Richard Burt

Spectral Historicism:

From Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba to Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

Reading not from perspective but from perspective understood as

perspectrarchivalization, of a kind of phantom citation or repetition in the process of

editing, of reducing dissemination to philology (of the collection and thematizing of

works dispersed as articles but now gather together in a single book.

“Ediots” (neologism for naïve editors)

A great example may be found in The Work of Mourning. The editors in their

introduction do not give the source of a Derrida article they reference on Sarah Kofmann

(p. 28) but do on p. 166. The footnote on p. 166 gets the title of the book writing as well

as the cuts short the full title of the essay. And they refer to the book as published, giving

he year of publication as 2001. But the book was not published until 2007, and under a

different title. All this takes shape under a page devoted to the title of the essay “ . . . . “

and Derrida’s discussion of the various titles he wanted to give his essay but didn’t. He

writes off the title, as it were. The title as entitled becomes spectral and inadvertently and,

in hiding in plain sight, calls attention to the way Derrida does not lay title to SK in

speaking of her. The perspective is not a set frame, already given, but it comes into play

precisely becomes it mistitles, disrupts the function of the introduction as frame as well

as the assumed to given orienting as framing relation to the tile of Kofmann’s essay

(which is given in full in French on p. 170, which repeats some of what is given in the

footnote on p. 168, but shortened in translation.

Furthermore, the translotr sues “cadaver” 237) whereas drrid asays he prefers the English

word “scorpse” (withouts saying that he is correcting a translation because the essay had

not been translated yet, but, on the other hand, is reprinted as the introduction (in English)

to Slected Writings, Sarah Kofman, in much longer form and without the footnote in

Work of mourning identifying its source. In the preface they still refer to Conjuring

Death with its short title (x) even though the contents gives the entire title. “The volume

introduction is translated and published by permission of Jacques Derrida.” SO the

introduciotn is not intri=docud, prefaed as a reintroudciotn, and the curous passive

construction makes it seem as if Derrida permitted hsimelf to the translate and publish the

introduction.

See also Kofman’s autobiographical essay “Nightmare: At the Margins of Medieval

Studies” For Bernard [Cerquiglini], 251-54. She takes up the issue of philology in

relation to classifiying what may nevertheless remain strange.

Derrida’s work on mourning, the “last book” puts into question the translation of the new

arrival, the latest, as the now, of a new tool we can use to pry open, force open perhaps,

the crypt and sue it as a reserve to produce to new readings. Not Schmitt’s last work, but

his late work, interrupted by WWII. How to read this double trajectory in relation to

Hamlet and Hecuba,a work about mourning.

H/oratio/ns (see LEH esay on Horatio andspectrality.)

stage the translation of the new Schmitt book into English as an occasion to

revisit the question of what it means to read, to read resistance, by reading the

delayed, full translation of Schmitt's book in relation to Schmitt's interrupted,

delayed response to Benjamin.  The delay is built into the paratextual

organization of Schmitt's book:  WB is put in the waiting room of the appendix.  I

would want to also use this staging of the book as a scene of reading as

resistance (de Man) to put some pressure, very gently, and open up questions

about the Telos book's self-presentation as the first complete translation and also

the first authorized translation."

I would furthermore want to focus on a page of the appendix that the French

translation of the book and the earlier Telos selections leave out of the German

original but reappear now in the book.  This concerns Schmitt's reading of Hamlet

as not a purely Catholic text, unlike Don Quixote (I forget now his other example).

I want to read the text of Schmitt's book in relation to this engagement with a

Jewish writer, on the one hand, and Schmitt's own Catholic theology on the other

other. And this question is also a question of geography (the island versus the

continent).  But, above al, and this would be my argument, is a question of

mourning and the time of reading, of death and the gift, of getting back what can

no longer come back (WB's text becomes readable now that he is dead), just as

Schmitt's text becomes translatable now that he is dead).  And I would want to

engage this question of mourning through Derrida's characterization of the

Catholic eucharist as the default (even for Sarah Kofman.  Holy EuCHaRIST!)

Reading Schmitt's H or H as delayed, deferred, destined or destin(t)erred, would

then be read in Schmitt's book as a question of address, of hailing the dead and

the economy of the gift, the difference between "Who goes there?" addressed to

the dead and the living in Hamlet as opposed to the challenge and recognition

HV gets when disguising himself to check on the soldier's morale the night before

the battle of Agincourt.  Schmitt's delayed book is day of refusing to close the

book (as HV wants to), to settle accounts, to erase or cross out the names of the

dead (or say them, as HV does) in relation to a dead reckoning, a last judgment

(as Williams casts it).  Schmitt is not settling accounts with WB but getting at the

relation between the book and the body as a question of the open or closed book

(Hamlet does nto give an account of himself in his last speech but "could tell" and

Horatio too interrogates the audience's desire to "see" on stage in terms of a

closed story figured by the assembled "dead' bodies.  We end with a future

anterior of reading as the yet to be done but also as the never to be done but

already figured as an interrupted succession without a final national destination.  

Hence Hamlet remains a figure to be read, just as Schmitt remains to be read,

even now, especially now, that he is here, once more, on English shores.

geography would then be less a question of Nomos (as the political) but a

politology, to use Derrida's words, of topology that gets rendered only through a

tropology, making the new translation of Schmitt's book something like the

shattered remains of a shipwreck that wash up on shore even as they arrive late,

perhaps too late, even washed out.  But this very lateness would be the book's

"survival effect," rendering its varied kinds of resistance (un)readable.

Death’s watch (Death keeps the watch, as in Hamlet at the opening) and dath

watching,, as in waiting for us to die, and death watching over us (a watch as the

time of securing, of being awake, of hailing and demanding recognition (Hamlet

and HV scene when HV disguises himself and visits his soldiers the night before

Agincourt, and Williams turns the discussion to the last judgment and the King’s

debts.

Derrida, Work of Mourning obit on setting Catholic eucharist as the default for

mourning in Louis Marin and again in Sarah Kofmann, this time connected to the

book and body, to the last book and not being able to close—suspending the

Christian notion of the last judgment, keeping the gift and legacy in play as

opposed to giving a dead reckoning. You can give an account of someone dead,

of yourself, of the survival of the dead, of the way they living are posthumous in

writing, even give an account of yourself that does not settle accounts, pay off

debts, close the book, cross a name off a list.

The Last Book

Introduction to Derrida, The Work of Mourning, the editors note that he often talks

about the dead person’s last words of final book. In the eulogy for Louis Marin

he talks about the ”last book” and uses the phrase several times, especially in

relation to the way the temporality of reaing and writing is not reducible to a

future anterior even though he has just said that Marin effectively knew he was

going to die and knew he would not see the publication of his last book and how

all Marin’s books are written in a way that makes them posthumous even while

Marin was still alive.

Derrida, Work of Mourning obit on setting Catholic eucharist as the default for

mourning in Louis Marin and again in Sarah Kofmann, this time connected to the

book and body, to the last book and not being able to close—suspending the

Christian notion of the last judgment, keeping the gift and legacy in play as

opposed to giving a dead reckoning. You can give an account of someone dead,

of yourself, of the survival of the dead, of the way they living are posthumous in

writing, even give an account of yourself that does not settle accounts, pay off

debts, close the book, cross a name off a list.

Tell me why we wait for death. Marin’s last book will have helped me think

this. To think what which in fact regards each of so singularly, namely, the

law of what does not return of come back, if what comes back to us only

there where it can no longer come back to us, and so comes down, lie

mastery, that is, like the fiction of force, to the incontestable authority of

death, to the very inexistence of the image, of its fantastic power, to the

impresence [sic] of a trace.

Louis Marin knew that this authority begins before death, and that death begins

its work before death. Death’s watch [veille], the time of this book, had begun

long ago for Louis Marin, well before the eve [veille] of his death.

This is also why this book cannot be closed, why it interrupts itself interminably.

And however prepared I might have been for it, I read it too quickly, in a sort of

haste that no mourning will be able to diminish or console. It happened to me too

quickly, like Louis’s death. I feel as if I were still on the eve of reading it. (164)

“As if respect for this certainty were still a debt, the last one, owed to the friend.”

(160)

“And this is what secretly links the gift to death” (164)

“Well never have the time.” (163)

“To speak this evening of the last book of Marin as I might have spoken in

another time and in more conventional circumstances of his most recent book.

(158)

“With a certain time of reading” (158)

“survival effect” (157)

that we are all looked at (each of us singularly) by the one who, with each page,

will providentially deciphered and prescribed, arranged in advance , a reading of

what is happening here, of what makes the present scene possible, foreseeing

and watching over it with the benevolent regard (since it is he who watches out to

watch over us) and with all the love of someone who can say, at the moment of

dying, even if it is not Christ or Christian, hoc est meum corpus, which is given for

you. Do this in remembrance of me (Luke 22.19) 160)

Sarah Kofman

At first I did not know—and I still in fact do not know—what title to give to these

words.

What is the gift of a title?

I even had the fleeting suspicion that such a gift would be somewhat indecent: it

would imply the violent selection of a perspective, an abusive interpretative

framing or narcissistic reappropriation, a conspicuous signature that is Sarah

Kofman, Sarah Kofman alone, Sarah Kofman herself, ever there [la-bas], beyond

here, well beyond me or us here and now. Sarah Kofman who should be spoken

about whom I hear speaking.

Sarah Kofman

Would d then be the best title, were I not afraid of being unable to measure up to

it.

Finally-since the question remains the gift and of what it means to give a title—it

seemed to me more just to speak, and for just this reason, of the gift in Sarah

Kofman, of her gifts: those she gave us, those she left us, and those she too

perhaps received.

The title would then be

Sarah Kofman’s Gifts

And here are a few possible subtitles, to give you some idea of what I would like

to say:

Here There

Open Book, Closed Book

Protestations

Here and there we find the body and we find the book, the open book and the

closed book. And protestations. Between the two, between here and there,

between the body and the book, between the open book and the closed one,

there would be, here and there, the third, the witness, the terstis, testimony,

attestation, and testament—but in the form of protest or protestation.

For when I say body, I mean the living body as well as the sexed body—as if

thus testament, the oldest and the newest: “this is my body,” “keep it in memory

of me,” and so, “replace it, in memory of me, with a book or discourse to be

bound in hide or put into digital memory. Transfigure me into a corpus. So that

there no longer be any difference between the real presence or of the Eucharist

and the great computerized library of knowledge.”

This great eucharistic paradigm, was first of all, and perhaps will always remain,

what is proper to man I mean to the son or the father. For is this not a scene of

men? No doubt, as long, that is, as we keep to the visibility of the scene.

We will perhaps talk later about the veil of a certain Last Supper scene, I mean

the Last Supper [Cene] of the Holy Table. (168; 169)

The eucharist is thus a scene of reading, of transfiguration rather than

transubstantiation.

The obit ends with

“On October 15, 1994, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Nietzsche’s

birth, Sarah Kofman took her own life.”

She is both Jewish and a suicide, and yet Derrida reads her legacy rather

expansively in Christian terms.

Her father (French) was interned, deported to Auschwitz, and died there. “The

children were given French names to conceal their identities” (165). She lived

with her mothering hiding with a french family during the Occupation.

The obit of Sarah Kofman ends with her suicide in 1994. In the eulogy that

follows, Derrida singles out her last essay, published in 1995, entitled “Conjuring

Death” for attention because it is “unfinished,” because he can “read this both

posthumous and living” text, and because the text itself is about the cory and the

book, about the way Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicholase Tulp,

1632, is the doctors reading their books and not looking at the cadaver (Derrida

says he prefers corpse because it is like the French “le corp”

He cites a passage “which he mentions life three times in this place where book,

cadaver, corpus, and corpse exchange places” (177).

The editors have an endnote that hints but does not say that the text was

published posthumously and quotes thee editors’ note that preceded the original

French publication of the essay (that again acknowledges SK’s death without

mentioning it). The editors of the French original read the essay in entirely

secular terms: “Sarah emphasized that this pairing of the cadaver and the book,

both of them open and offered to the gazes of the doctors surrounded by objects

situated in a play of light, offered, quite beyond the conventions of the genre, a

representation of the scientific method. The book, a sum and source of

knowledge, at once confronted and supported by the materiality of

experimentation, gives a new impetus to the discourse of science, its texts and

its commentaries” (p. 293 n. 1 in Selected Writings: Sarah Kofman ed. Thomas

Albrecht with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Introduction by Jacques

Derrida. (Stanford UP, 2007).

Derrida’s reading of the essay follows the mix of dry obit and critical eulogy in

which he recasts her suicide as a kind of burial in his essay. She becomes a

kind of Ophelia who protests against, resists Christian burial, protests against the

transfiguration of her texts even as she makes them readable only by giving them

away in relation to a last supper.

Derrida in Work of Mourning on Louis Marin—talking about The portrait of the King,

especially the last chapter o theschipwreck, inrelation to Kanotorwicz, the simulcarum,

the way, the painting and the photograph are the same,and hten on the temporality of

reading and writing,.

Use Ricikels sentence about underground connection in Nazi pyshcoaalysis htat I cited in

my Nazi Shakespeare article. The phone call always comes form underground,

interferencedsaticetc are all death rlated.

Geopolitics of nomos of the earth shoul dnot be opposedto spectrality of Derridaorof

Benjamin.

Sepectality areadyoperatvein Schmitt’sconception of the Nomos.

Mistake about the materiality ofhtetextand hteapapratus as well.

Connect Nomos (land, geography—De Grazia----land versus territory in / body in

Richard II (buried fear) with spectrality in Hamlet in terms of burial, gravedigging.

De Grazia as performing a major exorcism of spectrality from materiality. Yet can the

spectre be better grounded? Is there a ground, national body, king’s body?

Corporeality and nomos? See Agamben’s critique of KaNTOROWICz too.

Questions about Schmitt? What is the evidence of intrusion and how does intrusion

differ from interruption? How doe s the intrusion mark itself on Hamlet? And what is

“time”?

Frame—play within the play

And history as spectral. Aduience doesn’t see James I.

And aparadox—structurla versus post strucutralist—the temporality of the state of

exception.

Corpses in WB Trauerspiel and demon as well as description of severedhead, the tree as limbless--Horatio describing a hung corpse as if itwere cut., as if its cuts cut him. The

descriptions of the battle—General to the

voiceory—severed head, limbs.

Shot in the backStrange reistnce to rading Schmitt who reads Benjmain in the appendix, exoteric versus

esoteric. But in each case the reading remains the same.

Monstroisites of Criticism, caterories of review

Categories of Monstroieties criticms

Reading in order not ot hve to read

Reading in order to lsice and dice—coreective, quaranting, caudterizing operation

Readingfrom the margin to total.

Reading form fists;

Readings to seaparte, put distance between writers are who perceived to be too close for

comfort.

Question ofsovereign, the state of exception, justice, violence, history and form,

intrusion, time.

Radical dialogisim of WB and Schmitt in lration to Derrida and spectrality—Marx and

Hamlet.

Also reading of Schmitt in relation to Strauss. Persecution of Writing and Dstrauss’s

appendix to The Concept of the Political. This candal gets less attetion. Persecution as a

double reading.

Opens up a post-structuralist reading of Schmitt.

Implications for rereading WB on Hamlet

Reading Schmitt without WB and WB without Schmitt via the ghost of Hamlet.

Derrida versus Agamben,

Not who read who first account of origins but a double origin—both on the line and

putting each other on hold.

Double origin in terms of WB’s Ursprung—not a chronological temporality.

Retrurn to philology is a return to the conflict between poetics and herrmentuics, between

philology and philosophy (violence of reading, danger of saving the text, danger of the

text.

Th eissue involves reading him in relation WB in terms of structuralism or post-

strucrualism—the text’s as ruins, as double readings. Not linear, transparent texts, parts

of a unified archive that can be retrieved at will. H or H not a detur not a lens through

which the entire Schmitt oeuvre may be read—equally familiarizing moves, totalizing ,

cutting off in order to totalize. S[ectral is uncanny—who cam efirst—Derrida on

Agamebms’s firsts in Homo Scare (in Beast and the Sovereign) and hten Agamben on

Schmitt as first to read WB, rathe rhtan reverse. A simple oirigin rahte rhtan a double

origin.

A kind of simplistic model of dialogue.

Why Hamlet and why the Trauerpsiel, similarly overlooked in the corpusof each writer.

Why the detour? Hamlet and Hecuba shows that the structure of decision is not only two

but three moments (see Weber on two moments, deciding there is a stae of exception and

hten suspending the law), and that it is everywhere. Hamlet itself is a paradoxical choice

—so the paradox proliferates endlessly. Tragedy does not serve to stabilize sovereignty

but to maximize in such a way that there are only states of exception. There is play within

the serious that Schmitt cannot get rid of.

Conversely, Hamlet and trauersspiel is only lack of sovereignty, lack of perfect form,

linked to the mazimizationof police spreaization and spirit of ditatorship in Critique of

Violence as read byDerrida in Force of Law.

So the opposites come out n the same place—of multple paradoxes andspectrality in

which the spirit of ditactorship means its clapse into intrigue (the third moment, after

suspending the law) or into total sovereignty, invisibleas such , of the ppolice 9the feds)

of a scret government.

There is the question of this ungraspable revolutionary instant, of this exceptional

decision which belongs to no historical, temporal continuum but in which the foundation

of a new law nevertheless plays, if one can say so, on something from an anterior view

that it extends, radicalizes deforms metaphorizes or metonymizes—this figure here taking

the names of war or general strike. But this figure is also a contamination. It effaces or

blurs the distinction , pure and simple, between foundation and preservation.

Force of Law 274-75

Derrida brings up the Trauerspiel book in “Force of Law,” pp. 280-81 in the context of

monarchy, spirit, “spirit is dictatorship.” See also “Second Aporia: the Haunting of the

Undecidable” (252-255) in Force of Law and also discussion of death penalty and

spectrality that begins on p. 276; true mechanism of decision (286) is explosion of

violence in anger Mentions Carl Schmitt, p. 283 in historicist and ahistoricist

(transcendental) way, p. 283. The essay is not bound by chornology260: “The

chronology of such events cannot be taken for granted.”

Schmitt has to skip a beat in order to make Hamlet a tragedy—instead of moving from

myth to tragedy, Hamlet creates a myth and turns it into tragedy at the same time.

So the intrusion of time—what kind of time intrudes? Alarm clock time? Empty

homogenous time? Uncanny time? And what odes ntrusion mean, as opposed to rupture

or interruption?

See the addition of prologues by St Jerome and then by later editors to the Bible (paratext

as theological supplement even before the secular, Enlghtenment Bible.

The unexpected and even embarrassing dialogue Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt

about political theology and tragedy has received a lot of critical attention recently, but

not with respect to Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time in Play. In

the special issue of Telos devoted to Schmitt’s book, I would like to write an essay

treating Hamlet or Hecuba as a kind of spectral text in the larger debate about political

theology, tragedy, and violence from Schmitt through Derrida, Agamben, and Weber)?

My point of departure will be an epilogue and endnote in Derrida's Politics of Friendship

saying he plans to write on Schmitt’s book (Derrida never did).1 Of central importance is

Schmitt’s spectralization of history: The central line of Hamlet or Hecuba, in my view,

is the one where he says he doesn't except the audience to see James I on stage.  James I

(carrying the baggage of his beheaded mother, Mary Queen of Scots) intrudes, but only

as a ghost, in other words.  So Schmitt is not doing a conventional old historicist Henry

Paul (see his Royal Play of Macbeth) reading since his notion of intrusion and formal

imperfection.  Instead, he is writing a spectral historicism avant Derrida by implying that

sovereignty is always already weak sovereignty (that is, his own reading self-deconstructs

and becomes a Benjaminian Trauerspiel) and that his why he wants to keep Hamlet as a

hybrid play isolated geographically in England (see "Results" section) and also why his

appendix is contradictory--he divorces theology from politics (barbarism, religion versus

politics and the state) while again making England (Elizabeth) country in a transition, on

the way to becoming a state.  But Schmitt cannot then explain how the Trauerspiel ever

emerged in Germany. At least he does not explain why it did, or why, for that matter,

Hamlet (and Shakespeare) was received as German so early.  So my argument would be

that Schmitt's book is not a detour away form his political writings (into aesthetics) but

instead reveals the spectral, uncanny relation between theology and politics that haunts

Schmitt’s Political Theology.  Apart from the appendix written to Walter Benjamin, by

then a dead German Jew persecuted by the Nazis who had sent Schmitt in 1928 a kind

letter along with a copy of his Trauerspiel book, Hamlet or Hecuba is a spectral book

that haunts the history of political thought Schmitt engaged (Locke vs. Hobbes) as well

Schmitt and Benjamin’s writings on violence as interpreted by Giorgio Agamben, Samuel

Weber, and Jacques Derrida). The present implications of rethinking the oft-noted

German Catholic / German Jew connections and tensions between Schmitt and Benjamin

through Hamlet or Hecuba considered as a spectral text about the spectrality of history

and play would then be made visible in Quentin Tarantino's most recent film, Inglourious

Basterds (2009), with its different set of connections and tensions and common reference

to Hamlet:  the  Nazi / the Jew (American Jewish GIs form a special unit of Nazi

hunters); the French collaborator / the resistance fighter and the spectral citation of

Hamlet. Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds uses Hamlet to relay the spectrality of history

(via film). Inglourious Basterds has two parallel film-within-the-film plots that roughly

parallels the Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet.  In one of the two plots, highly flammable

silver nitrate film prints are used as an explosive to kill a Nazi audience, including Hitler,

Goebels, Goering, and Borman, trapped in a French theater I will conclude by playing off

Tarantino's Jean-Luc Godardian take on history as film history (in Godard’s Historie(s)

du cinema) and Tarantino's deconstructive view of violence in WWII and, by extension,

in the present (in interviews, he has compared the French Resistance characters to suicide

bombers) against the structuralist (and I think reductive) readings of violence (WB is the

same as Schmitt) by Agamben and Weber.

Also flag and handerkerchief

Horatio as double of Andrea.

Who worte the letter? Bel-Imperia? Who drops it?

Lack of motication for Don Andrea’s revenge—he says he was killed in battle. Doesn’t name a bad guy to avenge himself on—he cannot be placed, passed on Hell—his problem is hat they don’t know where to put him—so he goes through a dream to the frame via Persphone. Andrea is a weak sovereign, or a sovereign only after the play is over—he decides the fates—but even they are paradoxical in the play’s last line—“begins and never finishes”

The play in the play frame fragments rahter than unifies. Heironomo tears the text up, writes with blood (says he wants to) but uses the knife to kill Don Catillo (who he doesn’t care about, but Don Andrea, who is low born, like Horation, does).

The play sia bout a failure of translation—from life to death, from one language (sundry languages) t English (Latin is not translated0 and from text to peformance or performance to text. Fittingly,Kyd himself went missing as the play’s author, and it has an uncanny satus as being a partially missing play. The Ur-Hamlet—Hamlet via germany.

It’s a Trauerspiel—a ruination based on language and medium of language—finally Hiernomno bites out his tongue—silences himself thereby.

Silence is about a cut, a kind of violence,, and spectrality thatgets in the ay of trnsaltion, meaning carrying across. Hence the ned for a passport, for passage, pass on, that then turns into “consort” but only in death (when the characters are dead). Bel-Imperia doesn’t stick to the script. Not clear if Revenge is the author of the vents. He talks abut detny and can fall asleep at the wheel because he knows alreadyhowit will all (not) work out.Failure to translate Cahtolicism and greek mythology-Bindicita mihi both the Old Testament ad Seenca. He is a holding a obok, some editors say it is Seneca. Butthere is no info about the book in the play itself.

The book is a prop—action is not grounded in a foundational medium—lnguage—rahter language creates con-fusion –in the plot (Andrea’s revenge gets fused with Heironomo’s) and in the theology and in he characters (Horatio as avenged victim, like Don Andrea). And in the props (flags and handkerchief. And letters (Bel-Imperia’s is feinged not feigned.

Also a probem of staging—what to do withBel-Imperia’s corpse—shedes off stage or in in a small theater in the theater with curtains on stage.

Oddly enough "passport" comes up three times in Don Andrea's openingspeech. It is used n relation to going from life to earth, from earthto hell. (in the Arden edition, pp. 5, 6, and 7)

It also comes up later in relation to a mistaken execution, and"passport" is used instead of "pardon.""Sir, here is his passport; I pray you sir, we have done him wrong."

Act III, vi (in the Arden edition, p. 68)

Before the guy is hung (he actually is guilty of murder), he isawaiting a "pardon" (the word is used several times) from Lorenzo thatis supposed to reside in a box Lorenzo gives his servant to show themurderer (who murdered at Lorenzo's request) but that is actuallyempty.  The servant look in it and sees it is empty but keeps pointingto it in order to  reassure (though he does so out of sadistic joy)the murderer as he is about to be hung.

Andrea uses the word "consort" at   the end of the play (in the tenseof transport, but he , apparently, still has his passport with him.

The play is really bizarre and interesting in saying that the playwithin the play will be and was multi-lingual but then actually beingin English after a note  says that the original, in "sundrylanguages,"  has been set down in English, implying that the printededition is a translation of the originally multi-lingual performance.

Or was the note spoken during the performance?

In either case, the framing device is a disruption of the play'stextual integrity as well as translation, since we can never be surethere was an original with the different languages.  Al we have is aspecter of a text in a play that is a ply within the play.  Editors,of course, have no idea what to do with the note after having how itcontradicts Heironomo's description of the play.

I'm wondering if there is a connection H's reference to Babylon, as in"Babel on," because the play also mixes Christian theology and Greekmyths (making the latter the real frame) and the play within the playis about an Islamic turk who kills his friend to win the love of aChristian Italian woman, who rejects his advances.  H says that in theoriginal the woman  commits suicide but that he amended the play sothat Bel-Imperia would not kill herself. But she exceeds his"translation" and kills herself anyway.Speech and silence also come up when Hfinally bites off his tongue (ina strange Lavinia like moment from Titus A except that he does ithimself) and takes the "pen knife" and stabs the Duke of Castile.

The allegorical frame with Revenge and Andrea contains hte plot(recapitulates at the end) yet oddly departs form the play (H'sattempt at self-allegorization is dismissed by Lorenzo’s the ravings ofa madman.  So as intriguer, H has to resort to a play in a play thathas to be translated, and is, yet  is not (the original goes missing,becomes a ghost like Revenge and Andrea).

Interesting too the play ends on a Schmittian not about friend andfoe, ease and woe.

Thinking more about the play (I am teaching it Tuesday) and aboutextremity in it along Schmittian lines and the way te frame sets up adoubling (or series of them), mainly between Andrea and Heironimo, thatinitiates a ruination across the text, a collapse of linguistic,religious and national distinctions Kyd "gets wrong" the Englishhistory), and one could extend this spectralization effect to theplay's textual status--corrupt passages with missing lines , on theone hand, and additions from 1602 edition, on the other,additions that are published as fragments at the end of the Ardenedition.The text of the play is a ruin for the editor.

The plot of hte play WB , or the plotting via the ghost frame, and theextended speeches (also extreme) or single scenes with one character(Isabella when she kills herself) has a double origin in WB's sensethat creates a fntasy of an UR-play or that the play is the UR-Hamletand succeeds only in turning ruinination into urnination (a containerthat doesn't mange to contain its ashes, isn't installed intose palces--can't think of the word, where urns of ashes of dead people arestored.Columbarium

Also thinking of the play as a total Trauerspiel--almost a caricatureof itself, excessive (hyperextended speeches mixed with hyperbriefdialogue--stichomythia), eccentric, violent, and, in the view ofeditors, "corrupt"  (inconsistent and incomplete--missing parts andhaving leftover parts). T.W. Rose has a pretty good intro to hisedition.  The oddest (and sadly, totally meaningless) thing I havefound is that Milton's nephew Edward Phillips misattributed the playin 1675, and then in the last century, Philip Edwards edited it (in1959)!  Perfect that the first name Philip has only one "l," not two.Too much (and not much).It works really well for my course because of the "Ur-Hamlet" (missingGerman edition of Kyd's "lost" play with a German title) comes in. Atotally non-Benjaminian notion of the Ursprung.

Hamlet (Out of Film) and the Irony of the Political

“The so-called immortal works just flash briefly through every present time. Hamlet is one of the very fastest, the hardest to grasp.”—Walter Benjamin, “Notes (II)” (285)

A reading of the film frame as ironic bombshell opening up spectral history in Tarantino’s film may be productively deployed by turning to the unexpected, even embarrassing dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt about the state of exception as it bears on political theology, tragedy, and temporality.1 From our perspective, the main interest of Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time in Play2 is Schmitt’s spectralization of history: Schmitt says he doesn’t expect the audience to see James I on stage. James I (carrying the baggage of his beheaded mother,

1 For a return to Schmitt in relation to the George W. Bush administration, see Horton.2 For further reflections, see also Kahn, Weber, Lupton, Agamben’s Homo Sacer (15–30; 75–112), and Derrida’s endnote on Hamlet or Hecuba in The Politics of Friendship (165–67, 169-70n32); see also Derrida on the ghost of Old Hamlet’s visor being open or closed having no bearing on sovereignty defined as seeing without being seen in Specters of Marx (7–8) and The Beast and Sovereignty (6, 293).

Mary Queen of Scots) intrudes, but only as a ghost, in other words. Schmitt is not doing a conventional old historicist Henry Paul reading, since his is a notion of intrusion and formal imperfection. Instead, he is writing a spectral historicism avant Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, by implying that sovereignty is always already weak sovereignty (that is, Schmitt’s own reading self-deconstructs and becomes a Benjaminian Trauerspiel). Schmitt’s book is not a detour away from his political writings (into aesthetics), but rather reveals the spectral, uncanny relation between theology and politics that haunts Political Theology. Apart from the Appendix written to Walter Benjamin, by

then long dead, who had sent Schmitt in 1928 a kind letter

along with a copy of his Trauerspiel book, Hamlet or

Hecuba is a spectral book that haunts the history of political

thought Schmitt engaged (Locke vs. Hobbes). Schmitt’s

book is gaining new attention from Shakespeareans now

that an authorized translation has been published, but may

best be read within the wider context of the relation

between force and justice that concerned Benjamin and

Schmitt. With the exception of Derrida’s explosive essay

“The Force of Law,” critics have tried to salvage Benjamin’s

conception of violence and dismiss Schmitt. Yet perhaps

Schmitt’s value lies in his repetition in the Hamlet book in a

more extreme manner, the implicitly paradoxical discussion

of sovereignty and the state of exception he had made

explicitly paradoxical in his political writings. To put it

another, to what extent it Schmitt’s book on Hamlet

overtaken by irony? Whether Hamlet is a tragedy and

Trauerspiel matters to Schmitt because he wants to

separate politics from play: politics is what interrupts play.

To demonstrate this point Schmitt returns to Hamlet, a play

Benjamin classified as a Trauerspiel about indecision.

Schmitt ironically demonstrates, however, that the state of

exception is everywhere in Hamlet, leaving Schmitt unable

to make his argument and necessitating an Appendix in

which he returns to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book.3 That is an 3 Kahn criticizes Schmitt for not be able to tell the difference between a true decision (as opposed to faked states of emergency) but misses the more important point that the truth of any state of exception can never be determined; indeed, any decision will immediately be attacked by enemies of the state as a fraud, and no one will be in turn to decide whether the critics are provocateurs, paranoid, or correct (or all of the above). Aesthetics and politics cannot rightly be separated out and reduced to truth and fraud, if 1 See Derrida’s endnote on Hamlet or Hecuba in The Politics of Friendship (1994; trans.

2005), note 32, pp. 169-70, and the epilogue to the essay 165-67. See also Derrida on the

ghost of Old Hamlet’s visor being open or closed having no bearing on sovereignty

defined as seeing without being seen in Specters of Marx (1994) and The Beast and

Sovereignty (2009).

argument to be made at another time.

Irony and the Character of Inglourious Basterds

LAERTES: Know you the hand?CLAUDIUS: ’Tis Hamlet’s character.

Hamlet makes a brief appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a kind of verbal cameo.4 A film actress and several Nazi soldiers on leave in Occupied Paris are getting drunk in a bar. They are playing a game that involves guessing the names of characters written on cards they have each stuck on their own foreheads. When one Nazi soldier fears that his character may be controversial because the character is American, the German film actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), who is secretly working as a double agent for the Allies, declares that

it’s not controversial. The nationally of the author, has nothing to do with the nationally of the character. The Character is the character. Hamlet’s not British, he’s Danish.

Although Inglourious Basterds makes no other overt reference to Hamlet or Shakespeare,5 the way that the film 4 The Hamlet cameo echoes the uncredited audio cameos of prior Tarantino stars Samuel L. Jackson and Harvey Keitel.5 It does, however, self-consciously divide itself into five “chapters,” which we might consider a displacement of the more conventional five-act structure of a play. The Austrian actor who plays S.S. Officer Hans Landa, Christoph Waltz, has, when interviewed, taken to likening Inglourious Basterds to “Shakespearean” drama (Topel), as did David Carradine before him with speaking of Kill Bill, and Bruce Willis for Pulp Fiction--although for all this seemed a

references Hamlet in the context of literary character criticism may have productive implications for Shakespeare film criticism. For some time, Shakespeare on film criticism has been trying to leave behind considerations of Shakespeare and effectively read a given film as a film. In practice, however, this apparently film-centered criticism has meant that a given film related to Shakespeare is read as if it were a text, and thereby historicized the same way New Historicists might historicize the text of Hamlet. More recently, the tendency to historicize Shakespeare films as discrete ideological reproductions inadvertently coincides with a tendency in Shakespeare textual criticism and “New New Historicism” (or material culture criticism) to divorce

vaguely honorific category more than any more specific claim about the cinematic inheritance of theatre. In a 2007 GQ interview, Tarantino gamely suggested that he’s

always had a thought maybe that I might have been Shakespeare in another life. I don’t really believe that 100 percent, and I don’t really care about Shakespeare, I’ve never been into Shakespeare, but then people are constantly bringing up all of these qualities in my work that mirror Shakespearean tragedies and moments and themes. People have written lots of pieces about the parallels of my work and Shakespeare. I remember in the case of Reservoir Dogs, writing this scene where the undercover cop is teaching Tim Roth how to be an undercover cop, and when the actors came in to rehearse it, Harvey Keitel read it, and he thought I had just taken Hamlet’s speech to the players and broke it down into modern words. I’d never read Hamlet’s speech to the players.

Titus Andronicus has been cited as “Shakespeare’s Tarantino Play” (see, for instance, the Reduced Shakespeare Company), to the irritation of Julie Taymor.

the Shakespeare text (considered as physical, not metaphysical) from its performance history.6

The Hamlet reference in Inglourious Basterds implicitly calls into question an ontological discretion that historicism requires in order to situate its object of study in a narrative sequence and map: seemingly transparent paratextual distinctions between title and character, author and character, author and title are subject in Tarantino’s film to a medium-specific spectralization that divides sound from script and that demands a careful attention to Inglourious Basterds’ allegorization of the medium of film in relation to its (re)projection and its shooting script. Consider Bridget von Hammersmark’s statement “Character is character.” Two interpretations arise from an inaudible but scripted difference between lower-case-[c] “character” and capital-[C ] “Character” when the line is delivered in the film and when it is printed in the screenplay. In the former, inaudible case, the statement may be understood as merely tautological [“c” is “c”]; in the other, scripted case the “Character” is only the character (independent from the other). In either case (lower or upper), the repetition of the word character calls attention, for it is spoken by a character in the film who is herself an actress playing a role in order to help the other side in a film. By extension, the difference between a letter “c” in character also calls up the meaning of ‘character’ as letter in a film that deliberately mis-spells7 its own title, perhaps 6 As is the case, for example, with Margareta de Grazia’s book, Hamlet without Hamlet (2007).7 Indeed, one is tempted to speculate further that such a wayward spelling (or, to use the language of the First Folio Macbeth, “weyward” [see Thompson]) additionally evokes the erratic precedent of “Renaissance” (or, as our students often imagine, “Old English”)-style orthography. While “inglourious” is not an extant orthographic alternative from the early modern period, “basterd” certainly is—in Shakespeare alone, the Quarto Henry V has Burgundy cursing “Normanes, basterd Normanes,” and the First Folio version of the same play has MacMorris’s “What ish my

in order to call attention to its own inaudible but scripted difference from Enzo G. Castellari’s earlier film of the same name, Inglorious Bastards (1978).8

By putting the “character of ‘character’” in play through a reference to Hamlet, Inglourious Basterds systematically unfolds oppositions between Allies and Nazis, between Nazis and Jews, in ways that bear similarity to Jean-Luc Godard’s retrospective montage of Hollywood films and stills and at World War II documentaries of the Nazis at war in Histoire(s) du Cinema.9 That is, like Godard’s a-chronological film about history, the cinematic self-conscious of Inglourious Basterds implies that history since the twentieth century cannot be understood apart

nation?” speech read: “Ish a Villaine, and a Basterd, and a Knaue, and a Rascall”; likewise, line 2 of Sonnet 124 speaks of “fortunes basterds” in the 1609 quarto. (For bastardy in early modern drama, see Neill and Crawford.) Note that the only instance of “inglorious” in Shakespeare’s works is uttered by the Bastard in King John in reply to the King’s peace treaty with the Pope’s legate:

Oh inglorious league!Shall we, upon the footing of our land,Send fair-play orders, and make compromise,Insinuation, parley, and base truceTo arms invasive? (5.1.65–69)

8 Underscoring need to read film history recursively with the history of Shakespearean performance, Enzo G. Castellari directed Romeo and Juliet as well as a Western version of Hamlet, entitled Johnny Hamlet (1968); furthermore, Castellari’s Inglorious Bastards itself mentions Elsinore. Castellari and original Inglorious Basterds lead actor Bo Svenson both appear in Tarantino’s film, in a characterological nod to the earlier version.9 For Godard’s other films also related to the Holocaust, see the prologue “Hell” in Notre Musique (2004) and In Praise of Love (2001).

from the history of film.10 In addition to linking war and cinema (as Godard, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler, and others have previously done), by literalizing silver nitrate film as an explosive device to be burned at a film premiere attended by Hitler, Tarantino metaphorizes film as a spectral medium that both precedes and follows “real” history.11

Loosely parallel to Hamlet’s inscription of Senecan tragedy and Elizabethan tragedy through the play-within-the-play, Inglourious Basterds uses a series of film-within-the-film references that invoke a history of cinema and film media. Beyond the nitrate footage, overtly meta-cinematic aspects include the shooting, development, and the splicing of a 35mm film print with a soundtrack into the final reel of the final reel of Stoltz der Nation (Pride of the Nation); and 10 For Tarantino’s biographical analogue to Godard’s a-chronology, note that

as a struggling young actor, Tarantino chose to put films on his resume that he had never acted in, but he chose obscure films by great directors, figuring casting agents would never have the time to confirm his claim while being impressed by the famous director. One of Tarantino’s favorite directors is Jean Luc Godard (Tarantino’s production company, A Band Apart, is named after Godard’s film Bande À Part). He credited himself for playing a part that he never played in the film Godard made in 1987. That film was King Lear. (David)

11 The finale’s coup d’cinema is thus a kind of Moustrap inset that actually works, instead of the somewhat uncertain results of Hamlet’s production of The Murder of Gonzago. Landa had earlier in the film had characterized Jews as rats—“How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!” Yet the grandiosely-theatrical ending is perhaps more Marlovian than Shakespearean, akin to what Barabas had planned in The Jew of Malta.

the character of British Lieutenant Hicox, who is recruited for a sabotage plot not only because he is fluent in German, but also because he’s a film critic, with a bi-monthly column and two published studies (Art Of The Eyes, The Heart, and The Mind: A Study of German Cinema in the Twenties and Twenty-Four Frame Da Vinci, described as a “a subtexual film criticism study of the work of German director G.W. Pabst”). Additional cinematic citations abound: the German actor Emil Jannings attends the premiere of Stoltz der Nation; references are made to UFA (the German film studio taken over by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in 1933); at the Parisian theatre, marquees are shown for Le Corbeau (The Crow, dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943—filmed during the Occupation, giving rise to contentious critiques about the degree to which it ought to be considered pro- or anti-Nazi) and the German “Berg” film starring Leni Riefenstahl, Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (The White Hell of Pitz Palü, 1929), is to be shown for “German Night.”

In Tarantino’s self-conscious hands, film history becomes a principle of divisibility and misdirection, tearing and taking down the political differences between characters on opposing sides. In some cases, the divisibility is literal, or letteral. For example, Shosanna12 Dreyfus (Melaine Laurent) is the solitary Jewish survivor from the massacre of her family in the film’s opening sequence, who turns revenger. Years later, in Paris, she takes down letters from the marquee from the cinema she owns when she first meets the Nazi turned film star, private Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl); in a subsequent scene, she is in the process of putting up letters on the same marquee for a new film when she is picked up by Frederick’s adjutant, and taken by force to take her to lunch.

The division between political sides unfolds through a vertiginous, ironically corrosive series of references to films in the film that link both sides. For example, Frederick 12 Along with many other orthographic irregularities, Tarantino drops the “h” from the conventional Jewish spelling of Shoshanna.

Zoller compares his role as a sniper in Pride of the Nation to Sargeant York (1941), which is to say both the World War I American soldier of the same name and the title of a Hollywood film based on his life, made by Howard Hawks during World War II as propaganda. Similarly, Frederick says he will become the equivalent of the Hollywood actor Van Johnson after Pride of the Nation is released. In other words, a Nazi character in the diegesis stars in a film in the diegesis based on an historical event outside the diegesis that resembles an American film. Yet this reversibility follows from asymmetrical relations between sides rather than from a straightforward mirroring. Whereas Frederick plays himself, Sargeant York is played by film star Gary Cooper (near the end Senator Hull tells York about ten job offers—the first to be in a Hollywood film about himself, the second to be in the Ziegfield follies, but he turns them all down and returns to his rural home); and whereas the anachronistically edited Pride of the Nation focuses entirely on the soldiers killed by the sniper, Sargeant York is mostly a romantic melodrama about the rakish Quaker Alvin York finding his religious faith (a comparable scene with York in a machine gun nest fighting off Germans takes place near the end of the film). Tarantino’s double flip on fiction and history, American and German, is echoed by an internal split in the characterization of Frederick, who at times seems very charming: when watching Pride of the Nation, he reacts like an ethically conflicted soldier out of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), while the rest of the audience laughs and cheers wildly as American G.I.s get quickly and brutally shot down. Yet Frederick also turns out to be a sadistic would-be rapist and murderer.

These divisions are corrosively ironic, in that they open up frames that double back on the film’s audiences. Heroic Sargeant York morphs into the demented killer Charles Whitman.13 Ethan (John Wayne) in The Searchers (1956) 13 That is to say, the plot of Pride of the Nation resembles Sargeant York less than it does Targets (1968), based the University of Texas student-turned-sniper Charles Whitman. Targets ends with a shoot-out in drive-in theater playing

morphs into the part Apache leader Lieutenant Aldo who demands soldiers meet a scalp count (taken from Nazi corpses), echoed in turn by the Nazis referring to German novelist Karl May’s character, Winnetou Chief of the Apaches. Goebbels is compared to Hollywood producer David O. Selznick. The story of King Kong, in chains in New York, opens up the story of “the negro in America.” Shosanna’s projected film image in the movie theater after Pride of the Nation ends recalls less Big Brother in 1984 (as the screenplay says it will) or even the Great Oz, than the end of Stephen Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) when the face a ghost released by a Nazi archeologist from the Ark looking like a beautiful woman turns into the face of a skeleton and then kills (by cremation) all the Nazis. In each case, the framing opens up a seeming exception, authorizing paralegal violence in the name of justice that turns out to be (or always already to have been) the norm.

The most controversial irony concerns Jews and Nazis. Unlike Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, Inglourious Basterds does have explicitly Jewish characters, and they too are divided. On the one hand, we have the G.I. “Jews,” as it were, some of whom are first-generation European immigrants, and all of whom act in Germany as terrorist guerrilla fighters; these are the characters promoted by the trailers for audiences expecting an “action” film. Yet on the other hand we have the French Shosanna, who is excepted from the mass murder of her Jewish family by Hans Landa, who laughs as he decides not to shoot her after aiming his pistol at her as she flees.14 “Operation Kino” (“Kino” means

Roger Corman’s horror film The Terror (1963); in the context of Targets, The Terror supposedly stars the recently retired actor “Byron Orlok” (played by Boris Karloff), yet Corman’s film actually starred Boris Karloff himself. Orlok stops the sniper, Bobby Thompson, who has become confused by the close proximity of a huge screen image of Karloff and the life-size actor Orlok.14 In Lubitsch’s film, the character named Greenberg wants to play Shylock, and twice recites the “Hath not a Jew” speech; yet the speech is carefully revised to omit

movie theater in German), the failed British plot to blow up the theater by having Allied soldiers dress as Nazi officers, echoes the plot of To Be or Not to Be (in which there are two actors playing Hitler, one impersonating him, one the “real” thing, and two almost identical photographs of Hitler and his impersonator; neither Hitler nor his impersonator is confused with the other by the audience).15

The least obvious parallel in the film (between a child and

Shosanna) is also the most destructive of political

oppositions between normal, lawful violence and

exceptional violence authorized in a time of war and a state

of emergency. When Shosanna explains to her lover and

projectionist how the nitrate films in the theater will serve

as the explosive, the screen splits in half and on the right

appears a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage

(1936), based on Conrad’s The Secret Agent. The sequence

involves the child Stevie getting on a bus with a film

canister that contains a bomb. Stevie, unaware that he is

references to Jews, and is instead delivered as “Have we not eyes?” Mel Brooks gave the Jewish characters yellow stars in his 1983 remake of Lubitch’s film. On the non-representation of Jews in 1940s Hollywood films, see Karpf’s 1943 essay.15 As Ryback has demonstrated, Hitler “owned the collected works of William Shakespeare, published in German translation in 1925 by Georg Müller . . . He appears to have imbibed his Hamlet. ‘To be or not to be’ was a favorite phrase, as was ‘It is Hecuba to me’” (Ryback xi–xii).

carrying a bomb, is delayed several times, and the rest of

the people are killed when the bomb explodes. The survivor

Shosanna at this point in the film appears to be an

exception since, unlike Stevie, she was spared being

murdered by Landa as a child. Yet the scene cancels her

exceptionalism in that we see that she has become a “sui-

decider,” so to speak, as an adult, a kin of “no Sho-ah.”

Saw Inglourious Basterds again yesterday. Enjoyed it and noticed some stuff I

hadn't the first me, mostly about the narrative exposition (the use of cameo insets

or sidebands--I don't know what to call them).

Another Brigitte star in a related berg film, in this case anti-Nazi.

I've ordered films referenced in the film including as well as Hitler: Dead or Alive

(1942) and a bunch of related trashy B war films from the same time that have

some bearing on IG, even if QT has never seen them. I also thoguht I had

ordered Targets, but apparently didn't. So I (re?)ordered it.

Thinking more about Metropolis as well--the actress in that film is Brigitte Helm--sort of like Brigitte von Hammersmark (who is fictional)--at the end of the "Revenge of the Great Face" chapter and how Lang / Harbou's quite conventional allegory works quite differently from Tarantino's which, in a short essay I am now writing, am comparing to the Trauerspiel as Walter Benjamain defines and his idiosyncratic concept of allegory. Good Maria a CHrisitan character who adapts an Old Testmanet story asa parable, with Jewish slaves building the building for the ?

ANd then, if Rowtang is a Jew (pentagram rather than Jewish star), andhis robot Maria, a witch, is also a Jewess, she is a double, alook-alike.

Just as the film can be regarded as anti-Nazi and pro-Nazi (or pro-capitalist).

In any case, teh allegorical strucutre of Metropolis, inclduingFreder's delusional dream of hte dance of death inspired by the goodMaria! takes a traditional, narrative form, of insets, or filmin thefilm, that does WB's allegory of Inglorurious Basterds, which ahssidebar narratives that aer coninuous in narartive logic (like anillustration in a book)  but not temporally the same or even clearlymarked as past present and fuutre.aking of ht efilm inset happensafter they talk about making hte film.  It hapens discontinuously.

I hope to get in a note on Pabst's To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Lang's

Manhunt (1942).

Hitler - Dead or Alive – 1942 film

about American gangsters from

Alcatraz prison on a mission to kill

Hitler.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) was

filmed at UFA/

Universum Film AG, better known as

Ufa or UFA, was the principal film studio

in Germany, home of the German film

industry during the Weimar Republic and

through World War II, and a major force in

world cinema from 1917 to 1945. UFA

was created during November 1917 in

Berlin as a government-owned producer

of World War I propaganda and public

service films.

UFA was also the studio of the bergfilm,

a uniquely German genre that glorified

and romanticized mountain climbing,

downhill skiing, and avalanche-dodging.

The bergfilm genre was primarily the

creation of director Arnold Fanck, and

examples like The Holy Mountain

(1926) and White Ecstasy (1931) are

notable for the appearance of Austrian

skiing legend Hannes Schneider and a

young Leni Riefenstahl.

the company became a producer of Nazi

propaganda films after Hitler became

gained power in 1933. Joseph Goebbels'

ministry of propaganda essentially

controlled the content of UFA films

through political threat.

In 1921, Decla Bioscop passed into

Universum Film AG (UFA) which had

been founded in 1917. This company built

the large studio (which is now known as

the "Marlene Dietrich Halle") in 1926 for

the major film production of Metropolis

by Fritz Lang. The first German sound

stage in Babelsberg, the Tonkreuz, was

built during 1929.

David O. Selznick 9also referenced in

Godard’s L’histoires de cinema

UFA included Fritz Lang Brigitte Helm ... Maria Rudolf

Klein-Rogge ... C. A. Rotwang, the inventor

Metropolis as an anti Nazi or as a reactionary film.

Sigfried Kracauer, The Mss Ornament Weimar Essays

Andres Husyen, “The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” in After

the Great Divide: Modernism, Mas Culture, Postmodernism Indiana, 1986) 65-81,

Metropolis BFI

character also has the biblical parallel of the Egyptian pharaoh enslaving the

Jews to build pyramids. .... Rotwang and Freder fight on the roof top of the

cathedral

. to the pentagram being confused with the Jewish Star of David, which has six

points. .

Dolgenos, Peter The star on C.A. Rotwang's Door: Turning Kracauer on its Head.

Journal of Popular Film & Television (Summer, 1997), 68-75

" The half-Jewish film director Fritz Lang rejected propaganda minister Joseph Goebbel's offer of a top position in the newly Nazified German film industry and left the country to be one of Hollywood's leading directors of leftism and anti-Nazi films instead. One of Lang's controversial films, 'Metropolis', is criticized as portraying an overly simplistic message when examined from a political point of view. The film's plot is compared with the confusing activities of the National Socialist Party. Rotwang, the film's villain, is observed to possess several Jewish traits." [Expanded Academic Index]"According to Joseph Goebbels, it was when he and Hitler went to see Metropolis

in a small-town cinema that Hitler declared that Fritz Lang "will make the Nazi

film." One can shed light on the ideology of Metropolis by comparing it with that

of the National Socialist Party. The Nazis offered a critique of the

industrial/capitalist civilization of their time, which bore roughly the same relation

to a standard socialist critique as Metropolis does to a standard leftist film.

Whereas the socialists spoke for those at the bottom of urban society, the Nazis,

and ultimately Lang in this one film, spoke for those who were altogether outside

society looking fearfully in. In the 1920s, the Nazis' support came

disproportionately from rural areas, especially from people who distrusted

modernization and urbanization and feared becoming proletarianized. To them,

Metropolis--filled with futuristic architecture that the party rejected along with all

modern art--might have seem ed real as a projection of their worst fears about

the city." [Art Index]

Leni Riefenstahl in G.W. Pabst’s ; film posters and marquees appear; the

German double-agent is a film actress; the German villain is the star of a film that

brings all the Nazi top brass to its premiere;. All of these are read largely through

the prism of 1960s and 1970s American films, however, most notably in Stoltz

der Nation (Pride of the Nation) and Targets (dir. Peter Bogndavich, 1968), and

the frequent Sergio Leone spaghetti Western soundtrack music (the music calling

up Leone’s Chapter one is titled “Once Upon a Time in . . . . Nazi Occupied

Rance, 1942), effectively alluding to Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and

Once Upon a Time in America). Plus some seventies Graphics for the Bear,

compared to The Golem, filmed three times in Weimar Germany, with

anachronistic rock music. And the division of the film into chapters and the white

lettering and white directional arrows for the Nazi chief of staff—Goering and

Borman.

Sargeant (Brad Pitt) says that watching the baseball bat is the only chance to go

the movies; the moreover, the Brit officer is a film critic who has written a book on

24 Frames;

still tends to read films as if they were texts ad in the same kinds of terms of

cultural studies (transgressive).2 I suggest by a greater knowledge of film

analysis, film history (paper, silver nitrate, celluloid, analogue (video and

laserdisc) and digital (DVDs and Blu-rays; digital downloads), a wider database

(knowledge of films having nothing to do with Shakespeare) and film and media

theory. By turning to Quentin Taranatino’s (2009), a film controversial for the way

some say it deconstructs American Jewish soldiers and Nazis, in relation to

Walter Benjamin’s book on the German Trauerspiel, or “Mourning Play,” we want

to show how film history and theory may engage other fields of Shakespeare

(historicism, especially Frederic Jameson’s account of allegory), philosophy

(Derrida’s Spectres of Marx), and cultural materialism, or the “New New

Historicism.”3 We may arrive a future of falling4

Linking Tarantino and Benjamin may seem odd, and in doing so I concede

that I am limited by considerations of chronology or influence (I doubt Taranatino

has read Benjamin or Schmitt) partly because of accidental time lags of

translation.5 Moreover, Hamlet occupies only a marginal place in both film and

WB’s book. The film star Brigitte von Hammsermark (Diane Kruger) mentions

2 For a recent example see SQ essay n Hotel.3 Hamlet without Hamlet (2006)

4 Richard Burt, "SShockspeare: (Nazi) Shakespeare Goes Heil-lywood," in A Companion to Shakespeare in Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen, (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2005), 437-56. See also Enemy of Women, which includes a scene of Joseph Goebbel’s auditioning an actress who performs lines from Juliet’s balcony scene.5 Telos published last chapter and the appendix, but skipped over the conclusion,

“Results.” An English translation was published in 2006. First chapter of Hamlet

or Hecuba published in

Hamlet during a game played at a bar to differentiate the character form the

author. Despite the fact that Germany is at war with the UK, it is acceptable to

pretend to be Hamlet because Hamlet the character is a Dane. The author’s

nationality does not matter. The film has vague connection to Hamlet in that it

about it concerns revenge and has many film within the film plot developments,

Similarly, Benjamin makes only passing reference to Hamlet and Shakespeare in

his Trauerpsiel book. And even Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba is an atypical

considered in relation to his overall output, focused on political theology, not

aesthetics. My aim is not a total synthesis of different silos, however, but to work

through the abjection of deconstruction (the repression of Paul de Man and the

sanctification of Derrida, the Holy Jew) work through some of the resistances

present in each silo in order to arrive through Hamlet, a reading go the film that

allegorizes film history as Trauerspiel, defined in part by weak sovereignty of the

tyrant, martyr, and intriguer to declare and resolve a state of emergency or

exception, rather than tragedy, which ends in a decision, however indecisive.

This means, implicitly, a brief for the persistence of metaphysics, for the

spectrality that remains imminent in Hamlet’s so-called materiality, and a

pushback on recent historicist efforts to “discover” the true early modern Hamlet,

linked to the earth, and exorcize the modern, interiorized Hamlet.

many allusions to specific films (an interior doorframe shot of Shoshanah

escaping in the distance is taken straight out of John Ford’s Western, The

Searchers (1956) and footage from Alfred Hitcock’s Sabotage (1936) being two

of the more notable) and moments of exposition involving film as a projected

medium. Like Jean Luc-Godard in L’histoire(s) de cinema, Tarantino thinks that

the history of the twentieth century cannot be separated from the history of film,

but Tarantino’s film goes in the direction of Trauerspiel in making the potentially

pedagogical aspects of his films ornamental and excessive

Death by Cinema

All of these scenes link, as Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler have shown, the

history of war and the history of cinema.

I take up

Reading Inglourious Basterds!, as a Trauerspiel, which I will do shortly, will

help us better understand the stake in the distinction between Tragedy and

Trauerspiel with regard to Hamlet, especially with regard to historical time and

eschatological or messianic time. Although Hamlet may be mentioned once in

the film, it was centrally important to Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s

account of tragedy and Trauerspiel. The fact that Marxist and mystic Benjamin

cites Catholic Nazi Schmitt’s Political Theology approvingly and even sent a copy

of the book with a flattering cover letter to Schmitt continues to be scandal, but

their agreement about the inadequacies of liberal democracy are less important,

for our purposes, that their different views on aesthetics matters and on Hamlet

as Trauerspiel. Benjamin claimed Hamlet was a Trauerspiel while Schmitt later

in Hamlet or Hecuba said the opposite and devoted an appendix to refuting

Benjamin. While both Benjamin and Schmitt agree that the Trauerspiel and

tragedy are concerned with what Schmitt calls the intrusion of time in play and

what Benjamin calls the stand still, they differ in thinking that the intrusion of time,

the disruption of what Benjamin calls clock time, or elsewhere empty

homogenous time means the end of play. Schmitt thinks that liberal democracy

is play, and that politics means stopping he theatrical performance and being

serious, thereby putting an end to one form of government and beginning a new

world order. By contrast, Walter Benjamin regards the Trauerspiel as incapable

of ending. If the state of exception for both men means a suspension, that

suspension allows for sovereignty, according to Schmitt, the making of decisions

and action, while for Benjamin, sovereignty in the Trauerspiel is always weak (the

capacity to rule is never adequate to the ruler), and while leading to downfalls

and deaths is also an allegorical pile up, a discontinuous succession in which

there is repetition without a goal. Both readings are paradoxical: Schmtt,

polioytial theorist of the state of exception who finds of states of exception

everywhere, turns to Hamlet, a play about the hero’s indecision he says is

tragedy precisely because historical time intrudes in it. Far from being an Old

Historicist, Schmit’s reading of Hamlet in relation to the pressure James I’s

succession exerted on the characterization of Gertrude (Mary, Queen of Scots) is

a post-structralist, symptomatic, paradoxical reading: Schmitt does not expect to

see James I on stage; rather, James I, or history itself, appears in spectral form.

Similarly, he views tragedy as imperfect, incomplete form. Moreover, he

distinguishes Hamlet as a hydrid from Don Quixote (“pure” Spanish Catholic) and

Doctor Faustus (“pure” German Protestant). At a moment in which tragedy is

identified with a “pure” national literature and race (Jews have disappeared from

Schmitt’s account of Cervantes’ Catholic Spain), this account of Hamlet is striking

to say the least, and it is perhaps unsurprising that the S.S. kept a file on Schmitt.

Rather than regard Benjamin and Schmitt as having opposed views of similar

problems, or see them as the same (Agamben and even Weber), we may more

productively see them as having an uncanny, spectral relation to each other.

Their difference lies between their sameness, especially their shared interest in

paradox.

We may best approach Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds! as an avatar of the

seventeenth century German baroque Trauerspiel by turning briefly first to

Benjamin’s second and last chapter “Allegory and Trauerspiel.” Benjamin’s

concept of allegory differs significantly from other historicists (like Frederic

Jameson) in that allegory is not a narrative for Benjamin; it is about a

paradoxical tension between collection and dispersion, falling and fixing, looking

up from below, the absorption of theater and performance by the book and by the

image. It’s emotionalism, bombast, violence, and ostenstation all mark its

imperfection.

G.I. Jew

Immediately upon its release, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds! was criticized in

some quarters for seeming to appear to turn American Jewish soldiers into Nazis

as they kill Nazis in merciless fashion and scalp the corpses. While I find his

reading simplistic for obvious reasons, it does get at something central to the

film, namely, the constant reversal of German and American, German and

French, collaborator and resistance fighter/ terrorist.6 The German version of

Sargeant York who then can’t watch the film he stars in as himself because the

violence is too disturbing. And he morphs in the film into Charles Whitman, the

film in he film like targets. The reversal keeps moving form film to extra film

6 In my view, the film is not anti-Semitic. It allegorizes the politics of film violence

in ways that puts intense pressure on an apparent distinction between the

diegetic Nazi audience viewing the war film within the film (Hitler loves it) and the

audience watching the Tarantino film (us). More interestingly, Tarentino indulges

and interrogates a fantasy about ending WWII by killing Hitler et al and Nazism in

toto through two scenes involving what Carl Schmitt (Nazi and Catholic political

theorist) called the "state of exception." During a "state of emergency," Schmitt

argues in The Concept of the Political, the state could suspends the laws and

treat a certain class of people as exceptions to the rule (trials and appeals were

done away with people the Nazis viewed as enemies of the state--non-persons,

actually). The first state of exception scene involves calculating the

odds.:"999.999" probability versus "fate" offering "a hand from the pages of

history." A story that seems too good to be true actually is true. The second

scene closes the film. The war is now over, yet Brad Pitt leaves his trademark on

the Nazi collaborator /traitor who allows Hitler et al to be killed; Pitt carves very

deeply a swastika into the SS villain's forehead and saying to the one surviving

American soldier, "I think this is my masterpiece." In this closing scene, the

exceptional part Apache practice--continues in peace time as a masterpiece--

(Pitt is part Apache and is linked early on to John Wayne through a door frame

history. Sargeant York was based on a real soldier, but Gary Cooper played him,

not the real Sargeant York.

STOP READING HERE

The 60s-70’ prism is the deep recesses, the underneath or behind the screen, like the floorboards.

shot straight out of John Ford's Searchers --that film's plot begins soon after the

Civil War has ended; Tarantino's opening scene is reminiscent of the Indian

attack near the beginning of The Searchers, minus the implied rapes). The war

is over, but art allows for more violence in a single case. This kind of artistic

ends the film but calls the status of ending through "good" violence versus "bad"

violence into question. In the scene in the movie theater when the French Jewish

heroine Shoshanah comes on screen and her boyfriend ignites the silver nitrate

film behind the screen, the screen image goes up in flames. The diegetic cinema

screen and her image seems to go up into flames as well, even as the heroine's

laughter starts to seem banshee like (her laughter makes her sound like a witch--

as if the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz hadn't melted.)The sequence recalls

the "bad" Maria robot of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, on the one hand, and her

destruction but also calls up the retaliatory fire bombing of German civilians

(planned by the British since 1940) by the British and American in Dresden and

other German cities. The tone of Inglourious Basterds is extremely well-

callibrated--the violence is surprisingly toned down in almost even case and is

done very quickly; suspense is created like in the usual (even good) war action

films, and Tarantino's humor comes through in the monologues he gives some

characters (the actors perform them wonderfully). But the humor is never so

The Searchers—former confederate soldier hunts down to kill a captured white girl become Indian squaw and one of the Chief’s wives.

Shot at the end is just like the shot at the end of chapter 2, only with Pitt on the left this time instead of on the right).

Quintessence of dust—a metaphysics of dust

great that you can do more than smile. There is really no release in the film. The

first violent film I found to be shockingly subdued. Tarantino has a character

invoke Hamlet at one point, and QT's film indeed seems like a revenge tragedy

(most of the "good" characters who die do so very abruptly). Justice and peace

are seemingly impossible to combine, as we cycle past violence into the violence

of the present, Nazi Germany having become much more than a specter that

more than haunts the United States.

A lot of the criticism on rounds its alleged anti-semitism (american Jewish GIs act

like Nazis) is based an failure to read the film's plot as well as it lessons in film

history (the sequence on silver nitrate footage as explosive) and their integration.

In terms of the plot, there are two conspiracies to kill Hitler and the audience.

Both succeed. One includes the Jewish survivor of hte SS murder at the start of

the film, who shoots the film's star (the German version of Sargeant York,

according to the German solider turned star of the Nazi opposite film number,

Pride of the Nation (a fictional film based Targets (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)

based on the true story of the Texas Tower sniper and that ends in a drive in

screening of a film starring Boris Karloff, who also stars in Targets) and then in

turn is shot and killed by him though can't possibly have survived the three shots

she gave him in the back, a sort of repetition of the brutal and surprisingly long

Overreactingout out and underreacting in

Schmitt and Benjamin on Hamlet and state of emergency / exception.7

Collection and dispersion as tension in WB

Hamlet with/in Hamlet—the traveling players—Priam; Murder of Gonzago

scene in which the German film star (Diane Kruger) is strangled by Hans Landa,

the SS villain. There's an overhead shot from the end of the climatic fight

sequence from Taxi Driver here as well. As you can see, a lot of the film runs

through late 60s into early 70s cinema--hence the spaghetti Western sound track

themes). Nevertheless, the heroine's black lover gets her signal because it

comes through her addition to the film. So her plot succeeds through film,

through her film of the conspiracy, not by simple "action," and that action, of

course, means using film footage as a bomb. And Hans Landa has left a bomb

under Goebbels' seat which explodes before the bombs on the legs of the two

GIs do. Moreover, it is Landa who lets the plot succeed. So there is a German-

Jewish tension at the heart of the film's multiple plotting that cannot be resolved

by equating of totally separating Nazis and Jewish civilian resistance fighters and

Jewish GIs with Nazis. Moreover, the film again and again points to the centrality

of film for the Nazis, much as it was central to the war effort in the U.S. Tarantino

just literalizes the film as weapon metaphor, turning film itself into the explosive.

Here Tarantino borrows a scene from Hitchcock's Sabotage--a film canister

carried by Stevie explodes while he is on a London bus; the beginning of htis

sequence appears in Tarentino's film). Just as Roosevelt had screenings of films

like Olivier's Henry V and supporting Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, so

DeGrazia, Hamlet without Hamlet as the ultimate materialist reading—interiroization is regared as modern; Renaissance Hamlet is all about the earth, ground, dust

WB on dust; formatting dist; Steadman on dust; bill Sherman on dust. Hamlet

Hitler viewed various films, including, according to the film the Lives of he Bengal

Lancers (in which Gary Cooper also stars, as he does in Sargeant York, as a

kind of take action, engage the enemy NOW officer). The film's references to

UFA, Leni Riefensthal,ad son all work to make the point that violence in film is

not separate from violence outside film either for liberal democracies or fascist

states; moreover, propaganda films made by the U.S. and by Germany aren't

that different. Tarantino keeps drawing parallels and doubles, but mixing things

up as well. The people in the two conspiracies don't know about each other and

act independently, and Hans Landa only knows about one of them. The logic of

action movies like the Eagle Has Landed or melodramas like Casablanca is

entirely subverted by vertiginous references to historical events that were filmed

and to films about history that refer to other films. So when Tarantino says that

the civilian french couple who run the French cinema are like suicide bombers, it

is naive to think he is drawing a simple comparison between real suicide

bombers and cinematic ones. We already know, don't we, that television, the

internet, and film are all central to Al-Queda? That they post videos of violence--

that the Americans engage in their own psy-ops and always have? That the

distinction between terrorist violence either by Israel (settlements, bulldozing,

bomb dropping, gun fire) or by occupied Palestinians is not to be reduced to the

No ground, no dust, just language, encryption, frames. No materilaization of the ghost.

Ghostlier demarcations Marxism without Marx

Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been

same or the totally opposite? IG doesn't deny a difference between "real" history

and film history but prevents any kind of interpretation in which one kind of

history is read as the master of the other: the specters of victims haunting the

present produced by traumas of the past can ever be exorcised or "re-

membered" because the trauma itself already included always already spectral

media (film, photography) which always route evidence through fantasy.

The mark of the Swastika at the end of IG is a remarking, a repetition of an

earlier scene. In the first scene, we see a the end that the soldier has a swastika

carved in his forehead. So we know the "masterpiece" at the end can be hidden

as well. What marks Naziism is not is not an open wound or scar, but a hidden

wound. Nazism did not know itself for what it is. Neither do Americans know their

liberal democracy for what it is, Tarantino implies, as we are mired in Iraq and

Afghanistan. We know but don't want to know about the extralegal violence the

government (even under Obama) commits in the name of "state security."

Daniel Mendelsohn's reading of the film as anti-semitic:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/212016/page/1 (My thanks to Jimmy Newlin for this

link).

7 Schmitt’s book translated in Telos, and also in Philosophers in Shakespeare.

Complete translation in 2006, but poor quality, and then in 2009. Attention to

untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head.166

Sgt. York: His Life, Legend & Legacy : The Remarkable Untold Story of Sergeant Alvin C. York (Hardcover)

by John Perry

As those who lose their footing turn somersaults in their fall, so would the

allegorical intention fall from emblem to emblem down into the dizziness of its

bottomless depths, were it not that, even in the most extreme of them, it had so

to turn-about that all its darkness, vainglory, and godlessness seems to be

nothing but self-delusion. Or it is to misunderstand the allegorical entirely if we

make a distinction between the store of images, in which this about-turn into

salvation and redemption takes place, and that grim store which signifies death

and damnation. For it is precisely visions of the frenzy of destruction, in which all

earthly things collapse into a heap of ruins, which reveal the limit set upon

allegorical contemplation, rather than its ideal quality. The bleak confusion of

Golgotha, which can be recognized as the schema underlying the engravings

and descriptions of the [Baroque] period, is not just a symbol of the desolation of

human existence. In it transitoriness is not signified or allegorically represented,

so much as, in its own significance, displayed as allegory. As the allegory of

resurrection. Ultimately in the death signs of the baroque the direction of

allegorical reflection is reversed; on the second part of its wide arc it returns, to

redeem. The seven years of its immersion are but a day. For even this time of

Bnejamn and Schmitt has only really begun in the 1990s, the foundational essay

being Sam Weber’s Taking exception, diacritics reprinted in Benjamin’s -abilities

(2009)

hell is secularized in space, and that world, which abandoned itself to the deep

spirit of Stan and betrayed itself, is God’s world. In God’s world the allegorist

awakens . . this solves the riddle of the most fragmented, the most defunct, the

most dispersed. Allegory, of course, thereby loses everything that was most

peculiar to it: the secret privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule in the realm of

dead objects, the supposed infinity of a world without hope. All this vanishes with

this one about-turn, in which the immersion of allegory has to clear away the final

phantasmagoria of the objective and, left entirely to its own devices, re-discovers

itself, not playfully in the earthly world of things, but seriously under the eyes of

heaven. And this is the essence of melancholy immersion: that its ultimate

objects, in which it believes it can most fully secure for itself that which is vile.

Turn into allegories, and that these allegories fill out and deny the void in which

they are represented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest in

the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly steps forward to the idea of

resurrection. (232-33

—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 232

And the characters in the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus as corpses, that they can enter into the homeland of allegory. 217In the Trauerspiel of the seventeenth century the corpse becomes quite simply the pre-eminent emblematic property.

I will return to Paul De Man, Derrida, and Walter Benjamin to provide an account of the formal materiality of film (as living dead projected image, digital image, and apparatus) in order to leverage a critique of the new new historicism, material culture studies, new antiquarianism, thing theory, object studies (whatever you want to call it), on the one hand, and Shakespeare Film Studies, on the other, in their common resistance to continental philosophy and its spectres. I will discuss Hitchcock’s Murder!, which ends by turning into the mousetrap scene from Hamlet (the villain is a cross dressing half-caste actor who chooses not to be; he

hangs himself off screen after confessing by writing the final scene of the Hamlet adaptation). I will also discuss Powell and Pressburger’s Contraband, which includes a mousetrap scene set at a club called “The White Negro” in which a white woman dancer is surrounded by black male dancers.

The third Act of Murder!, about actors in a play, turns into Hamlet, Act 3.2. ,the mousetrap, with Sir John as Hamlet, and Markem (already a pun on Mark ‘em; remark, notice, mark them down,) as Horatio (with a wife). The final scene is missing, but the Claudius figure/ murderer does kill himself by hanging form a trapeze rope after he ties the noose, and ten Sir John reads the cross-dressing half-caste killer’s script cum confession which translates into the final shot of the play actually performed, with audience applause.

The shots of the rope not only anticipate Rope but also the shot of the rope before the church bells are rung in the Secret Agent just after Gielgud and Lorre discover the murdered organist.

The Rope as an attachment disorder. Overattachment in the case of gay couple and their teacher, as well as the other, and the underattachment in Murder! It’s a spectral rope.

Also blackface in To Catch a Thief!

Could get at the theology of secular thing studies by addressing film theory and investment immaterial and immatieral the way theologians contrast spirit to incarnation as immaterial to material, light as immaterial.

Look at Tom Cohen on cultural studies and theory.

Now cultural studies is over too.

Marquee is for Le corbeau ( Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. 1943) 8 and also for Germannight, Fritz Lang, Metropolis—good Maria is a Christian, Rowohlt, the inventor 8 A vicious series of poison-pen letters spreads rumours, suspicion and fear among the inhabitants of a small French town, and one after another, they turn on each other as their hidden secrets are unveiled - but the one secret that no-one can uncover is the identity of the letters' author... Written by Michael Brooke {michael@everyman.demon.co.uk}

of the bad Maria robot, a Jew.

LENI RIEFENSTAHL , THE WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU (1929)

G.W. Pabst: The Austrian co-director of “ Pitz Palu,”Fritz Lang, Metropolis—good Maria is a Christian, Rowohlt, the inventor of the bad Maria robot, a Jew.

Louis B. Mayer: Winston Churchill (played by Rod Taylor) asks Hicox if Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, who supervised Germany’s film industry, can be compared with Mayer, a Russian-born Jew who ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, then Hollywood’s top studio, for a quarter-century. Hicox replies that a more apt comparison would be to Mayer’s son-in-law David O. Selznick, an independent producer famous for “Gone With the Wind.”

Oradour-Sur-Glane: French village where, in June 1944 German soldiers locked 642 men, women and children in a church and set it on fire. “Basterds,” whose fiery climax takes place that same month, is one of several films exploiting this historical incident. Others include last year’s “The Reader” — Kate Winslet is held responsible for a similar atrocity — and Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot,” in whi

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Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, 401-19; 336-72;

Anslem Halverkamp, " Richard II , Bracton, and the End of Political Theology" Law &

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Jacques Derrida, "Hostipitality" in Acts of Religion (2002), 356-420); Jacques Derrida, on

Hamlet or Hecuba in The Politics of Friendship, on Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba, p. 165

and endnote 32, pp. 169-70 (click on link above for the latter)

Andrew Stofer, "The Skull on the Renaissance Stage"

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis chapter "The Weary Prince" (UF course reserves) versus

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versus Hamlet as a religious play; Schmitt says it is not a Christian play.

Carlo Galli Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete

Translated by Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze