Filmmaking in West Germany since the late 1960s has a complex background. Its current high productivity follows twenty-five exceptionally arid years, a moribund period for the country's commercial film industry. Hollywood's particularly ruthless exploitation policy as applied to the West German market meant the enforcement by distributors of block-booking and other near-monopolistic practices. The Germans, unlike the French or British, were unable to protect their own private industry through legislation. Import quotas and the freezing of box-office receipts – the two most frequently applied trade barriers of the 1950s and '60s – proved politically unacceptable in the face if the massive lobbying undertaken by the U.S. State Department on behalf of the Motion Picture Export Association during the Adenauer era. The decline was slow since West Germany did grant subsidies to its ailing industry. A combination of fiscal measures (reduced entertainment tax on films of cultural value) and a levy on all box-office receipts sustained production. The industry remained undercapitalized, however, existing from hand to mouth, from film to film. The general slide into insignificance of other European film industries during the 1960s demonstrated the inadequacy of purely economic incentives. The Hollywood product was superior in almost every respect and the attempt to compete by means of exploitation pictures brought some producers short-term profits but ruined the already volatile market. The loss of the popular audiences was followed by the disaffection of the more serious ones. It was perhaps the very thoroughness with which the Americans "cleaned up" in West Germany that opened the way for a different concept of filmmaking.

How did Europe's most sophisticated and entangled system of government subsidized filmmaking come into existence? It derived partly from the defensive posture of the German industrial establishment in response to the postwar absorption of national industries by American capital and from European Community regulations protecting trade and exchange between individual member countries. More decisive, however, were the ongoing internal struggles between certain groups of German new wave directors on the one hand and those organizations representing the old guard commercial film industry, on the other. The manifesto issued at the 1962 Oberhausen Short Film Festival represents a turning point. This show of strength was premature, as it turned out, but it set in motion a government machinery which culminated in the creation of a production fund for first films (Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film) in 1965. Two years later, the filmmakers' lobby actually pushed through Parliament the Film Subsidy Law which, since its inception in 1967, has seen no less that three important and hotly debated amendments (1971, 1974, 1979).

With financial aid now becoming available on a relatively extensive scale, the latent conflict between culture and commerce within independent filmmaking began to surface; to this day it continues to be crucial. The Constitution of West Germany provides for the jurisdiction of matters of education and culture by the individual states. Since the Film Subsidy Law created a federal agency, however, its provisions had to be phrased in terms appropriate to an economic aid to industry. Hence the ambiguity in the statutes: "The aim is to improve the quality of the German film on a broad basis, and to ameliorate the structure the film industry." The "and" in this sentence begs several questions, but the law seems to work in favor of a "cultural" interpretation of filmmaking; at least initially, it relieves the filmmaker of box-office pressure. It also renders the status of the finished film and its relation to an audience increasingly problematic.

One consequence of the German subsidy system has been to impose the identity of an auteur upon the filmmaker. Not only are the functions of scriptwriter, director, and producer often united in one person so as to maximize eligibility for aid and cash prizes, the system tends, as well, to reward success and a high international visibility, such as those of Herzog, Wenders, and Fassbinder. Directors tend to turn themselves into superstars, "artists," self-conscious representatives of German "culture," of the new Germany. They become "bankable" within both the subsidy network and the international art market.

By subsidizing and promoting the new German cinema, through its embassies and cultural institutes, the federal government has cut the Gordian knot that ties film to both industry and art. The success of the Subsidy Law confirms that culture has been recognized as a commodity, part of the range of commodities one might call the national heritage, itself a diffuse accumulation of values that demands a distinct marketing strategy. This holds especially for a country such as West Germany, whose prosperity so largely depends upon exports. The mistake in the case of the cinema has been to consider films as material goods, similar to machine tools, BMW or Mercedes cars, and to attempt direct and unsuccessful competition with the U.S. and Hollywood. The French, by contrast, have always been highly successful in retaining the "French" label associated with a variety of material and immaterial products: wine, cheese, Roland Barthes, Francois Truffaut, and Chanel No. 5, so that "Frenchness" becomes almost an autonomous signifier of value.1

Films, compared with other artifacts, are cheap and efficient to transport. Unlike a ballet company or a symphony orchestra, a few cans of film can go by diplomatic bag, if necessary. And unlike literature, films present no insuperable language barriers, and insurance problems pale to insignificance compared with those attendant upon the shipping of paintings or other auratic works of art. If the subsidy system tends to reinforce the status of the filmmaker as a personality, so culture as export detaches the individual film from any historical or aesthetically precise context. It begins to circulate in as many forms as there are occasions for exhibition: as media event, "masterpiece," star vehicle, brand-name product, or as controversial treatment of a sensitive subject. Films are constructed in their coherence, meaning, and value, not at their points of origin or level of intentionality; rather, discernible shape crystallizes around them in the act of consumption. They become objects, but also "texts."

The films of the new German cinema acquire political meaning in ways not always controlled by their makers, and irrespective of their practical, aesthetic, or thematic opposition to West German society and its institutions. The international distribution and consumption of this particular national cinema are such as to make these films opaquely reflecting mirrors in which an audience may find confirmation of its own cultural or psychological identity. They are also official representations, sanctioned and sponsored by a country that has had difficulty in profiling itself either politically or culturally, except through a relatively recent, though intensive preoccupation with its internationally notorious past and its troubled ideological identity as a nation. Hence the special status of this cinema and of Fassbinder's films in the debate on the social function of the artwork today.

The European film director acclaimed at the international festivals is often called upon to make either a European film in Hollywood or international films in his own country. The consequence of even a modest commercial success in filmmaking is a thrust toward capital investments and production values that may structurally modify a nation's cinema as a whole.2 The new German cinema shows all the symptoms of a success that will force mutations on the very structures that begot it: Wender’s time with Zoetrope, Herzog’s years in the wilderness with Fitzcarraldo, and the emergence of German "Hollywood" films like "Das Boot" provide instructive case studies abut inadequacy of a precarious balance betweentelevision funding and government subsidy. The presssures of an author's cinema caught in changing technologies and changing markets can no longer be regulated by that balance.

Only Fassbinder, with his high rate of productivity, seemed able to meet the relentless demands of productivity imposed on him by success and his role as a symbol of the German cinema. Besides his international art-house films (Despair, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lili Marleen), he revived film genres from Germany's despised 1950s (Die Grosse Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss) and filmed his own stage productions (New York Women). This productivity made him an important employer. Having silenced and outflanked the remnants of the old film industry lobby, he was able to treat Wes Germany’s largest commercial studio, the Bavaria Atelier in Munich, as his own, virtually private production base. 3 Firmly rooted as he was in Germany, despite his occasiona, well-publicized outbursts ("rather a street-sweeper in Mexico than a filmmaker in Germany"), his work, no longer dependent on the subsidy system, offered a constant and intense reflection on the German cinema in transition.

Fassbinder's international reputation was gained by a series of "critical" family melodramas; he thereby appeared to demonstrate his ambition to work in a popular fictional genre, and at least in principle, to aim at a mass audience. It is also evident that very complex theoretical issues of subjectivity, socialization, of spectacle and the relays of power, of meaning and value are addressed in his films. The passion and insistence that sustain these concerns from film to film spring not only from their contemporary or fashionable relevance: they bespeak a personal urgency as well, a strangely earnest conviction that a filmmaker is, in his work, accountable to a public and works within history. Thus, the constant, probing meditation on show business, German fascism, and their relations to the nature of desire.

This essentially bourgeois self-understanding of the artist – and Fassbinder's subversive-provocative variation on it – stems directly from both the specific mode of patronage for West German filmmaking during the last two decades and the acute contradictions encountered, as the ceiling of the subsidy system touched the floor of the fully capitalist international film and television industry.

Fassbinder's films have been made with "real" money, that is, funds that materialize from the dizzyingly complicated profit-and-loss calculations, write-offs, deferral and refinancing policies, the ceaseless and now wholly self-evident logic of unlimited speculation. This is the most abstract, intangible form of value and exchange known; its manifestations are "everywhere to befelt, but nowhere to be seen" – a phrase that once referred to the creator of the universe.

In films such as Lili Marleen, Fassbinder indicates that fascism, forty years on, is neither specifically German nor merely historical as a phenomenon; it is rather the constant shadow cast by the crisis cycle of capitalism and of "world trade." Its crystallization points are the constantly displaced "theaters of war," both local conflagrations and those concentrations of power realized through the mass media and the new technologies; they are promoted and naturalized by the ubiquity of war spectacle and show. In the unmediated, pure presence "Lili Marleen" on the airwaves during World War II, "hard" military rule and consolidated corporate interests became "soft" through the relay of the product, the personality, the image, and the sound. Power had channeled, dispersed, and liquified itself, until it became as insubstantial and dematerialized as the air we breathe.

The project of Lili Marleen originated in the base proprietary rights of Luggi Waldleitner (West Germany's most industry-oriented producer) to the song and its title. Fassbinder thereby participates in the process by which capitalism strips history to the skeleton of its own truth; to that which survives as bankable assets. One might suggest that he is thus like his heroine, complicit in his exploitation as the figurehead of a particular regime. The vulgarity of nostalgia is the price paid for operating capital in the currently available valid currency of (German-International) show business.

Fassbinder's film is, however, the only film about fascism which constructs its narrative entirely around a paradoxical but historically authenticated montage effect such as the fortuitous encounter of a love song and a world war. The song's former popularity is all that Fassbinder actually takes from history; but is also all that actually survives. If that "popularity" is indicative of the nature and function of mass culture and the entertainment industry, this is because it designates their products as both objects (commodities) and signs (elements of a discourse). Could Breton have envisaged such a total victory for the objet trouvé and its convulsive beauty as the appearance in novelty shops of Taiwan-made ice-cream-cone saltshakers? Did Brecht realize that the aesthetics of the Messingkauf (buying a trumpet for its brass value) would be adopted by men such as Luggi Waldleitner, who buy a piece of history for its (song-) title? To talk of commercialization, "exploitation," or commodification is to miss the point. We suffer from overproduction of both commodities and discourses, but we now produce commodities directly as discourses (repetition is a form of destruction and recycling). Their consumption is managed, regulated, and assured by periodic de- and revaluations, which is to say, by either adjustment of redefinition of the material support of the signifiers.

The historical montage of Fassbinder’s film is trompe l’oeil effect, achieved by suppression and foreshortening of the many specific instances mediating between "Lili Marleen" and a Fascist war. These instances appear as discontinuities, cuts, abrupt transitions, only insofar as they represent different states of power, energizing and reinforcing each other across the gaps of the many media forms, the institutions, the representations, the channels of communication, the circuits of production and consumption. The gaps, modalities, and manifestations of the invisible substance of power also produce "subject-effects," emotions, and intensities. That is the secret of power’s hold on desire. Commodities and discourses are, in ther "origins," circulation, and destinies, subject to the same disjunctive logic of exchange and transformation that concentrates economic power on one side, while splitting and dividing the subject on the other.

Surrealism, dada, and conceptual art have consciously and unconsciously shadowed this leapfrog logic of monopoly capitalism with their mimetic or critical discourses. The difference between readings of surrealism as symptomatic or as critical art practice may now, retrospectively, seem uncomfortably slight. In the cinema, however, it would seem that the symptomatic is the critical discourse, and vice versa. Love stories, crimes, domestic interiors, disasters, battle scenes, the factory facade, the city street, the view of Monument Valley are surely in some sense the equivalents of Duchamp's urinal or bottle-rack or Max Ernst's magazine illustrations: ready-mades, the material substratum, transformed by cinematographic reproduction and editing into the support of signs. Preconditions for the discourses of the real and on the real being narrative découpage, editing, and framing, one might well place Lang, Renoir, Ford, and Hitchcock in the "avant-garde" beside Richter, Dulac, and Léger, except that the discursiveness of the latter three lacks an equivalent grasp of this social materiality of cinema, seen in relation to the act of separation and disjuncture.

Fassbinder's materials are those of the commercial cinema, the "industrial products," the commodities and consumer goods, transported from the hardware stores of show business to the cultural spaces of the art cinema. For his melodramas have never, in any sense, addressed the same audience as the Hollywood films of the 1950s that are now so called. One sometimes wondered where to locate the spectator of the early films, looking about for the object of the finger pointed in one's direction. Fassbinder was able to develop forms of textuality in his films which, while reframing and repositioning the melodrama as a genre, disclosed the constant slippage of the economic and the sexual, while closely adhering to the modes of textuality of the popular cinema; through pathos and irony the cinematic referent becomes a sign, retaining its materiality. Irony is, however, in many ways a weak kind of textuality, and Fassbinder has increasingly concentrated on narratives which heighten coincidence, chance, and the apparently unmotivated contiguity of events. His films have become more political and historical in that they move toward ma more explicit "social" textuality. Fassbinder, increasingly concerned with the historical moments of rupture (the inflation period, World War II, and the early postwar years), has redefined melodrama as a possible deconstruction of the hidden discursiveness in the realm of the referent, history, material reality, and the psyche, on the basis of a rigorous and everywhere enforced celebration of the arbitrary. This regime of invisible division within social life itself Fassbinder opposes in his later films through a textuality which parodies the social text that is monopoly capitalism and its most flamboyant self-representation: fascism and the war. Lili Marleen develops in a series of gags and jokes which point to the logic, by no means arbitrary, of the economic and symbolic systems by which our society reproduces its power relations and thus lives its history.

The preoccupation with fascism in the cinema of the last decade is a complex European phenomenon, not satisfactorily explained by references to the appeal of political pornography. For countries without a strong and continuous tradition of filmmaking, international success may depend on an ability to "market" the national history as international spectacle. 4 Common currency, such as the iconography of Nazism, establishes a signifying system no less complete, or replete with antinomies and binarism, i.e., possible narratives, than say, the American West or the Civil War. Has fascism perhaps become Europe's answer to the Hollywood genre cinema? It might be argued that fascism was Europe's last genuinely historical experience, the negative image of unification, against which the troubled emergence of national states within the European Community can be assessed. Or, more accurately, the most violent, spectacular face/phase of capitalist production and of (symbolic) consumption prior to the age of the supermarket and the mass media.

In films such as Visconti's The Damned, Cavani’s Night Porter, Bergman’s The Serpent's Egg, Losey's Mr. Klein, Truffaut's The Last Metro, Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum , Syberberg's Hitler – A Film from Germany, Petersen’s Das Boot, and Fassbinder's Lili Marleen, the Nazi regime and its visual paraphernalia function simultaneously within several other (generic, pscological, authorial, economic) discourses, so that the filmic status of fascism – as signifier, referent, or both – is therefore often extremely difficult to locate. The films of Fassbinder and Syberberg have an advantage in that they foreground those aspects of Nazism which make of it a specific subject of filmmaking in Germany. The establishment of connections between fascism and show business, with a view to a historical and critical placement of their own practice, appears to be the implicit common perspective of Hitler and Lili Marleen. Both directors have, on the immoderate scale characteristic of the new German cinema, found in the regime's use of radio as technology and as machine of social control a way of locating the present situation of the commercial film industry and state-sponsored German culture; and they have found in it a metaphor for the medium that would in time displace radio as well as the cinema, namely television.

They agree that the cinema can deal with history only when and where history itself has acquired an imaginary dimension, where the disjunction between sign and referent is so radical that history turns on a problem of representation, and fascism emerges as a question of subjectivity within image and discourse (of power, of desire, of fetish objects and commodities), rather than one of causality and determinants for a period, a subjects, a nation.

We know that the arts have survived (as commodities for the market, as vehicles of ideology) in the face of all historical evidence of anachronism and subservience by virtue of an intense and sustained self-scrutiny. The cinema is, at this stage in its history, in a similar situation, as though its abandonment as site for ideological work in favor of television had become the necessary condition for a realization of its conceptual dimension. Reflexive films have long existed, but cinema's history is now seen within other histories. In the case of Fassbinder and Syberberg, the mutations and transformations of cinema through the German subsidy system and its marketing abroad as "authentic German culture" (the phrase is actually Herzog’s) become the occasion for historical and theoretical reflection. Here, however, similarities end: although both directors are no longer dependent upon direct state funding, Syberberg’s quasi-artisanalmode of production contrasts sharply with Fassbinder’s essentially industrial form of filmmaking. Syberberg’s treatment of profilmic material produces a condensation of image and narrative, reminiscent of certain avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century which attacked pictorial representation and the romanesque with the economy of the mechanically reproduced, the collage, and the juxtaposition of heterogeneous verbal and visual material. There is in his work, however, an essayistic discursiveness that owes more to baroque or biblical models of interpretation than to surrealism. Compared to Syberberg's textual system, it is the romanesque, with its metaphorical condensation of time into action and argument into character conflict, that appears as the saving reductionism of fictional discourse.

The conceptual dimension of Fassbinder’s work derives not from a reduction in the profilmic, the materials of film production, but rather from a certain narrative economy: his grasp of the idioms of popular cinema and the image-work condensed in its narrative stereotypes and dramatic clichés, as well as hisunderstanding of the abstract forces inherent in the rhetoric of mise-en-scène and of editing technique. The devices of illusionistic representation – camera movement, in-depth lighting, point-of-view, and reverse-field cutting – yield, in Lili Marleen, a textuality in which the imagined plenitude of filmic representation is opened through ellipsis and disjunctive cross-cutting.

[Bild 1: Josef von Sternberg, The Scarlet Empress, 1934.]

In the classical narrative cinema, a relay of surrogates, a process of substitution, is constantly activated with respect to point-of-view and the delegation of the look. Considered as a system of enunciation, any form of direct address – be it spectacle, "number," or performance – makes the fictional space contract, approximating a kind of zero degree of filmic narration. There are film directors – most notably Sternberg, but also Antonioni (in the films made with Monica Vitti) or Godard in Pierrot Le Fou – who use their female stars and their performative presences as a way of literalizing, "representing" the filmic process itself. In Sternberg's Marlene Dietrich films, spectacle often draws attention to the (absurd, improbable, even tragic) disproportion of means to ends, causes and effects. When, in The Scarlet Empress, huge doors are worked by an army of attendants or, in Shanghai Express, crowds of extras surround the train with their myriad activities so that Marlene Dietrich can fan herself in statuesque immobility as if to recover from the sight of so much human sweat, do we not have a relation between the cinematic apparatus – camera, crane, technicians, lights,

pieces of machinery – invisible to the spectator, and the spectacular display of a mere image, highlighting the narrative insignificance of the action? The ironic and gratified smile of Dietrich on such occasions evokes pleasure (and a measure of self-deprecation) in the immense and absurd labor involved in displaying her image, her effortless entrance, presence, performance. She appears to know that she is watched, not so much by the imaginary or invisible male gazes of diegetically present or inferred audiences, but by the immense business of an elaborate machinery, which is itself a metaphor of (male) sexuality. The psychological motivation provided by the narrative is an expedient disguise for the pleasure that consists in becoming aware of this play, of this discrepancy between the machinations of the apparatus and the phantasmatic nature of the apparition.

[Bild 2: The Scarlet Empress.]

In Fassbinder's film, this metaphorical relation of performance, of spectacle to camera and apparatus is disturbed and foregrounded in such a way as to become the condition under which a purely fictive, anecdotal relationship of spectacle to a political or historical referent can be actualized in the cinema. Fassbinder's refusal to construct a "properly" constituted narrative space, the ellipses and elisions of plot information and of image construction and spatial continuity, his very flat, frontal, and symmetrical compositions, juxtaposed with very cluttered, obstructed, wilfully extreme viewpoints, generate a systematic opposition between motivated point-of-view shot and exhibitionist performance which becomes a cinematic signifier in its own right. The spectacle is thus broken down into the imaginary one-to-one relationship between performer and viewer (sign of illusionist immediacy), and the relation seeing/seen comes to signify the agencies that produce the spectacle not behind the scenes, but in front of them. This "in front of" makes possible the entry of the extra-cinematic referent ("history," fascism) by way of a metaphorical relation to the filmmaking process, for which the action/performance on the screen is the metonymic surrogate. It would therefore be inaccurate to say that the song "Lili Marleen" is a metaphor, or even a representation en abyme of Fassbinder’s film of that title. But Lili Marleen – the fictional narrative and the historical pre-text, the song and its reiterated performance in sound and image, the subject slippage of actress, character, name, and addressee – does create a symbolic field of receding and nested references that places the film both as material object and, in the act of consumption, within the mirror-image of its own subject. To point to an obvious example: Hanna Schygulla plays a woman called Willie, singing a song in which a first-person narrator (a man) addresses an unnamed woman by invoking another woman, named Lili Marleen. Once this song has become popular, because it provides a subject position and a temporality for lonely men in the trenches, Willie autographs pictures of Hanna Schygulla with the name Lili Marleen. Hanna Schygulla is not Willie (in the tautology elaborated over decades by the star system which allows actor or actress to "use up" the fictional character they portray), she is Lili Merleen, because both are identical imaginary objects (or discursive effects) for two historically distinct audiences (soldiers of World War II and cinema spectators now) constructed en abyme in relation to each other. Fassbinder, in Lili Marleen, isolates something as ephemeral and banal as a popular song, albeit one that, like the cinema, commands its own imaginary and mythological space within history. This space is such that it can be neither metonymically collapsed with history (in the sense that one might be tempted to say that "Lili Marleen" stands for the use of the mass media under fascism) nor metaphorically separated from it (by treating the song as a symbolic representation of the cinema, for instance). It is precisely the complex status of the song as object, irreducible and recalcitrant to the uses it served, and at the same time, product, expression, and signifier of a historical period, which is at issue. The narrative is charged with tying down, anchoring, and articulating these relations and effects in both their metaphorical and metonymic implications.

Lili Marleen is a love story. Love stories such as Dr. Zhivago and Reds, played out against the background of historical events, advertise themselves as prestige products of the international film industry. Such films, however, represent not only the accumulation of production values and second-unit location work; they represent, as well, a certain textuality in which the narrative organization prescribes to the characters roles that relate them to the events as either embodiments or antagonists of the historical conflicts. As heroes of victims history, they participate in a rigorously metaphorical discourse. Battles and revolutions, a journey or an exodus, the founding of a nation or the fall of an empire duplicate or counterpoint individual desire or the destiny of a family in a reciprocity of analogies and paradigms. The dramatic and spectacular ingredients of a film epic meet in the contractual coherence of the package deal as a montage of elements which the narrative is called upon to articulate and shape into binarisms and metaphoric equivalences.

Recent novels, as for example, D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, have with a certain knowing confidence, attempted to employ this popular mode in order to turn it against itself. Lili Marleen, like The White Hotel, extracts its heroine from narrated history to implicate her in ways that challenge directly the metaphorical construction of classical narrative. Questions of heterogeneity and disjunction in these works are inseparable from questions of sexuality and desire. Fassbinder (dis-) articulates his narrative as a sequence of coincidences, accidents, ruptures, border crossings, and discontinuities: "love" is what inhabits always the space in between.

In this respect, a line of development emerges from Fassbinder’s career as a filmmaker. The early films could be described as love stories in which the desire of the central character displaces itself ceaselessly in relation to an unattainable object and in which the quest terminates in literal or symbolic death (The Merchant of Four Seasons, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fear East the Soul, Fox and His Friends). In each case the objects seems, more or less explicitly, to be the maternal body – a reading which the films, however, attempt, as it were, to block by a rather didactic use of coincidences, underscoring nonpsychological structure. When, for instance, in The Merchant of Four Seasons, Hans hires as his assistant the very man whim his wife had taken as her lover, the fact that Hans remains ignorant of the irony is less important that the narrative economy that results from the construction of a dramatic hinge between sexual and economic exchange. Exaggerated coincidences, in films like Fox and His Friends or Fear Eats the Soul, appear as part of Fassbinder’s strategy of redefining melodrama as social parable. In the later films, the structural use of coincidence has if anything increased in importance, especially in the films that deal with fascism; nevertheless, they cannot be read as social parables.

If one looks at Despair, The Marriage of Maria Braun, and Lili Marleen one notices that all three films begin with a moment of break, in which an apparently "successful" heterosexual object-choice is disturbed by a more or less violent entry of a completely different referent. In despair it is the Wall Street Crash that seems bound up with the hero’s mental dissociation, and in Marie Braun an explosion at the Registrar’s office anticipates both the violent collapse of the Third Reich and the couple's separation. These political or economic signifieds are casually embedded in the narrative, but the relations of equivalence established between psychological motivation and political issues and events become increasingly precarious. Whereas in Despair it is possible to construct an essentially metaphorical discourse which holds the film in place until it deconstructs itself before the spectator's eye as a fiction of filmmaking ("I am a film actor. Don't look at the camera. I am coming out."), the relation between love and war in Maria Braun or Lili Marleen is the very occasion for a noncongruent, nonmetaphorical discourse. The collisions, divisions, and separations that structure these films when read as metaphorical appear preposterous. It is this which has led many critics to dismiss Lili Marleen as just that: a preposterous exercise in bad taste. This judgment is founded on the mistaken assumption (provoked by the manner in which juxtaposition teases the spectator with the promise of a hidden analogy) that the film constructs its coherence on the apparently naive metaphorical relationship between fascism and the song, between a doomed love affair and a war ending in defeat. Yet in Lili Marleen both love story and fascism are represented in ways that effectively dismantle the amature of popular romance and historical melodrama.

Maria Braun has generally been interpreted as a further exploration of the critical possibilities inherent in the Hollywood family melodrama. Fassbinder appears to establish a link between emotional privation and economic investment, leaving open the question whether economic activity is a substitute for sexual gratification or sexual activity a displacement of the erotic attraction of power. In this respect, Maria Braun does seem to invest the conventions of the melodrama, where the economic is usually the dimension that is repressed and thus gives to the dramatic situation the force of emotional excess. Here, renunciation and emotional coldness underpin a certain puritan work ethic, which provides a meta-psychological explanation for the energy Germans invested in the reconstruction of their national economy. Such a New Left reading of (Sirkian) melodrama by critics (including Fassbinder himself) does not altogether account for the perversity of a film like Maria Braun and risks seeing the heroine as an allegorical figure. It is true that in concentrating on the economic repressed of Hollywood melodrama, Fassbinder offers a view of the genre’s social function within the historical context of the 1940s and '50s. But Maria Braun mourns her missing husband even after his release, for she engineers situations that send him first to prison and then to Canada where he, too, can make a fortune. The marriage survives because it remains based on separation and is practically unconsummated, except in death, and under circumstances that return to and repeat, in the form of parody and "farce," the historic explosion which opens the film. There is considerable figurative ambiguity about the ending: whether it is an intratextual deferral of the initial violence, thereby constructing the terms of a difference that gives the narrative the circularity of its closure, or the representation of an orgasmic moment that subsumes a psychic and a political referent in a common metaphor is critically undecidable. It would appear that Maria Braun revolves around the heroine's attempt to retain absolute control over the terms of her own libidinal economy within a historical period of rapid and violent economic changes.

Lili Marleen resembles Sirk’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die in the way it sets love story against the background of historical events. It resembles Maria Braun in the way it represents this love as forceful and significant only insofar as it is based on separation, rupture, nonfulfillment. The story about love is doubled (or multiplied perhaps) by a story not, as in Maria Braun, about the love object, but about an objectification of this love in a form that both contains it and betrays it, namely the song "Lili Merleen." But in order to consider the significance of this shift, from the absence of the love object to its displacement by mechanical reproduction in the form of a phonograph record, it is necessary to indicate briefly how Lili Marleen actually does refer itself to the codes of filmic melodrama.

The film opens with the lovers in each other's arms. The stereotypical goal of the melodrama is here its point of departure. The subsequent narrative develops out of the interruption of this embrace which ensues when Robert's brother enters the room to remind him of his duty toward his father and the Jewish resistance group operating from Switzerland against the Nazis. The scene sets out all the antinomies that simultaneously structure the conflicts – Jew/Arian, Nazi/underground, Germany/Switzerland, father/lover – and keep the lovers apart. Since nonfulfillment is not only the driving force but also the goal of the narrative, the conflicting terms are never mediated in a "classical" narrative resolution. Robert's insistent demand to know which side Willie is on never receives an answer. Rather, the condition of their love is that it sustain the territorial and moral divisions that the film sets up. As in Maria Braun, object and desire establish a unity in the heroine only across a separating bar which both films represent as, among other things, a geographical border.

[Bild 3: Lili Marleen, 1980.]

At one level, the narrative movement of Lili Marleen simply illustrates the pressures that force the lovers to identify themselves with groups opposed to their love – the Jewish resistance on the one side, Nazi show business on the other. Both remake themselves in the image and the terms of the worlds they inhabit, at the same time as they try to use to use these worlds to realize their love. The world of moral and political obligations which Robert chooses turns out to be dominated in every respect by his father, so that he is defined completely by the oedipal limits of patriarchy. The world of spectacle, show, performance, and self-display which Willie chooses is synonymous with Nazism. The difference between Robert's and Willie's "inscription" into society reproduces the sexual difference which society traditionally sanctions. The Law of the Father alots duty, work, renunciation to him; specularity and objectification to her.

The film also makes a distinction between the vicissitudes of Robert's and Willie's displaced desires. As these are so carefully underscored, Lili Marleen, depending on whose destiny one is most concerned with, is actually two films: a melodrama and an antimelodrama. Robert's story follows the lines of the typical German melodrama of the mid-'30s, exemplified, say, by Detlev Sierck's Schlussakkord and of "composer" or "great artist" films that Hollywood made popular during the 1930s and '40s. In these films, an impossible love, the lashings of sexual frustration, gives rise to virtuoso performances and master works. This identification, by bourgeois art forms, of art and frustrated love is attributed, in a complexly edited scene near the film's end, to the castration anxiety which empowers the Law of the Father. The face-to-face meeting of Willie and Robert at the Zurich opera house is mediated by the glances of two women – Robert's mother and his wife. These glances are intercut at points, however, by an image that cannot be located within the diegetic space of the narrative, but that acts as a kind of master shot for the sequence: this is a frontal mirror shot of Robert’s father as a benevolent but threatening spectator of both the triumphant performance onstage and the embarrassing scene backstage. Robert's escape into the world of performance has not liberated him from anxiety as Willie’s spectaciular resurrection as the mythical Lili Marleen has liberated her by giving her, as she says, "a passport to no longer being afraid."

[Bild 4: Lili Marleen.]

Willie's story offers a reading that turns the melodrama on its head; it also suggests a kind of psychoanalytic approach to the genre. She, too, sublimates and displaces her unfulfilled desire in music and performance. The substitutive function of "Lili Marleen," when she first sings it in a Munich nightclub, is explicitly established by the phone call she places backstage to Robert in Zurich. Her frank and reiterated declaration of love can be heard, due to a fault in the amplification system, throughout the bar, to the great hilarity of the guests and to the detriment of her performance. The attempt to fix her subjectivity in this way is a disaster, quite literally, insofar as her cabaret number gives rise to a riot in the bar, between a group of young Germans in SA uniforms and some English visitors. The ensuing demolition of the premises is staged and cut in a manner later reserved for the depiction of air attacks and of bomb explosions in German trenches. These shots are themselves intercut with those of bouquets of flowers being tossed on stage in tribute to her smash hit. Here is a good example of Fassbinder's undercutting of the metaphorical use of parallel editing by playing on a pun: "Lili Marleen" is a Bombenerfolg, while the bombs are falling; human bodies erupt from the ground like flowers on opening night.

There is another irony at work in Willie's story. Frustration is not sublimated in a symphony, an immortal score, or an unforgettable performance, but in the performance of a popular song on a phonograph record. Fassbinder, however, twice makes the point that no psychological, causal, or intentional relationship exists between the singer and the phonograph record. Frustrated love remains just that: her performance is a flop, and the fact that her Nazi protector insists on recording it merely emphasizes that it is not her desire that speaks, but someone else's desire for her. Even the record would have passed unnoticed, had it not been for the coincidence of the war's breaking out. It takes the additional fortuity of the Belgrade radio operator's finding a stray copy of it among looted spoils for the song to air at all. At the climax of her career, Willie dances around the luxury apartment given to her by the Führer; holding a mirror in front of her, she exclaims, "We've made it, we're above the clouds." Taschner, her pianist and companion, responds as if to complete her sentence, "And the irony is, you have no voice and I'm a lousy pianist." This is the most Sirkian moment in the film, a rapid undercutting of subjective elation with a sobering objectivity. Irony is piled upon irony: Taschner's comment severs, in the most direct and brutal way, any organc or necessary connection that might be thought to exist between singer and song. Self-expression and success, talent and recognition, subjectivity and image, authenticity and exhibition value. Which advises us, as spectators, against construing the relationship between love and war as metaphorical – or as merely coincidental.

The all-night recording session in which the song is cut is most revealing of the film's ironies. After several takes, Willie’s manager agrees to a short break; it is 6:00 AM. They turn on the radio for the news just in time to hear Hitler announce, "Since 5:45 AM this morning, the German Army is returning fire." The outbreak of the war coincides with the recording of the song. A cliché from the B-picture thriller – the hero on the run turns on the radio to learn that he is wanted by the police – thus serves to introduce a historical referent, a documentary piece of evidence that the cliché clearly cannot contain. Not only has war been declared, but outside in the park, Willie’s lover is waiting, having crossed the border illegally and against his father’s orders. These three moments of drastically unequal weight and significance are made to coexist within the same narrative space, against all probability, and in breach of every code of verisimilitude (except that which governs the comic book). It is only the artifice of fictional construction, dependent on the viewer’s ability to read coincidence as a conceptual montage effect, which unites these events. Otherwise the incongruity between the private, the anecdotal, and the historical remains so radical and unbridgeable as to offend the sophisticated viewer’s sense of proportion and even propriety. For having to read the coincidence between the end of a recording session and the start of a world war as significant on the diegetic level – as a moment of symmetry, as an explanation of why the song was so meaningful during the war – amounts to dismissing the film as "not serious."5 The scene must appear as grotesque, unless one sees the films as pressing narrative coincidence to the point where it deconstructs itself as a "gag."

Fassbinder here appropriates, as he had already done in Satan’s Brew (1976), the logic of film comedy for melodrama – a move that is motivated in this case primarily by his views of fascism and the shortcomings of the melodrama as a socially significant form. The problem with melodrama, as has already been indicated, lies in its particular modes of disjuncture and discontinuity: irony and pathos. Both depend on the spectators assumption of a secure position of knowledge, which is to say, on a narrative which establishes a strong sense of closure. Depictions of fascism, for example, are ironic, whenever they assume, as they invariably do, the spectator's knowledge of fascism’s historical and geographic boundaries. The play of anticipation, rhyme, and echo-effects which this knowledge allows makes the historic referent metaphorical. Fassbinder's problem is precisely how to inhibit this metaphorization, how to stop Nazism from in all narrative accounts, since the reader-viewer knows in advance "how it ended." In Lili Marleen, May '45 is not the endpoint of the narrative, nor is irony its primary mode. The misconception that fascism has ended, has been contained, that it was just another story is thus disallowed. Instead coincidence is presented as gag and disturbs, with its asymmetry and nonequivalence, the formal closure of popular narrative.

A series like Holocaust attempts to contain fascism by translating its effects on and making it equivalent to the bourgeois family. What is scandalous to many viewers of Lili Marleen is that the relation family/fascism is presented as a structural symmetry onto which the antagonism Jew/Arian is simply mapped as additional confirmation that the heroine must find her subject position outside either set of value systems or narrative constraints, at the same time as she represents an object – of value, of exchange – for both sides. Her lover's anti-fascism is entirely recuperated within patriarchy. His desires thus become fixed in an object-choice and a mode of "self-expression" that trap him in the melo-dramatic resolutions of renunciation and sublimation. For Willie, on the other hand, political and subjective value are noncongruent. By resisting all constructions of herself by the terms of binary oppositions, she achieves a particular kind of freedom. She becomes a sign without a unique referent. Instead, several referents – notably her star image and the phonograph record – are simultaneously attached to her, allowing her desire to exist outside either possession or fulfillment. Neither her show business "personality" nor the song she records and sells represents or expresses her desire, except in the way they permit her to constitute herself outside fascism and outside the family. Spectacle becomes a form of escape. Whereas her lover forcibly unifies himself in a discourse of repression, she lives desire as pure displacement and difference without fetish or object.

Fassbinder becomes aware of the limits of melodrama at precisely the point where the major ideological premise of his earlier work begins to change, namely that "love" – whether given or withheld, whether betrayed or upheld against all odds – is both the supreme source of value and the supreme instrument of inequality and exploitation. In all his early films, emotional, sexual, and economic exploitation are metaphors for each other, substitutable fields that make love "colder than death." Love remains the only currency still valid, but it lends itself to any form of speculation and calculation of gain and loss. Godard links economic and emotional relations under capitalism through the metaphor of prostitution (the ubiquity of exchange-value criticized from a romantic perspective of use-value), so that in his films it is only the active pursuit of prostitution (My Life to Live, Two or Three Things I Know about Her, Everyman for Himself) which affords any promise of freedom. Fassbinder, for whom it is above all the way love is traded within the family that provides the condition for perpetuating exploitation elsewhere has, inhis recent films, shed any residual romanticism about alienated use-value as the basic source of value in Western societies, and instead begun to analyze what is paradoxical and ideological in the very notions of exploitation and prostitution.

In an obvious, though banal sense, Lili Marleen does pose the paradox the earlier films: is Willie prostituting herself to the Nazis in exchange for fame and wealth, or is she merely being exploited by the regime that launches her on a career? How can she be on the right side (morally) and on the wrong (physically); how can she work for the resistance and be a figurehead and showcase for the Nazis; how can she love Robert and accept the luxury and glamour with which the Führer himself surrounds her? To think of her as either exploited or as prostituting herself is to hold her to the same binary alternative as her lover does. One sees here a constellation of factors which could structure a much simpler film, a "classical" melodrama where male desire, established and simultaneously divided by the jealousy that results from the oedipal triangulation, salvages itself from its own contradictions through the phantasmatic production of the woman as both victim and villain.

It is through the constant return to periods of economic crisis and collapse in his recent work, the dramatization of an unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire, that Fassbinder represents "exploitation" as a false question, or rather, as merely the partial and particular form of another problem. Recognizing that her desire is unfulfillable – that any desire is unfulfillable – Willie withdraws herself from the sphere of authority and control, from gain and loss. The question becomes no longer one of "exploitation," but of that which underpins and gives currency to exploitation and speculation, namely substitution and substitutability. In short, the realm of metaphor and exchange, where narrative form and the social production of meaning and value converge, is exposed to examination.

At the same time as Willie seemingly consents to lend her voice and body, her image and her performance to the Nazi regime, she also lets herself be used by the other side. Her attempted suicide is seized upon by the Jewish resistance as an occasion for making public to the world press certain facts about the concentration camps. In a countermove, the Nazis revive her in order to bring her back on stage. She is paraded before the same international press, as evidence that the Jewish claims – not about Lili Marleen, but about the concentration camps – are mere propaganda. The "reality" of her performance, of her death, and of the concentration camps, is entirely subsumed by their function as signifiers and shifted from one discourse to another. Her final appearance enacts that blissful version of death which turns the individual into a transparent sign – dematerialized, the human substance which has supported it used up. Only by turning herself into a site of sign-production, while at the same time insisting on difference, does Willie escape being constructed as an object – of desire and exchange, a commodity.

[Bild 5: Lili Marleen.]

It is almost entirely within this perspective – which is obviously also the perspective of Fassbinder's own construction as a filmmaker, as a performer in the cultural contexts of sign and commodity production – that fascism becomes specific as well as historical in Lili Marleen. Although well-known iconography of historical spectaculars invades the film, Nazism maintains its metonymic ties with the war, or rather, with several kinds of warfare (the military fronts, the propaganda and media war, and the "secret war" between the Nazis and the Jewish resistance organization). The rigorous and businesslike administration of war destroys existing criteria of value and conventional forms of coherence. War is represented from the point of view of production: it is seen as an acceleration and a unifying force which, by speeding up the productive and reproductive cycles of the economy, intensifies consumption. This is in the film, the point on which another surreal gag turns. The popularity of the song is confronted with the need of a Fascist society to liquidate and destroy surplus material (human and technological) in its attempt to impose the abstract and disguised rationality of war. "Six million" – Willie’s face beams as she is told by her Nazi friend how many listeners are tuning in to "Lili Marleen" every night. "Fantastic," she says, trying to hug herself with both arms to confirm that this means her. Turned to the camera in medium close-up, Hanna Schygulla's face reveals the bliss which her definition as a star, by means of sales sheets and rating figures, brings her. Six million – the figure connects her fans, soldiers dying in the trenches, and the Jews dying in concentration camps, as it equates mass consumption and show business with war and organized waste. The coincidence of soldier and fan is turned by Fassbinder into a gag when a pianist-turned-soldier takes his platoon over the hill and straight into the machine gun fire of the Russians whom he mistakes for German troops because they, too, are playing "Lili Marleen."

If this is an example of the way the same becomes different, of the way the song is shown to be nonidentical with itself, the extent to which this is a structural principle of the film as a whole emerges in the sequence in which Willie attempts to prove to her lover that she is on his side. The film documenting the existence of concentration camps in Poland is smuggled out under cover of Willie's Eastern Front entertainment tour; it is given to her during a car ride which is to provide her with an alibi for meeting with her lover. The Gauleiter's attempt to recover the film (she has hidden it in her bra) is deliberately misinterpreted by her as a sexual advance which she rebuffs with the help of her pianist friend whose assertion of his own sexuality starts off another chain reaction directly leading to his death. During a body search ordered by the Nazi command, he offers to transmit film to the Jewish resistance as a sign of his love for her, even though he knows that for Willie the film is merely a sign of her love for Robert. The film reaches Switzerland at the same time as Robert's father is negotiating the release of his son captured by the Nazis who demand the film in exchange for Robert's return. The film, which is never actually exhibited, is circulated and exchanged in a number of conflicting delas and "discourses," acquiring from each a different value quite separate from any original meaning or intended use. It is Robert’s brother, the "terrorist," who refuses to submit to the logic of these exchanges, between sex and politics, cinema and life. He blows up the ridge between Germany and Switzerland, reestablishes their division and distinction, because, as he says, he hates "these dirty deals."

As Willie receives the information about the number of fans who comprise her audience, her face is lit by a lamp, placed conspicuously in the foreground. Her Nazi friend, standing diagonally opposite in the background, idly (and prominently) spins a globe. Glamour lighting of the star image controlled by the global strategies of war, trade, and dominion – or a subjectivity entirely enthralled by itself on the other side of the divide, and an objectivity wholly instrumentalized on the other? The Fascist war economy and its show business operation appear as a kind of immense and universalized black market where, in the manner of all military dictatorships, the Nazis impose their own rate of exchange – fixed from moment to moment and liable to sudden and surreal reversals – which suspend all moral or referential values other than their own. With this, Fassbinder's view of show business as an instrument that splits sign from referent is doubled by the picture of fascism as a form of crisis management in the economic sphere, called upon to regulate by force the acceleration of production. Seen as eliminating surplus by simple destruction while at the same time developing radio, and organizing through it an elaborate system of transportation and communication, Nazism becomes a particularly flamboyant figuration of capitalism in the sprer of representation – nor merely because of its gigantic aspirations or the brutality of it spublic life, but more because of its power to reorganize a society’s ethical, material, and erotic relations in the direction of spectacle or rituals of communal consumption of sounds and images.

The identification, in Lili Marleen, of mass coercion (the Nazi regime and the army) with mass consumption (show business and electronic "global village" of radio and television) is interesting in another respect. The question which Nazism raises today is perhaps less its relation to material production and capitalism, or the monstrous scale and consequence of its demographic planning, than its astounding ability to create a public spere, a mass audience. The song of Lili Marleen, endlessly repeated as a nightly ritual above and between the sights and sounds of war, is such a fascinating phenomenon, partly because of the discrepeny between the pure presence of the song, hermetically sealed by its technological immediacy from any contact and context, and the ceaselessly destructive and immensely busy Machinery of war. Media technology binds, in this case, performer and listerner in an imaginary unity. It molds a whole array of social and communicat activities (performance, recording, broadcasting, listening, phoning, and letter-writing) around something which, while still in need of some sort of material support (a phonograph record, a receiver, a broadcasting station), nonetheless has no determinants itself other than a kind of mirror surface for the projection or reflection of desire.

What exactly is this desire? In a sense, "Lili Marleen" voices a protext, a refusal, a critique even: it says no to war, and yes to memory, loss, and love. ("For you and I again to meet/Under the lantern on the street/Like times gone by, Lili/Gone by, Lili Marleen"). One can see why the Nazi leadership felt ambiguous about it, because it gives expression to a death wish at the same time as it disguises and disavows it ("Out of the earthly soil, out of the silent realm/Your loving lips could lift me, as if in a dream/And late, when the fog is rolling in/I'll stand beneath the lamp again/Like times gone by. . .").

This double impulse may well explain the songs’s popularity during the war; it certainly explains the symptomatic significance which it is granted in the film. As a protest and a refusal, its message would seem to be at odds with its social and political function as a nightly theme song: to boost morale and unite the population – civilian and military – behind the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft and the Führer. The stark opposition of love to military discipline in the song, its "politics of subjectivity," is, however, recuperated by the ritual and turned to the advantage of the regime. But the situation is even more complex. Not only is the song repeated nightly (and throughout the film), it is itself entirely built on repetition and refrain ("wie einst" – like times gone by). Conjouring up a lost object and a lost moment, both of which the song re-presents and re-possesses through the refrain and the overall melodic structure, the song is clearly obsessional and fetishistic.6

How is it that mass subjectivity becomes so intricately bound up with this obsessional song? As Robert is tortured by broken snatches of the song, we are given a vivid representation of the hounding persistence of the compulsion to repeat and of the frustration, violence, or aggression it entails. The utterly subjective death-wish expressed in the song stands in symmetrical relation to the historical death to which its listeners are headed. For, by the film’s terms, the German popular culture which is massively committed to the articulations and representation of subjectivity and desire works in tandem with an entertainment industry that extends its dominion and economic control more and more firmly into the same area – that of the subject. Here the split, unreconciled in most contemporary theory of culture, between the economic structure of the mass media and the political meaning of subjectivity, is made obvious. As the products of culture reveal their commodity/sign status, which destines them for consumption or the devaluation/revalorization processes of the market, so the subjectivity that articulates itself across these products speaks only of loss and destruction, nostalgia and death. In this respect, the particular "sensibility," the powerfully melancholic, Saturnalian turn of the new German cinema is perhaps nothing other than the precisely perceived demonstration of its political function, the negative truth about its objective condition: the representation of radical subjectivity trapped in commodity form.

The more the song, "Lili Marleen," is repeated, the more it becomes a pure signifier, able to signify any number of different and contradictory signifieds, to enter into any number of conflicting discourses. Caught in a cycle of repetition, it no longer denotes anything, but merely connotes a wholly abstract, generalized structure of absence or loss and reinforces the primary death wish of the subject. Yet the song colludes with fascism only insofar as its repetitive form installs within the subject that same synthesizing force which unites the social system to a Fascist politics, unites it, that is, under a single figure,a single image, a single insignium.

The disjunctive though metonymic relations between performer and song on the one hand, and between song and material object/commodity on the other are absolutely fundamental to Fassbinder’s conceptualization of the cinema, since they implicate,by way of a series of displaced analogies and en abyme constructions, the film object and its author/performer. The songs, onsofar as it exists prior to and apart from material shape as record or infinitely repeatable performance, may function as a mode of self-expression, a declaration of love, of morbid protest, of a desire for nostalgic return; it may even, in its circularity, assert a kind of internal closure and coherence, of aesthetic autonomy. Its value as a record of subjective intention, however, contrasts with its exhibition or circulation value, since its intentions become literally immaterial as soon as the work realizes itself in the iterative acts of consumption.It is these acts which establish the commodity as sign, as vehicle (potential or actual) of an infinite number of discourses – the critical discourse being inly one among several.

This sign form is, above all, the symbol of the technical and economic power inherent in the mass media, of the power it has to reorganize, from the point of view of consumption, both the production of materials and of meaning. As these totally abstract processes of power emerge in concrete contexts (here, as a song that serves to console soldiers on both sides as they face annihilation; that becomes an instrument of torture, a political weapon in a propaganda war, a means of turning an individual into a star), they assume for their material support not that which is rich, varied, or profound, but that which is bland, banal, devoid of any but the power to circulate. The mass media artifact is thus not the product of a field of combative forces – between the author, for example, and the industry which exploits him or her – but of the site where, through immense technical and logistic effort, all forces are neutralized. The conjunction of Nazism and "Lili Marleen" illustrates the way the logistic-military machinery stages the perfect spectacle as the one from which all external referents are emptied.

Yet there is at work here another, a conflicting force. "Lili Marleen" also obliquely, stubbornly opposes itself to all the forces that attempt to appropriate it. When Willie says, "I only sing," she is not as politically naïve or powerless as she may appear. Just as her love survives because she withdraws it from all possible objects and objectifications, so her song, through its very circularity, becomes impervious to the powers and structures in which it is implicated. Love and song are both, by the end of the film, empty signs. This is their strength, their saving grace, their redemptive innocence. In this way Fassbinder acknowledges the degree to which his own work is inscribed within a complex system (of production, of dissemination and reception, of devaluation and revaluation) already in place and waiting to be filled by an individual, a locus of intention, energy, and desire. It is this system, after all, that transformed hin from the director of this material (Nabokov's, Döblin's,Lane Andersen’s) into a personality, a star. Straub and Huillet construct all their films around the notion of the resistance of their materials to the filmic process; Fassbinder, on the other hand, constructs his films around the notion of the inability of materials to resist. It is not through resistance, but through self-cancellation that materials are supposed to achieve any purity in his films.

Fassbinder has written a personal performance for himself into both Maria Braun and Lili Marleen. In Lili Marleen he is the leader of the resistance group who contacts Hanna Schygulla and gives her the film that will document for the "free world" the precise nature of German atrocities. In Maria Braun he plays a black-marketeer who gives Hanna Schygulla (again) the evening dress that launches her on a career as the "Mata Hari of the Economic Miracle." He also carries in his black suitcase a bottle of schnaps and the collected works Heinrich von Kleist. These self-portraits establish the filmmaker as a trader in intoxicants, glamour, culture, and documentary evidence, selling his wares in a world where war and the black market fix the prices.

It is in this light that the direction of Fassbinder's later films, especially Maria Braun and Lili Marleen, becomes evident. As he deconstructs the irony and pathos of melodrama by highlighting coincidence, turning fortuity into surreal gag, Fassbinder constructs tighter and tighter narratives. Convoluted and intricate relations of act and motive, of cause and consequence, the manipulative strategies of European history become signifiers of a narrative economy that realizes its objectives through the juxtaposition and equation of noncomparable entities. The logic of the narrative by which move gives rise to counter-move and acts of substitution or parallel editing replace head-on conflict becomes, in a very specific and restricted sense, the textual equivalent of the logic that regulates trade, barter, and exchange and defines value by force, the crossing of borders, and circulation of discourses. The logic which directs Robert's father first to pay for all of Willie’s "debts" in order to accumulate enough evidence to obtain an axpulsion warrant from the Swiss government and then to allow Willie to accompany Robert to Munich so that the lovers can be served the warrant and legally separated at the German-Swiss border, it is mirror equivalent of the logic which directs the Nazis to use Willie and Robert as bait for each other and as pawns in the circuit of exchange that results in the release of Robert and the transfer of Jews to Switzerland. The same chiasmic path defines the journeys of the reel of film as it makes its way from Poland via Germany to Switzerland and back and "Lili Marleen" as it circulates between contending forces both within and outside Germany. Robert and Willie’s love affair is always masterminded, but it would be inexact to interpret the film’s logic – by which the actions and methods of the Jewish resistance and the Nazis parallel each other and seem tohint at some vast conspiracy which locates the lovers (and the spectator) as victims – as paranoid. Each move implies a redefinition of genre (melodrama, thriller, historical epic, musical), a testing of the value of the objects in circulation.

We might say that in this sense Lili Marleen rewerks and historicizes Fritz Lang's M (in which police and organized crime are both in pursuit of the same suspect) and his Mabuse films (which are constructed entirely on the exchange and substitution of objects whose values are redefined). Certainly Fassbinder shares with Lang a concern with question on cinematic enunciation, with the way a film addresses and situates the spectator. The two kinds of discursive practices which confront each other in Lili Marleen – the economic one of unlimited exchange-value and the narrative one of metaphor and metonymy – are brought together in a historical reading of a subject position, in a fiction which is not about madness or sexual pathology, but about fascism and the negative desire embodied in a song and a love affair. The theatrical address, the emphasis on performance and spectacle does not work to establish a unified position of knowledge, but to make visible that particular, historical inscription of desire which is controlled by popular fictions. Cinema is indeed a machine that displays desire, but most often this desire is disguised in the endless chains of substitution that make up the narrative. In Fassbinder, it is desire in its disjunctive dimension that displays the machine (the whole institution of filmmaking, including its part in trade, in film financing). Instead of attempting to arrest the flow commodities and the marketing of history and its images, Fassbinder has helped to promote their circulation by giving his later films the same complex sign character that social "reality" has under capitalism. He insists, however, by the negativity of his self-consuming narratives and their not-to-be-realized consummations, on the nonreconciliation of sign and desire, of sign and referent. In this way he rescues for the cinema, for spectacle a dimension of loss and incommensurability that makes desire itself appear a historical force.