EVERYDAY FASCISM: IMPORT/EXPORT (2007), THE REBELLION OF RED MARIA (2011)

In the previous chapter I discussed the common elements between the Brechtian and Artaudian aesthetic so as to open a way towards a dialectical understanding of cruelty that can help us comprehend it politically rather than morally. In this chapter I want to develop further the Brechtian and Artaudian critique of literary dramaturgy with reference to films whose espousal of cruelty can be seen as a form of resistance. This is in keeping with my understanding of cruelty as an anti-commodity aesthetic and not as a way of putting forward abstract moralistic and transhistorical ideas related to the ‘inherent violence in human nature’. It is not accidental that Artaud rejected the commodification of the medium and ‘the production of bad films on the pretext that they are more saleable’ (1989: 60). Correspondingly, the films analysed in this chapter deal with unsettling situations without domesticating them, since their aim is to challenge the audience and encourage them to confront their social and political preconceptions. In the first section, I proceed to do this by discussing two contemporary films which combine Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte with Artaudian cruelty in terms of form and content. The case studies I discuss are Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export (2007) and Costas Zapas's The Rebellion of Red Maria (2011). What interests me in both is that they revive aesthetic strategies associated with Brecht and Artaud so as to comment on present political and social crises and this clearly showcases the persistent relevance of this representational model. In both, cruelty operates as an act against social conformism and as a means of producing what Michael Haneke calls ‘uncomfortable truths’ (cited in Kluge 2008). The second section of the chapter explores the prospect of a postdramatic cinema. The term has been introduced by Hans- Thies Lehmann to describe contemporary developments in performance art that push further the Brechtian and the Artaudian critiques of literary dramaturgy. The case studies I discuss are Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Katzelmacher (1969) and Peter Handke's Die linkshändige Frau (The Left-Handed Woman, 1978). I argue that the postdramatic can be a useful conceptual model for understanding films that do away with dramaturgical coherence and subscribe to an aesthetics of negation.