Gender and Artistic Production in <i>Roter Himmel</i> ( <i>Afire</i> )

Christian Petzold's oeuvre is the most successful and well-known of the Berlin School. Early films made in collaboration with the late Harun Farocki are known outside of the world of things German. For instance, the Gespenster (Ghosts) trilogy is popular among political economists for its incisive depictions of how capitalism shapes subjects and interpersonal relationships. Yella, Jerichow, and Barbara are known for their powerful female protagonists who filmically embody and express capitalist subsumption. Not psychologized, emotive, or physically sensual, these female figures are not meant to entice viewer identification or cathexis. They change little over the course of the narratives. Marxist-informed analysis considers the condition of woman a societal indicator; in these movies, the indicator gender expresses structural inequities through the experiences of the female lead characters. Roter Himmel's protagonist is male. The melodrama features the brooding, immature, insecure, and self-centered budding novelist Leon, centering his interior life and development. For instance, the film opens with a close-up and closes with a medium close-up of Leon's face, shot types that typically invite viewers into the subjectivity of characters. Furthermore, the camera repeatedly features his visage, body, and actions in rather slow takes and sequences that frame little else of interest, thereby also drawing attention to this character. Bumbling grumpily along as events unfold around him, Leon is the least charming, talented, socially adept, and/or attractive character in the narrative. His awkwardness is frequently derided early on. Notably, his negational phrase “die Arbeit lässt es nicht zu” [“the work doesn't allow it”] comes off as infelicitously pompous and other characters variously react to it with gentle derision (Rodek). Yet, Leon also embodies privilege most fully due to his intersectional advantage—presenting as white, Western German, heterosexual, and part of the educated middle class (Bildungsbürger). As so many normatively gendered and similarly intersectionally privileged fictional characters do, Leon also ends up holding a promising hand in love and work by the end of this narrative.1 Roter Himmel’s denouement reveals Leon's hopeful future in two primary ways. The last sequence reopens the horizon of relationship with his romantic interest, Nadja. At a surprise meeting in the clinic where Leon's editor, Helmut, is an inpatient, the two look fondly, gently, and half-smilingly at each other in a shot/reverse shot. As for career potential, Helmut has also just casually expressed professional confidence in Leon by asking for his opinion on a manuscript. Because there is but one copy of the document, Helmut is in fact asking Leon rather than Nadja to review it, although Helmut had previously valued the insights of this female graduate student in literature. Nadja's expertise would have been available to Helmut. Her ease and familiarity at the clinic suggest that Nadja has visited Helmut previously—she even takes a gentle joyride in a wheelchair—and she arrives just after Leon that day. The penultimate scene with Helmut establishes the probability of Leon's professional success even more directly. Leon's triumph is all but assured by his transformation of the diegetically real-life tragedy of those close to him into what the seasoned editor Helmut deems a successful new second novel (Deacy). The discussion between the novelist and the editor validates Leon's deployment of this tragedy to bolster his productivity. The approving editor tells the young writer that Felix's mother is touched that Leon dedicated his novel to Felix. Leon responds that she had insisted that Leon read her the entire text. This exchange between male protégé and male mentor underscores that Leon's fictionalization of the tragedy is not opportunism or unethical; even the heartbroken mother is grateful for the resultant artistic work. Traditionally, male protagonists must surmount considerable obstacles to achieve success, and Leon is no exception. His starting position is tenuous. Over the course of most of the film, his achievements are presented as meager. Early on we hear that his first novel was successful, but Leon and his editor worry that it was just singular luck. Nadja calls the manuscript of his second novel “bullshit,” asserting that she and Leon both recognize its inferior quality. Later, pedagogically skilled Helmut reads from the draft aloud, hoping that its author will come to recognize it as irreparably flawed. These early negative judgments by Leon's peer and love interest and by his professional editor set up Roter Himmel’s ultimate redemption of the male protagonist through his successful laborious abandonment of his flawed manuscript and arduous work in repressive productivity. Leon sublimates both feelings of intimate desire and of tragic loss to produce his artistically valuable new second novel. An apparently random and unconnected, jarring scene reveals Leon's potentially homoerotic, possibly homophobic, and perhaps simply jealously possessive, intimate feelings towards his friend Felix. Upon Felix's sudden return to a nervous Leon waiting alone in the woods, the startled Leon and laughing Felix spontaneously engage in and disengage from a close, intense, charged bout of wrestling. Later, Leon is disagreeably surprised by and finally comes to accept Felix's budding romantic relationship with the strapping, Eastern German beach lifeguard Devid. Another strikingly jarring narrative element, this time one that only Leon and the film audience can see, highlights Leon's sublimation of loss. All of the characters suffer due to Felix's and David's deaths. Leon's processing of the tragedy begins in earnest in the morgue scene. Black-and-white images of smothered lovers in Pompeii abruptly cut into shots of Leon and Nadja beholding Felix's and Devid's immolated, intertwined hands.2 A narrative voiceover of Helmut's voice reading from Leon's subsequent novel connects the mythologized deaths from the calamitous volcanic eruption to the contemporary deaths from calamitous climate intensification. The narrator continues that the pair was burned alive, rather than suffocating, as is more usual in a forest fire. In the sense that flames symbolically purify sin and guilt, their fiery death resonates particularly with Leon's subjectivity, notably his discomfort around male desire. Following the heteronormative psychoanalytic tradition, this striving male artist subsequently forges his repressed emotions into cultural production. In Roter Himmel, the ability to channel emotion and suffering into art is gendered. As the sequence shows and the voiceover highlights, these images of Pompeii arise for Leon in lieu of tears, even while Nadja sobs at his side. Shown as a promising literary scholar up to this point in the film, the emotionally laden young woman now gazes at Leon's calm face and, uncomprehendingly rejecting his response to the tragedy, abruptly turns and leaves the morgue. The female Nadja fails to recognize the beginning of the male Leon's production of art through repression. Her immediate, outwardly expressive, emotional reaction and her inability to understand his response demonstrate both her creative lack and his creative potency. In contrast, the male Leon represses emotional engagement with the enormity of the demise of young lovers as well as his feelings for Felix and successfully creates culture. First this productive impulse arises unbidden as the black-and-white images, later the artist molds it into a new successful novel. Unlike her male counterpart, the female Nadja functions primarily like the empty sea that complements and stages the action of the characters and Felix's photographs of oceanside visitors. Indeed, Felix's photo project underscores this role. As Helmut observes, Felix's image of Nadja is unique: photographed from behind, it is the only portrait in his collection that lacks a companion image showing the face of his subject. Subsequently, Leon pairs Nadja's photograph with one of the tranquil sea, thereby visually equating her visage and the saltwater mirror. Throughout the narrative, Nadja responds uniquely to the variedly narcissistic desires of the male characters around her. Even her scholarly work is functionalized as a foil to illuminate and foreshadow the libidinal energies and tragic ends of Roter Himmel. In contrast, the male writer earns his amorous and career advancements by working his libidinal and emotional desires into art, proving his human and professional ability, and earning his happy end. Yet, even as the melodrama articulates these traditional gender roles, it also gestures towards what may be their limitations. Nadja's interest in the fiery catastrophe around them remains circumscribed and impotent. Even her scholarly investigation of intersectional queer desire and natural catastrophe in Heine and Kleist remains inconsequential as it fails to generate any deeper engagement with the unfolding climate crisis.3 Similarly, Leon's work avoids grappling with nature as a formidable force by narrativizing it into a merely human tragedy. Ominously, the worsening real-world consequences of such truncated perspectives—the kind Roter Himmel depicts—still lie ahead, as the climate crisis increasingly encircles all of us.

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