Martin Brady

Thomas Quasthoff and the Performativity of Disability in Michael Harder’s The Dreamer

In their chapter, Drum and Brady examine Michael Harder’s film Thomas Quasthoff – The Dreamer (2004/2005), a portrait of bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, one of several thousand West German ‘thalidomide babies’. Harder’s film examines the impact of the drug whilst challenging categorisations of Quasthoff based simply on physical facts, in particular his size. The Dreamer presents him as an ‘unconscious-become-conscious performer’ of a double role as artist and as a disabled person. This chapter locates the film within the ‘thalidomide documentary’ genre and investigates how this impacts its status as a music documentary about a performer for whom ‘disability is a fact and not a problem’. The representation of the disabled body is examined in the context of the film’s modes of ‘speaking for’ and ‘looking at’ its subject.

Marx for Children: Moor and the Ravens of London and Hans Röckle and the Devil

Between 1946 and 1990 DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the state film studio of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), produced a diverse corpus of around 180 feature-length films for children (Kinderfilme). Despite the success of these films with audiences and, for the most part at least, with critics and functionaries, the East German filmmaker Heiner Carow — later director of Die Legende von Paul und Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula, 1973), the GDR’s most successful film, and Coming Out (1989), its first explicitly gay movie — identified as early as 1958 an ideological crisis in the industry. He summarised the problems facing children’s films as a deficit of realism, a tendency towards ’vagueness and vulgar materialism’, either they were too fantastical (the fairy-tale narratives) or too negative in their portrayal of contemporary society (the gritty, neorealist ‘every-day’ stories): ‘We can thus only conclude that the directors of films for children and young people […] are lagging behind the developments in society’ (Konig et al. 1996: 23).1 Whilst self-criticism of this kind was an obligatory ritual amongst GDR artists at this time, Dziuba does neatly identify a schism in films for young people in the wake of the success in the previous year of the most iconic of all GDR children’s films, the whimsical, faintly psychedelic fairy-tale Das singende klingende Baumchen (The Singing Ringing Tree, Francesco Stefani, 1957),2 and official disapproval of the candid portrayal of teenage disillusionment with GDR society in Gerhard Klein’s Berlin — Ecke Schonhauser (Berlin — Down Schonhauser Way, 1957).

’Du Tag, wann wirst du sein...’: Quotation, Emancipation and Dissonance in Straub/Huillet’s Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter

Taking as its starting point the radical potential ascribed to cinematic montage by Walter Benjamin, ans his concept of it’s subversive ’Chockwirking’, this article focuses on the thematic and structural use of dissonance, quotation and translation in Jean-Marie Straub’s and Daniele Huillet’s Der Brautigam, dir Komosiantin und der Zuhalter(1968, 23 mins) in order to identify its utopian aspects. Described by Straub as their most aleatory and political work, it is an elliptical montage of literary, cinematic and musical quotations, a ’document of documents’, or ’document-fiction’, which evolved out of their stage production of Ferdinand Bruckner’s Krankheit der Jugend in Fassbinder’s Munich ’action-theater’. Ser agasinst the back-drop of the Paris revolts of 1968, the film presents models of emancipatory political action. Der Brautigam is also a cinematic manifesto, a compressed documentary essay on cinema itself, distilling the debris of film history into a diamectical sequence of cinematic quotations which itself lays claim to being the apotheosis of that history.The article examines the ways in which the film transforms ots literary, musical, and cinematic source material into ’Jetztzeit;, making Der Brautigama commentary on the political potential of ’Literaturverfilmung’ or ’-dokumentierung’ to liberate and actualisr pre-existing texts in the here and now.