The Power Plant of Tragedy

Many films of the New German Cinema engaged strategies of traumatic and allegorical representation in order to disable standard forms of history, remembrance, and narrative. Alexander Kluge uses music and opera to precisely the same ends. His extraordinary THE POWER OE EMOTION/DIE MACHT DER GEFÜHLE blasts open nineteenth-century opera, scattering it as so many interrupted arias, unidentified rehearsals, performance fragments, manipulated film footage, through stereoscopic mattes, time-lapse set changes, ironic voice-overs, fictional interviews. These musical ‘pieces', along with other European art music, provide the raw material out of which his 1983 film is made.

Why opera? Because opera generates and then trades in fantasy, spectacle and emotion and typically exploits music's longstanding affiliation with human feeling. This conception of music was particularly central to Romantic aesthetic ideology which dominated nineteenth-century German music and which continues to influence Western concepts of musical production and function. That perception not only obliged music to serve as a diversion from material realities, but, in order to do so, gave it ostensibly universalising attributes, something that speaks to, and for, all. Kluge's work rarely allows music either escape or transcendence. If Gabi's Beethoven sing-along in THE PATRIOT divests the Ninth Symphony chorale of any grand, transcendent lustre, The Power of Emotion's deconstruction goes even further, tackling music's institutionalisation rather than music per se. For instance, even though Kluge banks on the Romantic association of music with human emotions, he makes it clear that social and economic forces function to keep that association in place.

Kluge de-idealises that relationship in no uncertain terms. For instance, we see selected scenes of an early silent-film version of Verdi's Aida and hear musical quotations from Aida scattered throughout the film. But audiences cannot get immersed in the music or caught up in its passionate story. For not only do we hear Kluge's ironic commentary over Aida's presentation, but we never see a full performance of it - just fragments, rehearsals, bits of music going by, not unlike what Godard did in ONE PLUS ONE (1969).