Lesbian Desire and the Jump Cut in Monika Treut’s Von Mädchen und Pferden

Abstract

This essay argues that Monika Treut’s use of the non-conventional editing device of the jump cut in Von Mädchen und Pferden (Of Girls and Horses, 2014) points to the temporality and representational limits of lesbian desire in film. The jump cut calls our attention to time, offering the spectator a (brief) experience of absence. If gazing, as represented by repeated shot/reverse shots, is slow, the jump cut ejects us out of linear temporality altogether. We miss a piece of the action, and the jump cut calls our attention to this gap. Treut’s highly nuanced integration of jump cuts into a film that depicts female-female desire constitutes an important intervention into the history of representations of lesbian desire in the cinema. The jump cut, a mode of editing that makes visible that a moment has been missed, performs the dialectic of visibility and invisibility that characterizes lesbian cinema.