<i>Roter Himmel</i> and/as Ecocinema

In her 2024 book Disavowal, philosopher Alenka Zupančič argues that (perverse) disavowal has become a commonplace of contemporary social and political life. Zupančič opens her exposition of disavowal by recounting a dream discussed by Sigmund Freud, in which a child who has just died appears at his father's bedside and utters the words, “Vater, siehst du denn nicht, daß ich verbrenne?” [“Father, can't you see that I am burning?”] (501). Awakening with a start, the father finds that a lighted candle has fallen on his son's corpse, which has in fact caught on fire. While Freud chiefly discusses the case as an example of how dreams prolong sleep, even in the face of danger, as a function of wish fulfillment (a glimpse of the living child), Jacques Lacan's reading draws attention to the peculiar reversal that this nightmare enacts: the incorporation of fire into the father's dream does not actually allow the father to keep on sleeping, but rather the other real—the burning reality of his son's untimely death—jolts the father awake, enabling him to escape the traumatic fact of his inability to prevent his son's death, which has appeared to him unvarnished in the oneiric form of the burning child. Thus, what happens in the dream actually wakes the father up so that, in a sense, he may keep on dreaming. For Zupančič, the polycrises of the present echo the structure of this dream: “They confront us with something more than just the immediate crisis (the fire we need to put out), with something profoundly disturbing and disturbed in our social, ecological, political way of being. In other words, they point to another fire within the fire” (10). Even as we extinguish the numerous fires raging around the globe, whether in Canada, Hawaii, France (or near the Baltic coast of Germany), another fire—climate change itself—continues to burn: “What we tend to do in this double- or cross-fire is precisely that we readily wake up—so as to be able to go on dreaming, to forget about the fire that bears on the real” (11). It is not that we repress or deny climate change (though that happens too), but rather that we accept it as reality while simultaneously pushing its traumatic, shattering aspects aside: we disavow it. It is no accident that Zupančič offers fire—and its metaphorical rendering of the fire within the fire, climate change—as a synecdoche for the disavowal that structures contemporary life. For as commentators including Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff have pointed out, although the scale and imperceptibility of environmental collapse present many representational challenges, “Fire brings it home” (8). Fire's elemental symbolism, simultaneously destructive and regenerative, passionate and utilitarian, captures the eye and the imagination. Christian Petzold's 2023 film Roter Himmel—or, in its somewhat awkward but ultimately fitting English translation, Afire—draws on this elemental symbolism across multiple registers in a narrative that likewise brings home the encroaching realities of climate change as well as the multiple forms of disavowal that structure our perverse, damaging relation to it. From its opening sequence onward, Roter Himmel focalizes collective disavowal through the individual perspective of Leon, brilliantly portrayed by Thomas Schubert, whose comic turn as the sophomoric author of a pop novel titled Club Sandwich—the patent awfulness of which he blithely disavows—lends an ironic layer to the illusions of control the film tracks across its diverse cast of characters. Shortly after Leon and his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) enter the German forest in a little red Daimler, as if in a fairy tale or, indeed, a dream, to the tune of the aptly-named, trance-like theme song “in my mind,” Felix utters the film's clarion first line: “Irgendwas stimmt nicht” [“Something's not right”]. The immediate cause for concern is Felix's observation that the Daimler's motor is misfiring. Setting the stage for his narrative function as an agent of disavowal, Leon responds, “Ich höre nichts” [“I can't hear it”], shortly before a smash cut reveals the car, hood up, broken down on the deserted road.1 Leon's premature repudiation of the car's obvious mechanical failure foreshadows an array of other facts that he will disavow knowledge of in the course of Roter Himmel, despite clear evidence staring him in the face—or resounding in his ears, as the case may be (marking his initial line, “Ich höre nichts,” as especially ironic). For instance, Leon purports not to understand who could be having sex on the other side of the bedroom wall, even though he has observed Felix and Devid (Enno Triebs) kissing at dinner. Early in the film, Leon spies on Nadja (Paula Beer) and reads her journal, which is filled with poetry, political stickers, and addresses for restaurants in New York. Yet he appears shocked to learn that she is a PhD candidate studying literature, rather than the full-time ice-cream seller he ostensibly takes her to be. Later, after his editor Helmut Werner (Matthias Brandt) audibly refers to an ongoing medical condition during a phone call before collapsing and spending the night in the hospital, Leon encounters him in Ward 4, directly in front of a sign that reads “Oncology,” yet apparently fails to grasp that Helmut is being treated for cancer. Roter Himmel portrays Leon's solipsism with comic relish, but the tragedy of the film is that he is not the only one who de-realizes the fiery truth surrounding Felix's seemingly idyllic summer home. Less than five minutes into the film, Leon first hears the roaring propellers of the helicopters deployed to fight the forest fire. Fifteen minutes later, while buying groceries in town, both friends are warned about the fire by the cashier and then listen to an emergency alert over public loudspeakers announcing the closure of two major highways and a ban on outdoor smoking (Leon keeps smoking outdoors). In addition to the repeated sounds of the helicopters, the encroaching fire is heralded by the titular red sky; when Nadja expresses concern about the fire to Helmut, Leon dismisses her worry on the grounds that wind blows inland from the sea, making the coastline invulnerable to combustion. Even as ash rains down on the summer house and an emergency siren signals the fire's imminent threat, Felix and Devid head directly into the forest—the vortex of the blaze—dead set on retrieving the red car and thereby disavowing the conflagration that will soon engulf them. Not least due to its figuring of disavowal, Roter Himmel can be generatively understood as an exemplary intervention into ecocinema, a form of political cinema that aims to make the viewer an active witness of anthropogenic environmental impact through storylines, recurrent tropes, and formal-aesthetic interventions. With its cli-fi symbolism and narrativization of forest fire culminating in the shocking deaths of Felix and Devid, Roter Himmel overtly deploys common markers of ecocinema. Petzold's frequent discussion in interviews of Roter Himmel as a (disrupted) summer film, which cites an array of precursors including Kathleen Collins's Losing Ground (1982), Éric Rohmer's A Summer's Tale (1996), and Mia Hansen-Løve's Bergman Island (2021), highlights strategies of remediation and genre remix, characteristic traits of Petzold's oeuvre that here convey the toll of environmental devastation, awkwardly mashed up with the pleasures of the seaside romance. When Roter Himmel’s summer comedy verges into tragedy, narrative time fractures. Shortly after Leon and Nadja learn from the police that Felix and Devid have died, the unmistakable voice of Matthias Brandt begins to narrate, in the subjunctive, the events that likely led to their demise, a narrative that the film visualizes through a stark image track. The voiceover serves as a sound bridge to the next scene, in which the camera follows Leon and Nadja into the morgue, where they see Felix and Devid's burnt bodies, fused together by the fire. Nadja begins to cry, and the voiceover's (third-person, limited) narration continues: “Er sah zu Boden und spürte, dass sie ihn anschaute. Und er wollte weinen. Aber statt zu weinen, dachte er an die Liebenden in Pompeji, ein Bild der Ausgrabungen” [“And he looked down and felt her looking at him. And he wanted to cry. But instead of crying, he thought of the image of the lovers in Pompeii.”] Here, the diegetic image track breaks off altogether, and we see images of lovers’ bodies preserved in volcanic ash, referenced by the extra-diegetic voiceover, which carries on: “Er schüttelte den Kopf, als wollte er die Bilder und diese Gedanken vertreiben, und wirklich trauern, hier und jetzt. Hier, mit ihr” [“He shook his head, as if trying to banish these images and thoughts, and to truly grieve, here and now. Here, with her.”] But Leon's inability to mourn—his disavowal through substitution, visualized by the non-diegetic inserts—incites Nadja's departure from the morgue and from the summer house, which, the voiceover tells us, was empty upon Leon's return there.2 This apparent rupture in Roter Himmel—a moment, after the fire, an opening onto possibility—is subsequently recouped, teleological time and linear narration restored, when, months later (it is no longer summer), Leon arrives by bus at a clinic on the outskirts of Berlin, where Helmut, now revealed to be the originator of the voiceover, is undergoing chemotherapy. The source text from which he reads, we learn, is Leon's new novel, a categorical departure from Club Sandwich that seemingly participates in the venerable German project of processing trauma through literature. Whose lives are expendable and who survives? In the ambiguous ending of Roter Himmel, Leon's extractivism is affirmed at the expense of the marginalized characters (Felix is Black, Devid hails from East Germany, both are queer) now expunged from the diegesis of the film, whose horrific fate he romanticizes.3 Stepping outside the clinic while his editor receives an infusion, Leon, unobserved, spies on Nadja as she arrives for a visit. While she waits, she sits down in a wheelchair and begins to turn circles around herself, in a symbolic movement of complacent solipsism. Eventually she notices the presence of Leon, their chance meeting presumably orchestrated by Helmut—the powerful man and national allegory (named after one German chancellor and played by the son of another)—in whose orbit they circle. As if the fire had never burned, Leon and Nadja rekindle their flame.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.