Event

Jaimey Fisher

Despair (1978) amid the New Waves: Fassbinder’s Nabokov Adaptation and the Look of the National versus Transnational in the late 1970s.

Fassbinder was so furiously productive over the course of his short career that one can speak of distinctly different phases in it, pitched in different aesthetic tones. The presentation would take up a later phase of his career in a way that can illuminate that likewise late stage of New German Cinema. New German Cinema, in a way more pronounced than the other new waves around the globe (e.g., in France, then Czechoslovakia, the US), made its national past, and its national identity in light of it, its calling card. This is often regarded as a generational development – a deliberate dispensing with a distinctly troubled Papas Kino – but Fassbinder’s 1977 Despair demonstrates different dimensions as well. Such an English-language work, based on a Vladimir Nabokov novel and a Tom Stoppard screenplay of it, underscores how deliberately New German Cinema could navigate the terrain of the transnational. There is general acknowledgement that this was Fassbinder’s first large-scale effort in the idiom of European art cinema co-production – shot in English, with a European star (Bogarde), enjoying a Cannes premiere, and afforded a budget factors larger than what Fassbinder had previously shot-- but such a supposition also presumes a stable category of art cinema. The film might be complex enough to warrant the close readings it has mostly received in the scholarship (Elsaesser, Peuckert), but this presentation would examine how and why the first of Fassbinder’s distinctly transnational efforts fell short in the crucible of the national and transnational. The national past turns out to be, at Cannes and elsewhere, an unappreciated gesture of transnational outreach. Many critics took issue with the film’s liberties with Nabokov – a cosmopolitan author personified – but Fassbinder’s revisions to novel and screenplay reflect an effort to calibrate its level of national discourse persuasively. By highlighting its intersection with the festival circuit, the presentation would take stock of Despair’s balance of national discourse and transnational negotiation within the context of the late New Wave in Europe and around the globe at the time.

Jaimey Fisher is Professor of German and Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis. He is the author of four single-authored books: German Ways of War: The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War Films (Rutgers UP, 2022); Treme (Wayne State University, 2019), Christian Petzold (University of Illinois, 2013) and Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (Wayne State University, 2007). He has also edited or co-edited seven books or special issues, including on film (The Modern City in World Cinema [Telos special issue 2021]; Berlin School and its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema [2018, Wayne State UP]; Generic Histories of German Cinema: Genre and its Deviations [2013, Camden House's Screen series], and Collapse of the Conventional: German Cinema and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century [2010, Wayne State UP]) as well as on literature and theory (Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture [2010, Rodopi] and Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects [2001, Berghahn]). He is now working on a project on media, especially television, and democratization in the Germanys and Austria in the 1950s and 1960s. He has also published over 50 articles and book chapters, including in the journals New German Critique, The German Quarterly, Seminar, Iris, The Goethe Yearbook, and Zeitschrift für Germanistik, among others.