Page 213 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

FIGURE 41 Manipulating the motifs of visual pleasure: Nekromantik II (1991)

of the dead and those who love them, Buttgereit thus undertakes a distinctively Barthesian production
of what may be termed 'counter-memories'. Examples of this strategy are seen in Monika's
photograph album of dead relatives, her hilarious 'family photographs' of herself and her dead lover
sitting innocently on the sofa as well as in her newspaper pictures of Rob prior to his suicide. In these
instances, we see an attempt not only to record what has been (the living person now dead) but an
attempt, in the act of looking at such pictures, to interject the absent dead into the living present.
Hereby they become not memories, but counter-memories - a way of remembering otherwise.13 This
is, of course, another aspect of Buttgereit's attempts to revivify the corpse of the past.
By making explicit the linkages between visual representation and memory, by predicating much
of his thematic machinery on the will to remember the otherwise absent and forgotten, Buttgereit
once more draws our gaze back to that sense of horror that, for New German Cinema, underscored
all representations of the past. A n d he also forces us to look again at that dark irrationality that for
Buttgereit, as for Syberberg, lies at the heart of the German subject. His task, akin to that of Claude
Lanzmann in Shoah (1985), the nine-hour documentary consisting of interviews with survivors of the
extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno and Belzec. Namely, this is to bring
the past into the present; to indicate through visual representations, that the past is never in actuality
over and done with. It is a project, in all its viscerality, that forces the audience to look at that which
they would rather avoid, offering a counter-memory to Nazi cinema's elision of its own bloody deeds

199