Port of Dreams, Portals of Displacement: Angela Schanelec’s Marseille and the Narrative Cinema of Exile

The film Marseille (Angela Schanelec, 2004) begins in the street. More precisely, in a car, the camera pointed to show exactly the back of the driver’s head and the reflection of her eyes in the rearview mirror, a focal point that foregrounds the view onto the street through the front windshield and to its left, through the side window. The frame is stationary; the car is moving.

“Where is it?”

Asks a voice, whose speaker cannot yet be located.

“Do you know your way around?” 

Responds another.

“No.”

This exchange is programmatically fitting. If only because the question, “Where is it?” resounds ambiguously. What does this it refer to; where is what? The response hardly provides an answer: instead, it asks after why the first speaker utters her question in the first place. Thus, what the exchange at first reveals is that the first speaker does not know her way around – and does not even know to where she’s headed in the car. She must ask another person – the driver as the viewer will soon learn – who is presumed to know these things. This uncertainty carries the result that the very possibility of navigation, of finding a place or of finding oneself in a place, is immediately on the line in the film, and remains so throughout it. It is a film in which the question of how and whether its characters will find their way around, where they are headed and where, or even whether they will arrive is constantly placed into question. However, if one thing is straightaway clear in all of this, it is that the place displayed through the car-windows of the opening scene is most likely the city for which the film is titled, Marseille. But insofar as this film dwells on this obvious thematization of a place, it also runs up against its opposite, placelessness, and not only statically.

More precisely, it is possible to see how the film revolves around the movement and status of displacement in a doubled sense: in the interior way, that what is most at stake in unconscious thought is often structured according to displacement, or Entstellung, in dreams according to Freud; and in the way that in English one refers on a political register to a being that has been rendered fundamentally displaced as a ‘displaced person.’ Primarily, the film investigates the vicissitudes and dilemma of displacement through the place of Marseille at the level of both its cinematographic structure and narrative structure. And it does so in order to provide material referents for, and perhaps even bear witness to, what plays out in this place at the level of the demolition of topographic structures of experience. In this, Marseille’s radically narrative strategies, although topically focused on the character of a bourgeois German tourist in this city and as well as in her homeplace of Berlin, suggestively exceed this purview, opening onto a mise-en-scène of the threshold-experience of exile. It is a film which elliptically cites and dissects other filmic and literary depictions of this city as a famous port of entry, detention, dwelling, and exit for displaced persons, beginning with László Moholy-Nagy’s Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (Impressions of the Old Marseille Harbor, 1929) and Anna Seghers’s novel Transit.

The Cinematographic Scaffolding

So where were we? In the street, with the questions “Where is it?” and “Do you know your way around?” and the answer: “No.” And to this it is added that the first speaker, revealed as the passenger, apparently does not know her way around the streets of Marseille.

“Is there a map in there?”

In the glove compartment presumably.

“[Sound of rummaging] ‘No.’”

The driver pulls over, the gearshift cranks as the car is put into park at an intersection. The camera rotates to follow the driver as she exits the car, springs over to a kiosk, purchases something, and returns, revealed wearing netted stockings, red boots, and a jacket that nearly conceals her miniskirt.

“Here, a present.”¹

 “Thanks.”

The driver looks to the right, and the camera follows the moment of her vision with a gliding movement that seems to also follow the traffic through the windshield running horizontally in this direction. The camera stops to land on the back of the head in the passenger seat, revealing the top left corner of the street map that had been gifted to her, displaying the first syllable of its title, Marseille.

The first few minutes of the film are therefore immediately reminiscent of Moholy-Nagy’s film Impressions of the Old Marseille Harbor. From here on out, this essay will proceed through tracing what might be understood as both associative and dissociative logics. This is because, on the one hand, if displacement in the unconscious is ultimately associative, according to Freud, then displacement in or from the political, on the other, is ultimately dissociative. In the unconscious, displaced material renders itself legible to the extent that it pops up as seemingly trivial, marginal or even insignificant content, where it should not. When interpreting dreams, the displaced element, for Freud, is that which would have, “no place whatever in the core of the dream-thoughts, unless it was loosely connected with it by an antithesis.”² Sometimes, the dream-thoughts can only be linked to form dream-content by undergoing a form of censorship that makes it appear to have ‘no place’: everything at first appears marginal and nothing makes sense.³  This has two key results: first, it means that, “what is clearly the essence of the dream-thoughts need not be represented in the dream at all.”⁴ And second, that all of this nonsense is also anything but:

Among the many thoughts that analysis brings to light are many which are relatively remote from the kernel of the dream and which look like artificial interpolations made for some particular purpose. That purpose is easy to divine. It is precisely they that constitute a connection, often a forced or a far-fetched one between the dream-content and the dream thoughts; and if these elements were weeded out of the analysis the result would often be that the component of the parts of the dream-content would be left not only without overdetermination, but without any satisfactory determination at all.⁵ 

Overdetermination does not only happen at the primary level in the formation of the dream, Freud goes on to explain. This delay opens up the possibility that displaced material is that which makes itself more available for secondary revision, constituting connections. This means that the more insignificant and trivial, like reusable refuse, the more readily such displaced content becomes available as empty yet reusable signifiers for the work of the dream’s analysis.

On another register, political displacement, a concept that is literally concerned with displacement in and from the polis, wrought say, through war or other forms of demolition in the pursuit of capital resources, works to dissociate certain people, places and things from being represented, let alone entering formal (that is, normative legal) consciousness. How to bring this second predicament into association with anything else? This might require a thinking of the way in which the displaced is actively, continuously, and consciously displaced. The status of being displaced always risks referring back to itself, recognizing constitutive exclusions only in order to naturalize them, making use of borders and margins to all the better centralize and concentrate resources and power for the properly placed. The task for a critic of this notion would be to reject such teleologic certainty: to recognize links even and especially where it would appear that there are none. Moholy-Nagy’s film proves that this medium might be capable of materializing such links, and by extension, both valences of the term displacement are foregrounded and brought into dialogue.

The opening sequence of Impressions of the Old Marseille Harbor also displays a street-map of the city. In contrast to Schanelec’s fragmented insertion of the material, however, here the map is spread out in its entirety. But not for long. Within the first minute of the film, an area of the map’s centre is slowly yet invisibly cut out to reveal an aerial view onto a street, showing a tram and then automobiles. Already, the gesture of cutting out a portion of the map performs a sort of surgical operation (on a mode of perception belonging to a subject-viewer held to be capable of locating the referent of the places thereby designated and by extension of locating himself) introducing a paradigm of the rational-humanist envisioning and partitioning of the world. The insertion of the filmed view of the street in the place of the cut-out map here could either imply that the film will more truly supply this referent, or otherwise, that it will exceed this frame of reference itself, a possibility further suggested by the necessity of the map’s partial destruction for this montage to function.

Then, a wrought-iron lattice frames what will open onto the first full-frame view of the city street: the viewer is positioned before the interior of a building looking out. The pattern of the lattice almost evokes that of the street-map. As the perspective is drawn into the city, it follows the curves of the tram tracks in the street, linking the material of the decorative lattice to that of the city’s transit infrastructure. In this movement, the infrastructural elements of the city, whether functional or decorative, are revealed as sites of framing and cutting. Everywhere, the lines of the streets themselves are foregrounded or repetitively evoked.

A sort of turning point occurs nearly halfway through the film, as the cables of the transporter bridge, which visually very clearly evoke the sequence just described, slice the frame of the harbor, which then further disintegrates as the dissolve cut of the street brings the (bourgeois) interior of the city to this edge. Here, images of the homeless asleep at this periphery of the city materialize suspended between the reflection of the cables in the water and the shadows cast by the bridge. Moholy-Nagy’s camera is one that traces the geometric lines of high modern industrial order to linger and focus upon the most marginal beings upon them. Images of street urchins running in circles appear no less spectacular than those of industrial grandeur, larger than life. The place of the displaced is very clear. Filmic cutting, like displacement, is both associative and dissociative. Politically, this carries the task of rendering the disappeared, disappearing and excluded, visible at the precise fault-lines of the streets and other borders that are sites of transit, for some, and hellish limbo for others. The parallel lines that the film’s editing techniques draw reveal dissymmetry.

Schanelec’s Marseille is cinematographically structured along similar lines, although the chiaroscuro of iron, glass and steel reflecting and obscuring light in the black and white of Moholy-Nagy’s experiment is picked up instead in the contrast played upon between blue-tinted streets and windows intercepting yellowing walls. The parts of the film that take place in the city of Marseille are overwhelmingly represented through these colours, which nonetheless ultimately mix and melt into grey.⁶ As in Moholy-Nagy’s film, frames are visually structured through striking attention to and navigation of the borders constituted by the frames of the city’s infrastructure: windows, curves in a street, flows in traffic, unexpected walls creating narrow alleys – all form stark edges that are perpendicularly juxtaposed or forcefully reproduced in the cinematographic techniques of the film.

For instance, Marseille’s opening shot ends upon the focal point of a tiny corner of the street-map, a point that’s drawn into focus through the movement of the traffic and then the protagonists’ glances anticipating and determining the movement of the camera. Suddenly, a faint shadow in the shape of the car’s driver can faintly be seen approaching a wall of glass, through which the interior walls of an apartment and an opposite window are shown on her left, the reflection of buildings leading down to the sea on the right. She slides open the glass door and takes in the view still withheld from the viewer, revealing the flat through the frame of the doorway. Abruptly, the view has flipped from inside a car, looking out its windows on a motion-filled scene, to the other side of a glass partition, looking in upon a relatively static one. In contrast to the scene just left, especially, this interior appears as a somewhat painterly tableau (the impressionistic images in the opening glass surface and its reflection contribute to this as well). The noise of traffic can still be heard quite loudly from outside. 

Marseille

This has the effect that the relative stillness of the scene itself is jarring. The characters’ movements as well appear slow, measured and unconsciously tense. Something is off, but it’s difficult to place. The exchange that transpires between the two characters here ultimately appears far removed from such a concept. It’s premise at first appears obvious from the characters’ gestures: the driver of the car is showing the passenger the flat. The former points out; the latter looks and takes in. But for most of the scene Sophie, who should be looking around and taking in her immediate new surroundings, instead settles her gaze somewhere beyond the interior of the apartment and the frame. Out the window presumably. But perhaps this is the point. There’s not much to see in the flat, it’s virtually empty. This, in turn, is what the viewer sees, calling to mind Walter Benjamin’s reflections on Eugène Atget’s photographs in “Little History of Photography.” Especially since Sophie, who will be partially, if not absent-mindedly inhabiting this apartment, like Atget also photographs streets. On the latter, Benjamin writes: 

Atget almost always passed by the ‘great sights and so-called landmarks.’ What he did not pass by was a long row of boot lasts; or the Paris courtyards, where from night to morning the handcarts stand in serried ranks; or the tables after people have finished eating and left, the dishes not yet cleared away-as they exist by the hundreds of thousands at the same hour; or the brothel at No. 5, Rue –, whose street number appears, gigantic, at four different places on the building’s façade. Remarkably, however, almost all these pictures are empty. Empty is the Porte d’Arcueil by the fortifications, empty are the triumphal steps, empty are the courtyards, empty, as it should be, is the Place du Tertre. They are not lonely, merely without mood; the city in these pictures looks cleared out, like a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant. It is in these achievements that Surrealist photography sets the scene for a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings. It gives free play to the politically educated eye, under whose gaze all intimacies are sacrificed to the illumination of detail.⁷ 

Similarly, against the backdrop of the emptiness of this scene, certain details of what I will call false, artificial or counterfeit equivalences delivered by chance become clear. For instance, one is struck by how the two sets of keys exchanged between the two women swapping apartments are very different, as different as loss on land and fullness found at sea, those figures respectively alluded to in the songs each character starts to sing out of tune. The doors to Zelda’s keys to the apartment in Marseille have the same lock on the entryway to the building as to the flat; Sophie not only gives away a separate set of keys for each door, but the one to her apartment has not one but two locks, prompting an inquiry into whether the area is dangerous, to which she replies it isn’t. She then asks Zelda to water her plant, nearly forgetting the word in French. Zelda nods, but it’s later revealed that she either lied or was diverted: she will never actually arrive to Sophie’s flat in Berlin and disappears from the film she barely appears in. The song she starts to sing when asked whether she speaks German, “Mein Freund, der Baum,” “My Friend, the Tree,” from hit-singer-songwriter Alexandra’s 1968 album Zigeunerjunge, more spectrally, coincidentally, and accurately evokes what will become of the plant, especially in the context of such an emptied out urban setting: the rest of the song describes a tree that is chopped down to make way for a new house: “Mein Freund der Baum ist tot” [My friend the tree is dead]. Similarly, Atget photographed buildings that would be demolished, further drawing into focus how the camera is capable of registering displacement.

 Schanelec herself has earned the moniker, “poetess of emptiness” from critics, and this is not entirely without its reasons.⁸ Marco Abel and others have suggested that her narrative reductionism, which defies conventional devices of filmic storytelling⁹ in favour of poetic and even communication-defying caesuras alongside dense, contextually laden imagery, renders her work paradigmatic of the formal concerns of the filmmakers associated with the label of the Berlin School – even and especially since she thereby drives experimentation with narrative nearly to its breaking point.¹⁰ Along with fellow students at the DFFB (Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin) Christian Petzold and Thomas Arslan, Schanelec is counted among the first generation of this group whose approach to narrative film was inspired by the documentary and essayistic strategies of their shared teachers such as Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki. While the appellation has expanded to refer to directors of subsequent generations and schools beyond Berlin and even Germany, filmmaker Christoph Hochhäusler locates their shared “terrain” in a conceptualization of narrative and characters in which “there is a shift away from the centre and toward the periphery.”¹¹ In Schanelec’s films in particular, it is always possible to trace how the insertion of ellipses or breaks in communication in dialogue, laconic narrative structuring, and alternately blockaded or extremely open techniques of framing do not merely serve to suggest emptiness within or beyond each scene – although some viewers find its very possibility oppressive. Rather, by shifting attention to the limits of speech and even vision, the so-called empty spaces in her films, and especially in Marseille, always belie a movement towards the periphery, filled with the displaced traces of what has been or will have been, traces which the film rigorously tracks. The 95-minute film is composed of only about 75 long shots.¹²  Their meticulous framing, the composition of which nearly doubles that of the photographs Sophie takes, is extended through the use of pans: the film is the first in which Schanelec and cinematographer Reinhard Vorschneider have recourse of this technique. Favouring still frames and pans over the tracking shot, Vorschneider describes the spatial logic of the film as made up of “pushed, fixed frames,” as if the camera were pushed along by the traffic of the streets while simultaneously evoking the lines of vision of Sophie’s camera.¹³

Marseille

What is Sophie, and the camera, and the viewer, looking at or for in her photographs of streets, and in the images of the action of her photographing these streets? What story of, in or through the streets is thereby told?  Is it a form of prosaic displacement to even look for a story here? These questions are not only concerned with the relation between pictorial or cinematographic form and content, but also mobilize questions of narrative structure. Does the fact that these spaces are difficult for some to recognize as being filled with up-grounded referents point to a failure on the part of the filmmaker, or is this part of the point?

Marseille

Schanelec’s published diary entries from her visit to the city in 2002 in preparation for the film demonstrate that she clearly had Walter Benjamin’s writings on storytelling and the city of Marseille in mind: the diary cites texts such as “Hashish in Marseilles,” “Myslovice – Braunschweig – Marseilles,” and “The Handkerchief.”¹⁴ In this, the film also seems to reference yet another text set in Marseille which meditates on the role of storytelling in relation to exile: Anna Seghers’ Transit. Seghers likewise found herself in Marseille alongside her friend Benjamin while attempting to escape Europe as a German-Jewish refugee. The novel’s reflections on storytelling suggest that it may have been written as a response to these writings of Benjamin following his death. 

The Narrative Scaffolding

“If I’m not mistaken, my friend, you’d like to have two lives; and since you can’t have them one after the other, then two lives side-by-side, running on parallel tracks.”¹⁵ While these lines apply to the narrator of Anna Seghers’ Transit, in many ways they characterize Sophie’s emplotment in Schanelec’s film as well. In Seghers’ novel, these words hit upon the narrator’s desperation to masquerade as a dead author whose last manuscript he becomes the courier of after discovering it at the scene of his suicide. But after reading the novel while fleeing from Paris to Marseille on the eve of the German Occupation, this narrator becomes a paper-man in an even more literal sense. The manuscript becomes the chance vehicle through which he falls in love with the former author’s wife, Marie, and through which he might obtain them both transit and exit visas – but only if he can convincingly play the part of the dead man for an audience of bureaucrats, and the part of a removed but exceedingly obliging acquaintance to everyone else (including the author’s wife). In the process he, along with everyone else attempting to escape Marseille it seems, becomes a virtuoso of storytelling.

Marie, for instance, when attempting to articulate the strange narrator’s role in her life, begins an exchange with him that begins to elucidate the stakes of their need for narrative: 

‘Suddenly, coincidence did indeed turn into a stroke of fate. I was alone with the man who had found me instead of with the man I’d been looking for. That which should have been just for a little while now had permanence; and what was intended to be forever was –‘  

‘Stop that nonsense!’ I said. ‘You know it’s all nonsense. A coincidence never becomes fate: a shadow never becomes flesh and blood; and something that has real permanence never turns into a shadow. Anyway, you’re lying. You told me a completely different story before.’¹⁶

The closer Marie comes to recognizing her husband’s fate and the narrator’s double identity, the more vehemently he dismisses it as nonsense. Paradoxically, these lines render the truth of their encounter – the truth of their encounter through story, through all of the displaced material that the narrator has run off with. A coincidence may never become flesh and blood as fate per se, but this does not keep it from being materialized in the representations that emerge from the encounter, forming a premise for the novel itself. Storytelling need not constitute an unbroken chain, but instead is shared and picked up by others in the caesura of ellipsis, broken, and even overheard or borrowed utterances. Instead of only forming separate parallel tracks, as if such a thing could exist, we have a story that arises from the edge or fault-line of another. In Schanelec’s Marseille, this is at stake in both the film’s narrative and cinematographic techniques.

Sophie’s life-story is similarly structured through false or impossible parallels back in Berlin as well. She returns to Berlin to discover that her flat has remained empty the entire time: as if no swap or exchange ever took place. She’s shown playing third to another woman’s faltering marriage as she also steps in to care for and play mother to her child, all with whom she appears to have a close relationship. For the most part, this part of the film in fact revolves not around Sophie, but around this other woman’s expressions of her desire to “really leave” her family. Sophie pops up as someone who positions herself as a central marginal figure to the drama unfolding. In one scene, she accuses her friend of merely acting as if she were unhappy, since she’s always acting. In the next, as Sophie reads the child a bedtime story, he tells her that she can play the part of a seagull in the story’s dialogue, like his mother once did in a play. As if propelled to escape the parallel interpolations rendering her a play-actor, in the scene before she’s shown on a train¹⁷ back to Marseille, she looks again at the photographs she took of the city’s shoreline, as if the punctum of their emptiness were.

This return to Marseille, however, means that the film’s narrative is structured around a doubling of the protagonist and a doubled relation to the city: before and after. An initially blank character returns to the place after her narrative characterization had been filled in somewhere else. What, if anything, changes in this second appearance?

The closing sequence revolves around the account of yet another aleatory encounter concerning death and survival, once again literalizing the stakes of displacement. Sophie, who on her last visit to Marseille had been shooting pictures of the streets, overhears a shot in the street. The viewer neither sees nor hears this action, but hears of it, after Sophie is revealed waiting in a yellow dress that was just seen to be given to her by a police officer in exchange for a blue worker’s uniform. Her examination with the police begins, which is ultimately the account of her second arrival in Marseille.

This time, her character does not begin emptily, but nonetheless still has something proper to her literally stripped from her. Stutteringly, with the help of a translator, the viewer and the officers first learn that she had been held at gunpoint in order to exchange her clothes with a man fleeing a crime scene, so that he might escape arrest. “And you understood him without him having spoken?”¹⁸ asks the examiner’s interpreter: “There wasn’t much to understand,” she replies. More difficult to answer is the next question posed to her as a suspect or witness: “I see you are photographer. What do you take pictures of?” This is followed by a long silence. “Is the question too difficult?” The examiner asks. To which she finally answers, “Streets.” She then begins to give an unbroken account from her arrival by train in German and explains “I’ve been here before,” before finally continuing the story in French. From this account, it emerges that the shots of the streets suddenly have a referent that is very real, although impossible to contain or possess, like her clothes, over whose exchange she and perhaps another survive through, rendering her a witness, and like the cinematographic image itself.  Similarly, the final frame reproduces one of the photographs Sophie had reexamined before deciding to leave Berlin and return to Marseille. The shot resounds with real seagulls’ cries.

Endnotes