Queering Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia : The Sexual Politics of Christian Petzold's Roter Himmel ( Afire )
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: After the Berlinale press screening of Christian Petzold's Roter Himmel (Afire, 2023), I overheard a conversation in which the interlocutors praised this film about four young people spending a few (deceptively) lighthearted summer days at the Baltic Sea while a nearby forest is afire as a return to form for the director. Yet they questioned Roter Himmel's sexual politics because its narrative sacrifices the queer interracial couple, Felix (Langston Uibel) and Devid (Enno Trebs), while allowing the (failed) heterosexual white couple, Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Nadja (Paula Beer), to survive and seemingly even thrive. One could generalize this assessment and point to an aspect of both Petzold's oeuvre and the Berlin School tout court that scholars have ignored: these films’ conspicuous heterosexuality.1 Criticizing Petzold for doing what countless films before Roter Himmel have done—killing off marginalized people in stories that center majoritarian protagonists—is, thus, understandable, especially when questions about gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity have moved into the limelight more than ever before. But attending to an implicit reference to Roberto Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954) and thinking through its function alongside Grace McNealy's essay on “queering the gaze”—a provocative intervention that mobilizes Lacan's objet petit a to proffer a counter-argument to not only Laura Mulvey's theory of spectatorship but also to the above-mentioned desire for positive screen representations of queerness—might allow us to supplement this otherwise justified critique. While the film's reception has noted Éric Rohmer's influence on the genesis of Petzold's “summer film,”2 it has heretofore ignored the important role of Journey to Italy, which Petzold considers among “den wichtigsten Filmen meines Lebens [“the most important films in my life”] (Ranze 19, translation here and below mine), exerted on Afire. It starts with premonitions of the horror that lies ahead, before taking a detour that comprises the body of the film's narrative, during which intimations of horror only occasionally disrupt the education sentimentale—not least of which Leon, the struggling Stinkstiefel [stinker] of a writer who serves as the narrative's focalizer—in the form of both brief dialogue moments and some of the film's most beautiful images. I'm thinking here of the moment when our protagonists see ash floating through the air like plump snowflakes, almost dream-like, and the deep glowing red at which they stare while standing atop the roof of the house that serves as the film's primary setting: both images intensely braid beauty and horror, thereby rendering sensible both the affect of horror as beauty and the beauty potentially inhering in horror. During this detour from the horror-film setup—the car break-down, the forest's uncanny noises, the Black German Felix momentarily disappearing—Petzold plays with his audience. Specifically, he queers the desires manifest among the one female and three male protagonists, to the (humorously played) point at which Leon—who envelops himself in airs of unearned superiority but is oblivious to what's going on not only with Nadja but also Felix and Devid—wakes up to noises emanating from the other bedroom. Exasperated, he thinks it's once again Nadja and Devid who, notwithstanding his earlier complaint about their noise, are having the very fun he denies himself. To his surprise, however, it is Devid and Felix who are responsible for the racket. Importantly, Petzold never shows the two men having sex; consistent with his career-long aversion to staging explicit sex scenes, he limits its representation to the soundtrack.3 Yet post-off-screen intercourse, Petzold affirms the queer romance as more than just a one-night fling between Felix and Devid, who earlier had playfully revealed his interest in Felix when suddenly kissing him after narrating a dream in which a character tells him, “ich spray dich schwul [“I spray you gay”]. Felix, for example, tenderly identifies Devid to the fifth protagonist, Leon's editor Helmut (Matthias Brandt), as his “Freund” [“boyfriend”], and how they interact suggests an intimate connection. Yet instead of developing the queer romance to its summerly happy ending, Petzold, reusing a narrative device he had already used in Transit (2018), abruptly returns to the almost forgotten horror film as which Roter Himmel seemingly started.4 Leon observes from a distance two policemen informing Nadja of Devid's and Felix's deaths. As one of the officers catches the fainting Nadja, Petzold cuts to a close-up of Leon's face, then to an image (as if from Leon's perspective) of a burnt doe, as piano music accompanies the suddenly onsetting voice-over spoken offscreen by Helmut, which narrates how the lovers died. As the voice-over continues, the camera reveals among the remains of the scorched woods a gently rustling golden thermal blanket, thereby rendering sensible their dead bodies without representing them—a strategy Petzold repeats in the next scene at the morgue, where he grants us but a glimpse of two burnt hands holding each other as the voice-over explains that they lay there and “hielten sich umarmt” [“wrapped in each other's arms”]. Though not shot from either Leon's or Nadja's perspective, the sight triggers her to cry. But Leon, the voice-over continues, instead of crying “dachte […] an die Liebenden von Pompeii [“thought of the image of the lovers in Pompeii”], at which point Petzold inserts two photos of skeletal remains. Though the images are not from Journey to Italy, Petzold is essentially restaging the moment when Alex (George Sanders) and Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) witness the excavation of two bodies that a worker declares “a man and a woman.” With this scene, Rossellini heterosexualized the famous image of the “Two Maidens of Pompeii,” instrumentalizing it to create the possibility of revivifying his protagonists’ failing marriage. Petzold steals this image back from Rossellini. Just like the sight of the bodies causes Katherine to cry and hurry away in distress, so Nadja weeps and leaves, whereas Leon lingers, remaining trapped in his position of an aloof observer rather than an emotionally engaged participant. However, Roter Himmel proceeds without reducing the dead to a larger goal of reconciliation or commencement of a heterosexual relationship. For as the voice-over continues, we learn that Leon returned to the summer house only to discover Nadja's disappearance. At this moment, Petzold exposes that the voice-over we've been listening to is Helmut reading aloud Leon's new book manuscript, in which he reveals his recognition, as Petzold claims, that Leon, unlike Rossellini, “wird sie nicht erleben” [“will not experience love”] (Ranze 19, my emphasis). If Rossellini hijacked the famous image of two same-sex bodies, which at least carried the possibility of queerness, to create the affective conditions of possibility for a failing heterosexual relationship to have a chance at redemption, then Petzold reinscribes into film history not only a same-sex image but one that is rendered as unambiguously queer (one informed by the recent discovery that the “maidens” were men). Perhaps we can thus entertain the possibility that Petzold is doing something other than sacrificing the queer couple. For as Leon temporarily steps outside Helmut's hospice room as the latter receives treatment, Nadja suddenly reappears. A concluding sequence that directly contrasts with Petzold's Barbara (2012), it does not, I submit, communicate the possibility of romance.5 For whereas, as I've shown elsewhere, Barbara non-verbally and non-narratively renders sensible its heterosexual couple's romantic future by using a classical shot/reverse shot sequence consisting of true point of view shots, Roter Himmel’s closing shot/reverse shots stitch together false point of view shots of the protagonists’ smiles.6 Because of the “rules” of classical film grammar that Petzold purposefully deploys, Nadja's smile should not be mistaken as signifying romantic hope; instead, it communicates that she has relinquished her anger and forgiven Leon. After the camera lingers for a split second, allowing us to catch Nadja beginning to turn away from Leon, the final shot of his face reveals his smile subtly transforming into a look of contemplation, of remembrance of things past: of a life he hasn't lived, of the missed chance at love with Nadja. Roter Himmel does not conclude by intimating a romantic ending for the heterosexual couple, and Petzold also resists the temptation to counter Rossellini's heterosexualizing of a famous same-sex image by allowing the same-sex couple to enjoy what cinema history has only rarely depicted: the fulfillment of queer desire. What can be made of this choice? McNealy's argument about queering the gaze might help address this decision. Turning to “Lacan's notion of the gaze as objet petit a, an object that provokes our desire yet is fundamentally unattainable in the field of the visible,” she “conceptualize[s] a queer gaze that allows us to locate non-heterosexual identifications and desires in the invisible spaces in film” (434). Our gaze is not driven by what we do see but by “the very experience of not seeing it, yet still knowing it is there” (436).7 The objet petit a is that force in and of the Real that serves as the object-cause of desire, provoking our desire for what is absent in the field of the visible. This theorization of the queer gaze offers “viewers the opportunity to grasp at the possibility of queerness in film even where it is not explicitly shown, functioning as an alternative reading practice that … filmmakers can imbue into films themselves, allowing the film as object to trigger and sustain our desire” (440). McNealy formulates here not merely an alternative viewing practice for (queer) viewers but also a “manual” of sorts for directors, queer or not. For filmmakers can organize films by heeding the “nature” of desire as rooted not in a representational logic that could be realized by showing the object of desire but in one that is realizable only at the level of arepresentational yet real affective force: rather than providing viewers with positive content (e.g., a queer couple's “happily-ever-after” romance), Roter Himmel's ending “instead perpetuates the queer gaze, which by nature cannot be satisfied or resolved and instead leaves [viewers] suspended in pure desire” (453). Petzold achieves this suspension, where the “object” of desire is nothing but the affective experience of desiring desire, through the two aforementioned images (the golden thermal blanket and the burnt hands holding each other) that he wrests from the representational white heterosexual narrative logic and momentarily imbues with a sense of aesthetic(ized)—and interracial queer—autonomy. This autonomous moment lingers undisturbed by the (failed) logic of heterosexual desire to which it is not subjected and, as such, communicates a sensation of utopia that resonates with Petzold's larger project of Heimat-building—of imaging “the utopian desire for a place of one's own” (Abel, Counter-Cinema 70), a longing in which “time and space, the ‘here’ and the ‘now,’ become different to themselves as a ‘no-where’ in a ‘now-here’” (85). In this sense, Roter Himmel precisely exemplifies the Berlin School's “project,” which tout court does not “represent” Germany or the German people (5) and instead posits it as an objet petit a that can only ever exist in a temporality of something about which one can merely say that at some time in the future it will have been. In short, Roter Himmel is evidence that, pace claims to the contrary, the Berlin School is not yet out.
Source: The German Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/gequ.70031
Author: Marco Abel
Institution: University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,900
OpenAlex ID: W7123926294