal.” Ibid., 27:10. “Die Kinder sind verschwunden. Das muss doch einen Grund haben. Du tust so, als wär nichts. Ich versteh das nicht. Du bist doch eine Frau, das sind doch jetzt deine Kinder. – Du weißt doch überhaupt nicht, was hier los ist.” Ibid., 42:13–43:00. Ibid., 49:45. “Das glaubst du doch auch nicht.” Ibid., 42:45. This montage is reminiscent of montages in horror films in which a scene starts with a long shot from outside of the building, eventually penetrates the house, and gradually approaches the sleeping woman, ending with a close-up shot.

Notes to pages 125–32

207

45 Ibid., 1:12:45. “… kalt, kalt.” 46 Ibid., 1:23:05. “Raus! Haut ab! Raus! Verschwindet!”

Chapter Four 1 Abel, Counter-Cinema, 165. 2 Stockton, Queer Child, 7, 10. I am turning to Bond Stockton’s work because of its explicit focus on fictional texts (twentieth-century literature and film) rather than the many books that “focus mainly on gay teenagers and come from the fields of popular psychology, clinical counseling, self-help, parenting, and education studies.” 3 Stockton, Queer Child, 4. 4 Ibid., 11–13. 5 The association of bikers and motorcycle gangs as subjects and groups that are deemed marginal subjects evokes a variety of associations. For one, it reverberates one of the major themes in classics such as The Wild One (1953) starring Marlon Brando or Easy Rider (1969) directed by actor-director Dennis Hopper. It also connotes the most notorious motorcycle club in the United States and Canada – the Hells Angels. While certainly embodying the outlaw biker lifestyle – riding Harley Davidson motorcycles, donning leather gear, and having shaved heads and many tattoos – the gang is today considered to be one of most organized criminal enterprises in the United States and Canada. 6 The German title “falscher Bekenner” references Armin’s acts of falsely admitting to the crimes. 7 Abel, Counter-Cinema, 37, 165, 167. Abel’s work describes I Am Guilty as a film that insists on the existence of two discrete and distinct realms that establish and shape the protagonist’s subjectivity and, as Abel emphasizes, affirm a separation of “private environment” and “public … [or] corporate spaces,” which seems to hold up until the very end of the film. Abel further asserts that the sex between Armin and the biker reifies a dichotomy between “his heterosexual interest in Katja [and] his homosexual activities at night.” 8 As already mentioned in the introduction, Marco Abel proposes the notion of the “future perfect,” which he understands as a condition that is grounded in the “here and now.” From this moment in the present, the subject is able to look ahead to what remains “to-come,” a position in the future from where it looks back at that which, by then, will have been. Thus, the future perfect is a type of “presentism [that is] pursued in the name of affecting the future,” which, however, also relies on the past as the point of reference. See Abel, Counter-Cinema, 5, 15, 22.

208

Notes to pages 133–43

9 I Am Guilty, 23:00. “Ja, bitte.” 10 Harris, “Restauration und Ambivalenz,” 131. “Selbstbestrafung.” 11 Fiol-Matta’s work is biographical and aims at unpacking the complex nuances of the public figure and private person of Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957), who was not only the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature but also a “closeted lesbian,” human rights defender, and supporter and representative of the Chilean authorities. As Fiol-Matta points out, Mistral serves as the prime example of both the disruption and the stability of binary structures and, in so doing, helps “not to see the world as simplistically divided between the dominant power, along with its discourse, and the dominated, with their resistance strategies. Instead, the picture presented here is complex, shifting, and unstable.” See Fiol-Matta, Queer Mother for the Nation, xiv, 218. 12 In his essay, queer theorist Leo Bersani outlines how the rectum figures as a grave in traditional conceptions of gay male sexuality during the 1980s AiDS epidemic in the United States. Rejecting conventional notions about gender, sexuality, and power, Bersani proposes new ways of thinking about the rectum in homosexual anal sex. While conceived as the place of insertion that makes the penetrated the one who must give up power and yield to the penetrator – “to be penetrated is to abdicate power” – Bersani cautions against this kind of thinking and demands a rethinking of notions like sexual promiscuity and embraces the “possibility [of] a certain refusal of sex as we know it.” See Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” 212, 215 (emphasis in original). 13 The mouth’s ability to consume is emphasized when Armin sits at the kitchen table and eats breakfast with his parents. 14 I Am Guilty, 53:37. “Mein Zimmer ist oben.” 15 The notion of the German Kinderzimmer or Kinderstube as a space of children’s development, experience, and education that separates them from the father emerged in the nineteenth century. While this room can be found in most houses and apartments today, in nineteenth-century Germany it was an indicator of class. Although depicted in Biedermeier paintings, such as those by Johann Michael Voltz (1784–1858), as the epitome of a harmonious and happy childhood, only children of the upper class living in cities enjoyed the privilege of having a room of their own. Budde, “Das Kinderzimmer,” 194; Weber-Kellermann, Die Kinderstube, 27–8. 16 I want to note that this is not the original image. Due to the relatively small size of the image and the dark colours, I modified certain settings and effects for a somewhat better visualization. 17 Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, 30. 18 Edelman, No Future, 29.

Notes to pages 145–60

209

19 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 11. 20 The term “biometrics” refers to the ways in which bodies are measured and identified. This way of making bodies legible reduces them to sets of data. In her monograph, Kelly Gates points out that biometrics has contributed to the “problem of ‘disembodied identities’” insofar as “visual and textual representations of individuals … circulate independent of their physical bodies.” See Gates, Our Biometric Future, 12. 21 Pfleger, “Imaging the ‘Good Life.’” An earlier and shorter version of this section appears as a chapter in Photographs and German Cinema. 22 Scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, Melissa Gregg, and Gregory J. Seigworth have shaped the academic discourse on affect theory and what it means to desire, construct, experience, and maintain a “good life.” 23 Abel, “Imaging Germany,” 270; Biendarra, “Ghostly Businesses,” 465–7; Clarke, “Capitalism,” 145–6; Fisher, Christian Petzold, 5–6; Löffler, “Ghost Sounds,” 71–2; Ochsner, “Christian Petzold,,” 64–6; Schwenk, Leerstellen – Resonanzräume, 73–4. 24 Webber, “Topographical Turns,” 67–9. 25 Kaussen, “Ghosts,” 156. 26 Cook et al., ABC, 13. 27 Ghosts, 1:11:40–1:11:51. “Du kriegst gar nix mit oder? - Wieso? Wo ist Toni denn? - Deine Freundin ist mit meinem Mann weg zum Ficken. So und jetzt verschwinde aus meinem Haus.” 28 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 10–14. 29 The expectation to see one’s desires and fantasies represented on screen bespeaks Linda Williams’s argument that the development of film in the early twentieth century sparked a shift from understanding sexuality as reproductive to understanding it as pleasurable. Acts that were “once considered ob-scene (literally off scene) because they had the capacity to arouse have come ‘on/scene.’” See Williams, Screening Sex, 7. 30 Despite her reluctance to partake in family activities such as eating meals together, Lynn, unlike her brother, can sign and therefore communicate with her deaf niece. She is also aware that her sister-in-law is cheating but does not tell her brother. 31 The title also evokes the 2006 film In Between Days, directed by So Yong Kim, about a young girl who emigrated from Korea to Canada and who fell in love with her only friend. “Days Between” is also a song by the rock band Grateful Dead about their feelings of nostalgia and longing after the death of Jerry Garcia on 9 August 1995. 32 Landry, Movement, 99.

210 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Notes to pages 160–81

Creech, Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts, 230. Baer, “Berlin School and Women’s Cinema,” 27. The Days Between, 1:22:50–1:24:10. See chapter 2 for an in-depth discussion of the connection between heteronormativity and monogamy. At the time of the release of the film, marriage was not yet legally open to same-sex couples. This change was undertaken in October 2017 in Germany. Since then, marriage no longer functions as a straightening device because it is not limited exclusively to heterosexual couples; however, it still needs to be understood as an institution that aims at the regulation and homogenization of citizen-subjects and orients them towards coupledom and monogamy. The Days Between, 1:23:55. Ibid., 23:40–24:55. Halberstam, Queer Art. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 2. The Days Between, 1:30:00. Ibid., 1:01:15. Ibid., 1:00:42–1:01:28. Ibid., 1:06:06–1:09:18. Landry, Movement, 99, 100. Brinkema, Forms, 19. Jagose, “Trouble with Antinormativity,” 44.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9

Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 162. Clarke, “Capitalism Has No More Natural Enemies,” 146. Abel, Counter-Cinema, 4. Some of the characteristic features of this particular style are: long takes, long shots, clinically precise framing of the images, deliberate pacing paired with very little movement, sparse or no use of extradiegetic music countered with a poetic use of diegetic sound, and the predominance of mostly unknown and unprofessional actors. See Abel, Counter-Cinema, 15. Jones, Parker, and ten Bos, For Business Ethics, 100; Duménil and Lévy, Capital Resurgent, 1–2; Pinkerton and Davis, “Neoliberalism and the Politics of Enclosure,” 305. Duggan, Twilight of Equality, xii. Ibid., xiv. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 3. Athanasiou and Butler, Dispossession, 18.

Notes to pages 181–5 10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19

20

21

22

23 24 25 26

211

Ibid., 19. Butler, Precarious Life, 26. Puar et al., “Precarity Talk,” 166. I want to note here that the difference does not merely manifest itself in Butler’s and Berlant’s choice of words but emanates from their working in different academic disciplines. While the former is a political philosopher and gender theorist, the latter is trained in literary analysis. As Butler succinctly states, this strand of philosophy argues that a person’s self-understanding of possessing a coherent sense of personhood is related to “consciousness, the capacity for language, or moral deliberation, … [or] selfdetermination.” See Butler, Gender Trouble, 22–3. Butler, Gender Trouble, 23. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4. Athanasiou and Butler, Dispossession, 146. Ibid., 159. Most broadly, I mean by “technologies of the self” a particular type of functionalist approach that revolves around strategies of self-marketing and self-optimization, or even a kind of entrepreneurial effort to constantly modify one’s body in the guise of self-actualization or enjoyment. Meyer, “From Godesberg to the Neue Mitte,” 25–30. In a similar vein, Sebastian Müller’s Der Anbruch des Neoliberalismus: Westdeutschlands wirtschaftspolitischer Wandel in den 1970er-Jahren (2017) identifies a correlation between the political agenda of the SPD and the rise of neoliberalism in West Germany in the 1970s. He also highlights a direct connection between “Gesellschaft und Ökonomie” and argues for an analysis that takes into consideration their constitutive interactions. See Müller, Der Anbruch des Neoliberalismus, 10. First and foremost, a variety of reforms proposed as “Agenda 2010” included legislation to make it less difficult for firms to dismiss their workers, several significant cuts to health care, and more stringent limitations around unemployment benefits. I want to note here that many contemporary writers contribute to discussions pertaining to current topics and/or take up these issues in their texts. Authors and public intellectuals such as Julia Franck, Ulrich Peltzer, Kathrin Röggla, and Ilija Trojanow engage critically with socio-cultural and political issues of their time. Druxes, “Indictment of Neoliberalism,” 154; Druxes, “’Leaning In,’” 244. Baer, German Cinema, 17. Ibid., 14. Mirowski, Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste, 92.

212 27 28 29 30 31 32

Notes to pages 185–92

Peters, “Neoliberal Convergence,” 228. Smith and Stehle, Awkward, 100. Lorey, State of Insecurity. Berdahl, “Spirit of Capitalism,” 235. Ibid., 241. This blurring of the private and public is reminiscent of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s seminal essay “Sex in Public” (1998). They argue that the public sphere is infused with heteronormative forms of intimacy, thus upholding heteronormativity as “a fundamental motor of social organization” and “a founding condition of unequal and exploitative relations,” while “queer culture, by contrast, has almost no institutional matrix for its counterintimacies.” See Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 564, 562. 33 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.

Filmography

Be My Star / Mein Stern. Directed by Valeska Grisebach. Filmakademie Wien, 2011. DVD. Beau travail. Directed by Claire Denis. La Sept-Arte, 1999. DVD. Bungalow. Directed by Ulrich Köhler. Peter Stockhaus Filmproduktion GmbH, 2004. DVD. The City Below / Unter dir die Stadt. Directed by Christoph Hochhausler. Heimatfilm GmbH + Co Kg, 2010. DVD. The Days Between / In den Tag hinein. Directed by Maria Speth. November Film GmbH, 2001. DVD. Easy Rider. Directed by Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures, 1969. DVD. Everyone Else / Alle Anderen. Directed by Maren Ade. Komplizen Film GmbH, 2009. DVD. The Forest for the Trees / Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen. Directed by Maren Ade. Komplizen Film GmbH, 2003. DVD. Ghosts / Gespenster. Directed by Christian Petzold. Schramm Film Koerner and Weber, 2005. DVD. Hotel. Directed by Jessica Hausner. Coop99 Filmproduktion GmbH, 2004. DVD. The Hurt Locker. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Voltage Pictures, 2008. DVD. I Am Guilty / Falscher Bekenner. Directed by Christoph Hochhäusler. Heimatfilm GmbH, 2005. DVD. Longing / Sehnsucht. Directed by Valeska Grisebach. Peter Rommel Productions, 2006. DVD. Orly. Directed by Angela Schanelec. Ringel Filmproduktion, 2010. DVD. Thelma and Louise. Directed by Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991. DVD. This Very Moment / Milchwald. Directed by Christoph Hochhäusler. fieberfilm, 2003. DVD.

214

Filmography

Walk of Shame. Directed by Steven Brill. Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, 2014. DVD. Western. Directed by Valeska Grisebach. Komplizen Film GmbH, 2017. DVD. Windows on Monday / Montag kommen die Fenster. Directed by Ulrich Köhler. Ö-Filmproduktion Löprich and Schlösser GmbH, 2006. DVD.

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Index

Abel, Marco, 22–3, 81, 132, 146, 152, 176; works of: The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School, 10 Ade, Maren, 13, 42, 47–8, 72, 183; works of: Everyone Else, 13, 43, 45, 46–9, 51, 61, 63, 64, 72, 82, 86, 90–1, 191; The Forest for the Trees, 46 aesthetics, 12, 13, 24, 26, 33, 36, 38–9, 81, 88, 129, 131, 141, 170; untimely, 7, 38, 40, 43, 49, 59, 61, 63, 71–2, 83, 87, 96, 108, 111, 116, 123, 125, 127, 132, 136, 141, 144, 154–7, 164, 167, 174, 175. See also close-up; jump cut; long shot; long take; medium shot; slow cinema affect, 38, 40, 80, 87, 88, 107, 113, 118, 121, 174, 176, 181 Ahmed, Sara, 9, 85, 103–4 antisocial negativity, 19 arc, teleological, 16, 63, 71, 85, 111, 135, 160. See also teleology; telos; timeliness Athanasiou, Athena, 181

Berlant, Lauren, 4, 20–1, 26, 30, 38–9, 52, 60, 95, 102, 107, 120, 124, 130–1, 145–6, 153, 181–2 Berlin School, 6, 11, 13, 24–5, 28, 182; aesthetics of, 7, 35–40, 81, 94, 98, 146, 153, 178–9; cinema of, 3–5, 8, 10, 12, 14–15, 17, 21, 23, 25–6, 29, 31–2, 34, 45, 49, 131; scholarship on, 6, 10, 22, 33, 44, 108, 129, 176–7, 184 Bersani, Leo, 19, 142 Biendarra, Anke, 146 Bloch, Ernst, 23; works of, The Principle of Hope, 23 bodies: timely, 50–1, 53, 63, 74, 84–5, 101, 108, 158, 182; untimely, 31, 38, 60, 70, 82, 89, 105, 143, 176, 182, 188; untimely, 5, 7, 12, 32, 34, 47, 52, 54, 61, 66, 79, 83, 85, 87, 94, 116, 131, 178 Bordwell, David, 36 Braidotti, Rosi, 33, 104 Brinkema, Eugenie, 40, 174 Butler, Judith, 4, 8–9, 26, 32, 47, 181–2

Baer, Hester, 6, 48, 81, 93, 161, 183–4 Barad, Karen, 10 belonging, 5, 21, 148, 151, 156–7, 182; to community, 26; familial, 146, 152, 157, 167, 172; forms of, 23, 176; national, 22; to normativity, 30, 34, 39, 145, 172, 190; sense of, 150, 181, 190; in the world, 175. See also family Berdahl, Daphne, 29, 187

cadence, 12, 159; coercive, 14, 176; nonnormative, 30, 34, 36, 39, 45, 171, 188–90; normative, 21, 22, 25, 29, 34, 46, 132, 154, 160, 178, 186–7, 191; rhythmic, 135; steady, 77, 136. See also telos; time; timeliness; untimeliness; untimeliness capitalism, 179, 183; neoliberal, 8, 25, 27, 29–30, 154, 181, 183–4, 186–8, 191–2. See also consumerism

226

Index

chrononormativity, 17–18, 21, 23, 28, 30–1, 49, 65–6, 68, 83, 91, 94, 113, 132, 134, 136, 177, 180, 191 Clarke, David, 35, 146, 176 close-up, 3, 70, 74, 83, 87–8, 117, 123, 133, 137, 140, 148; medium, 137, 143, 148, 157; over-the-shoulder, 148, 153. See also aesthetics: untimely Cook, Roger, 35, 47, 153 consumerism, 29, 179, 184, 187; capitalist, 184; mass, 26, 27, 187. See also capitalism Cormican, Muriel, 48–9 coupledom, 77, 79, 87, 91, 156, 175, 191; conventions of, 60, 107; expectations of, 52; ideals of, 62; as institution, 43; monogamous, 65–6, 162; monoheteronormative, 48, 53; monoheterosexual, 48; mononormative, 45, 90; narratives of, 54; normative, 44–5, 64–5, 68, 162; traditional, 60, 64, 178 Creech, Jennifer, 160–1, 164 crisis, 38, 158; AiDS, 17; economic, 27; existential, 52; of the present moment, 38–9 cruel optimism, 20, 26, 38, 53, 64, 87, 90, 95, 98, 101, 108, 120, 153, 156, 158–9, 160–1, 166, 177, 191. See also good life Deleuze, Gilles, 10, 11, 23, 25, 32–3 desire, 12–13, 15, 17, 29–30, 38–9, 67–8, 76, 80, 90, 95, 99, 104, 124, 129–31, 132, 134, 136, 156–7, 162, 177–9; corporeal, 5, 7, 74, 94, 119, 170; expression of, 20, 26, 53, 57, 63, 75, 85–6, 160–1, 164, 167–8, 174, 188, 191; manifestation of, 3, 49, 51–2, 65; pursuit of, 88–9, 105–6, 110, 145, 151–4, 158–9, 172; queer, 139; sexual, 137, 165 Druxes, Helga, 183–4 Duggan, Lisa, 180 Edelman, Lee, 16, 25, 93, 142 Eng, David L., 41 family, 9, 14–15, 22, 74, 77, 84–5, 102–3, 107, 109, 116, 146, 152–3,

160; biological, 6; home, 90, 95, 96, 98, 100–1; life, 53, 94, 150, 159, 184; normative, 145; nuclear, 168; structure, 44; time, 52, 190; traditional, 150; unit, 13–14, 40, 49, 91, 92–4, 95, 96–7, 99, 101, 104, 108–9, 111–12, 151, 172, 175, 178 Ferree, Myra Marx, 183 Fiol-Matta, Licia, 137 Fisher, Jaimey, 146 Freeman, Elizabeth, 4, 17; works of: Time Binds, 17–18 futurity, 19–20, 23, 38, 40, 96, 111, 119, 131, 142, 177–8 Galt, Rosalind, 41 globalization, 10, 26–7, 183 good life, 7, 20–1, 26, 29, 39–40, 52–3, 60, 63, 82, 86, 89, 90, 94, 120, 124, 130–1, 145, 152–5, 158, 161–2, 164, 166, 170, 174, 177. See also cruel optimism Graf, Dominik, 35, 183 Grisebach, Valeska, 3, 4, 6, 13, 44, 80–1, 82, 90, 178; works of: Be My Star, 80; Longing, 3–4, 6–7, 13, 44–5, 80–2, 90–1; Western, 80 Guattari, Felix, 10, 11, 23, 25, 32–3 Haegele, Lisa, 47–8 Halberstam, Jack, 16, 17–18, 166 Harris, Sascha, 137 Heisenberg, Benjamin, 183 heterosexuality, 26, 45, 48, 64–5, 81, 157, 162, 170. See also monoheteronormativity Hochhäusler, Christoph, 14–15, 38, 44–5, 64–5, 92, 94, 109, 128, 129, 131, 133, 140–1, 144, 145, 177–8; works of: I Am Guilty, 14–15, 28, 38, 129, 131–2, 136, 143–5, 175, 178, 189–91; The City Below, 13, 44–5, 64–6, 68, 77–9, 80, 82, 90–1, 178, 191; This Very Moment, 14, 58, 84, 92–5, 109, 111–13, 117, 119, 126–8, 177, 191 Honig, Bonnie, 8 identity, 9, 13, 16, 18, 21, 27, 33–4, 40–1, 136, 139, 144, 146, 151, 180, 182, 185; categories, 137, 144;

Index gender, 47; markers, 26; normative, 141; politics, 81, 170; sexual, 130. See also heterosexuality; queerness impasse, 21, 38, 40, 109, 115, 146, 157, 159 impassivity, 30, 86, 91, 99, 103, 121, 129, 177–8, 185, 188. See also stuckness intimacy, 52, 56, 62, 76, 79, 81–2, 86–7, 94–5, 157, 164, 167, 181; desire for, 26, 174; moment of, 46–7, 64, 68, 109, 119, 132, 146, 155, 157, 165, 171–3; physical, 3, 48, 65, 72, 74–5, 80, 84, 89, 97, 162, 166, 169–70; queer, 140, 144; relationality and, 4–5, 10, 15, 17, 22, 25, 33–4, 90, 128, 131, 162, 176–7, 179, 191; yearning for, 156 jump cut, 38, 111, 140, 167. See also aesthetics: untimely Kafer, Alison, 19, 31; works of: Queer, Feminist, Crip, 19 Kaussen, Valerie, 34 Kazecki, Jabuk, 112 Koepnick, Lutz, 35, 36, 47, 153; works of: On Slowness, 36 Köhler, Ulrich, 14, 92, 94, 96–8, 177; works of: Windows on Monday, 14, 28, 92–6, 97–8, 101, 109, 116, 127, 177, 191 Kopp, Kristin, 35, 38, 47, 153 labour, 15, 157, 185; affective, 39; market, 183, 185; time, 190. See work Landry, Olivia, 6, 65, 160, 174 de Lauretis, Teresa, 37 Löffler, Petra, 146 longing, 10, 14, 23, 40, 151, 157, 175, 176, 182; for closeness, 3, 52, 80, 82, 130, 153; for detachment, 39, 52–3; for relationality, 56, 67. See also desire long shot, 3–4, 37, 42, 54–5, 58–60, 61, 71–2, 77–8, 88, 96, 99, 100, 111–12, 114, 116–17, 118, 122, 125, 127, 133, 146–7, 149, 152–3, 155–6, 162, 163, 166, 168, 171, 174. See also aesthetics: untimely

227

long take, 36–8, 42–3, 49, 81, 110–12, 115–16, 127, 153, 156, 174. See also aesthetics: untimely Lorey, Isabell, 186 Love, Heather, 16, 20; works of: Feeling Backward, 20 medium shot, 42, 49, 52, 55, 72, 74, 77– 8, 82, 84, 102, 113–14, 116, 126, 133, 135, 140–1, 144, 152–3, 155, 163, 166– 7, 173. See also aesthetics: untimely Meyer, Thomas, 183 monogamy, 6, 40, 44–5, 48–9, 65, 81; heteronormative, 66. See also coupledom; family monoheteronormativity, 41, 44–5, 48–50, 54, 60, 63, 64, 76, 84–5, 86, 90–1, 107, 164, 165, 167, 174, 176, 177–8. See also heterosexuality mononormativity, 44–5, 65–6, 80, 82, 90, 173, 178 Mukhida, Leila, 81 Mulvey, Laura, 158 Muñoz, José Esteban, 4, 16 neoliberalism, 14–15, 29, 47, 93, 179, 180, 183–4, 185, 186–7, 188 New German Cinema, 35 Ngai, Sianne, 103 Ochsner, Beate, 146 Petzen, Jennifer, 12 Petzold, Christian, 14, 28, 54, 129, 145, 146, 152, 153, 178; works of: Ghosts, 14–15, 28, 54, 67, 129, 131, 145–6, 152–3, 155–6, 159, 175, 178, 189 Polack-Springer, Katrin, 112 polyamory, 44, 82 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 30 Prager, Brad, 35, 47, 153 Preciado, Paul B., 143 progress, teleological, 117 progress narrative, 95, 127, 164 Puar, Jasbir K., 10, 20, 32, 41; works of: Terrorist Assemblages, 20 Quandt, James, 98 queer child, 128, 130, 131, 133, 136, 145, 159, 162, 173, 175

228

Index

queerness, 19, 24–5, 41, 93, 130, 137, 144, 170; gender, 5 queer studies, 9, 16, 33, 40–1 queer theory, 10, 19–20, 41 Rancière, Jacques, 40 Rentschler, Eric, 111 rhythm, 5, 13, 22, 24, 34, 66, 74, 94, 111, 120, 130, 135–6, 159, 176, 188, 191; circular, 149; daily, 9, 16, 29, 52, 186; fast-paced, 190; hegemonic, 20, 175; life, 67; normative, 14–15, 19, 21, 31, 46, 87, 110, 129, 131–2, 150, 177–8, 188–9; temporal, 11–12, 17, 25, 28, 30, 36, 40, 45, 48, 61, 74, 83, 85, 135, 178–9, 186, 188. See also cadence Richardson, Michael D., 6 Romney, Jonathan, 36 Schanelek, Angela, 183 Schoonover, Karl, 41 Schwenk, Johanna, 146 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 17 sex act, 3, 65–6, 71, 74–5, 84, 97, 108, 119, 136–7, 143, 176; casual, 64, 65– 6, 68, 72–3, 76, 79, 90; heterosexual, 81; nonheterosexual, 129, 139; nonnormative, 140–1 sexuality, 26, 44, 81, 136–7, 180–1; nonnormative, 93; studies, 4, 6. See also heterosexuality; monoheteronormativity; queerness Sicinski, Michael, 97 slow cinema, 35–7, 81. See also aesthetics: untimely slow death, 102, 107–8, 109 Smith, Carrie, 12, 185 Spade, Dean, 44 Speth, Maria, 14, 37, 129, 145, 159–61, 164, 174, 178; works of: The Days Between, 14, 65, 129, 131, 159–60, 164, 168, 174–5, 178, 189 Stehle, Maria, 12, 185 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 129–30, 131 stuckness, 38, 53, 94–5, 153, 178; feeling of, 51, 57, 59, 164; moments of, 18, 30, 40, 57, 146, 159, 177, 188; sense of, 21, 23, 53, 57, 177. See also time; untimeliness subject, proper, 69, 154, 161–2, 168, 190

teleology, 17, 91, 92–3, 132, 150, 162. See also telos; time; timeliness telos, 20, 61, 88, 98, 100, 104, 116, 121, 124, 145, 150; linear, 11, 114; of progress, 39; traditional, 48. See also timeliness tempo, 74, 77, 91, 136, 141, 143, 150, 190; alternative, 94, 132, 154, 188; normative, 111, 129–30, 132, 135, 177–9. See also time; untimeliness Thompson, Kristin, 36 time: queer, 10, 17, 19, 23, 82, 94, 141; straight, 11, 15, 19, 21–4, 29, 32–4, 49, 61, 66, 94, 141, 162, 177–9, 186, 192; teleological, 22. See also timeliness; untimeliness; untimeliness timeline, 6, 13–14, 16, 18, 41, 50, 66, 68–70, 79, 82–3, 85, 87, 93, 107, 111–12, 119, 123, 130, 162 timeliness, 32, 52, 59, 61–2, 68, 70, 72, 75, 77, 96, 98, 104, 111, 115–16, 123, 125, 135, 164–5, 167, 170–1, 186, 189; definition of, 10, 28–31, 187; moments of, 48, 131; resistance to, 33; state of, 58, 119–20. See also teleology; telos; time trajectory, teleological, 18, 20, 22, 98, 120. See also teleology; telos; time; timeliness untimeliness, 32, 39, 45, 51–3, 61, 69, 72, 77, 88, 91, 98, 107, 110–12, 116, 119, 128, 146–7, 154, 164, 178; definition of, 10, 28, 30–1, 48, 94, 96, 188; moments of, 66, 135, 171; state of, 67–8, 70, 73, 123–4, 127, 166 untimeliness, 6, 13–14, 38, 43, 45, 63, 67–8, 71, 88, 90, 95, 98, 102, 111, 113, 131, 134–5, 168, 171, 182; definition of, 7, 17, 23–6, 28, 32–3, 40–1, 44, 160, 173, 177, 192; forces of, 110; instances of, 82, 127; state of, 89, 151 utopia, 11, 14, 19, 23, 25, 37, 176 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, 98 willfulness, 103–4 work, 9, 15, 18, 52, 64, 82, 85, 99, 130, 154, 157, 159, 184–5; time, 17, 29, 186–91. See also timeliness