The hidden face of Narcissus: suicide as poetic speech in Margarethe von Trotta's early films.

Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta has inspired astute, psychoanalytically informed scholarship that uniformly shies away from analyzing the taboo act that distinguishes three of her early films. Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness, Marianne and Juliane, and Sheer Madness are subtle portrayals of female suicides. Von Trotta's nuanced stagings of suicidal depression, fantasies, attempts, and postsuicide trauma; blunt depictions of the female corpse as monstrous feminine; and emphasis on the impact of silenced mothers on their daughters invite critics to question her rigorous use of suicide as an aesthetic strategy. This essay comparing and contrasting the three films draws on Julia Kristeva's seminal work Black Sun (1989) to uncover subplots and read suicide as a means to enhance or rupture power constellations written by paternal law. (EK)

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   Peace bought with such sacrifices was too costly and I could no 
   longer stand the thought of partially destroying myself in order 
   to partially preserve myself.--Karoline von Gtinderrode (Der 
   Schatten eines Traumes) 
 
   My passage would always be death and not an island in the 
   South Sea. I would extinguish myself and not try to find paradise 
   elsewhere.--Margarethe von Trotta (Interview with Heike 
   Mundzeck (1)) 

Among feminist scholars, Margarethe von Trotta's critically acclaimed films Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness (1979), Marianne and Juliane (1981), and Sheer Madness (1982) (2) have been controversial, seen as undermining a feminist agenda by drawing on the codes of a patriarchal system. However, when it comes to suicidology, the study of suicide, von Trotta's agenda is distinctly feminist, as when the survivor (in Sheer Madness coterminous with the victim) fills the void by telling the victim's story and thereby imitates Teresa de Lauretis's action in Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, recuperating women from silence. By linking femininity to suicide, von Trotta steps back into late nineteenth-century thought when suicide was the only form of violence accessible to women; however, she anticipates de Lauretis's question: "What happens ... when woman serves as the looking glass held up to women?" (6, 7), and depicts women reinventing themselves to fight suicidal depression.

Unabashedly, von Trotta catches suicidal aggressors in action and maps their intricate narcissistic crises. Creating a psychoanalytic montage, she draws on literature, mythology, music, and politics to show the complexity of melancholic depression as the hidden face of narcissism. Her cinematic trilogy progresses from characters' succumbing to suicide as ultimate regression to overcoming suicidal depression that is marked by dislocation of speech. Moreover, she takes the traditional perception of suicide--as an act that collapses meaning and established systems of order--a step further, and depicts the trauma that it engenders.

Von Trotta subtly portrays the female psyche caught in a patriarchal discourse oscillating between a need for self-expression--vehemently defending her difference--and violent rage when realizing her powerlessness. In her favorite and most personal film, (3) Sisters, a compelling emotionally and economically symbiotic relationship between two sisters lasts until suicide parts them, only to reunite them inadvertently through postsuicide trauma. Investigating the alleged suicide of her imprisoned terrorist sister becomes the life goal of the survivor in Marianne and Juliane. A suicide attempt triggers an intense friendship between two very different women in Sheer Madness, a film that concludes not with a suicide but with an imaginary murder. Except for the self-slaughter of Marianne's husband, von Trotta's cinematographic suicides exemplify female transgressions of and resistance to a patriarchal discourse. These women more or less successfully seek alternatives to the tradition of submission exemplified by their mothers. (4) A seemingly clear-cut power dynamic between protagonists, suggesting, "I perform, therefore I am," and antagonists, claiming, "I control, therefore I am," spins out of control as characters unleash their rage in actual, imaginary, or alleged suicide attempts, traumatizing siblings and partners who then either replace the suicide victim or push the survivors firmly back into the position initially carved out for them. To defend their nonrepressed state as subjects in crisis, the characters must subvert meaning, challenge established systems of authority and order, and become anarchic. And, as Julia Kristeva states, "anarchy is the nonrepressed state of subjectivity and constitutes a permanent state of functioning" (Guberman 37); the narcissist becomes coterminous with the anarchist (Moi 158).

Von Trotta calls the corpse as a finite entity into question, using it to construct pivotal cinematographic moments when it reemerges in the survivor's imagination or is blatantly depicted as a real horror. Either survivor and film viewer stare at the corpse, or the viewer witnesses how the survivor cannot bear to look. Inclusion or exclusion from this most abject experience is given an interesting spin in Sheer Madness, where the viewer is privileged to see Ruth's suicide fantasies--a perspective denied to her husband, who triggers them. The distinct real or imaginary presence of the corpse prompts survivors to reexamine parameters of their value system and thus marks a "border" (Oliver 233) between self-reflection and self-destruction. It is surprising that long-overdue monographs, such as Renate Hehr's Margarethe von Trotta: Filmmaking as Liberation (2000) and Thilo Wydra's Fihnen, um zu uberleben (Filmmaking as Survival, 2000), mention yon Trotta's subtle portrayals of suicide only in passing. Similarly, Peter Buchka's inspiring interview film Never Stop Being Curious (1995) illustrates her interest in female identity, German romanticism, and psychoanalysis, but not her preoccupation with suicide.