Christian Petzold’s melodramas: from unknown woman to reciprocal unknownness in Phoenix, Wolfsburg, and Barbara

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Stanley Cavell’s theory of film melodrama is used for Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, Wolfsburg, and Barbara. Key for Cavell’s understanding of classical Hollywood melodrama is his notion of the ‘unknown woman.’ Remarkably, Petzold’s more contemporary melodramas feature unknown, i.e. unacknowledged, desires not only of female heroines but also of male protagonists. In Petzold’s melodramas, male and female unknownness is reciprocated: the men and women are unable to have a romantic relationship based on mutual acknowledgment. Petzold shows how the private lives of his protagonists are constricted by public, social circumstances. These restrictions do not relate to what Cavell calls ‘front-page moral dilemmas’ but rather to ways in which, as Cavell points out, the everydayness of the protagonists’ lives is determined by their lack of being at home. In Petzold’s melodramas, the protagonists find themselves in a place-in-between-places, which cannot harbor mutual trust, mutual acknowledgment. Typically, the three films feature the negotiation by the protagonists of the significance of public artifacts for their personal lives. These are key scenes determining the moral relevance of melodramas in the everyday appearance of social confinement away from front-page moral dilemmas.