Monika Treut Research Articles

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

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.

Queering the Screen: Spectral Figures and German-Taiwanese Encounters in Monika Treut’sGhosted

In queer German director Monika Treut’s film Ghosted (2009), a plethora of screen apparatuses, including cameras, laptops, and cellphones, mediate encounters among the German protagonist, Sophie Schmitt; her Taiwanese girlfriend, Ai-ling; and Ai-ling’s spectral doppelgänger, Mei-li. Examining how the screen bestows visibility on the otherwise elusive figure of the queer Asian woman while limiting her freedom, this article explores how the comparatively more fluid apparitional lesbian challenges the domesticating effect of racially charged looks by destabilizing various borders between life and death, past and present, the real and the imaginary. Although Treut valorizes the ghost’s unfathomable nature as its source of power, a full acceptance of the spectre’s opacity and epistemological differences inherently conflicts with the desire to bridge German and East Asian cultures.

Same, same but different: filmmakers are hikers on the globe and create globalisation from below

The significance of political engagement, queerness and transnationalism in both the cinematic oeuvre and biography of filmmaker, Monika Treut is outlined in this article, via an exploration of her childhood in a divided Germany stained by National Socialist atrocities; the activism, research and filmmaking which simultaneously offered a political and a creative outlet during her 20s; and her subsequent travels across Europe, North and South America and Asia, inspired not only by international networks of friends and colleagues but also the constant, and necessary, pursuit of film funding. Treut’s ‘hiking on the globe’, as she calls it, has resulted in a filmography comprising multi-lingual, feminist narrative and documentary films, which have secured her position as one of the leading lights in queer independent filmmaking.

Uncanny Doublings and Asian Rituals in Recent Films by Monika Treut, Doris Döörrie, and Ulrike Ottinger

This article aligns Monika Treut’s Ghosted (2009), Doris Dorrie’s Cherry Blossoms (2008), and Ulrike Ottinger’s The Korean Wedding Chest (2009) to inquire how these three films represent through their Asian setting the journey of self-exploration via the exotic Other. The formal and thematic device of doubling or copying, including in Treut and Dorrie the topics of haunting and mourning, raises the question of where the uncanniness of the romantic doppelganger resides in an age of global travel and the postmodern simulacrum. If the Freudian uncanny is defined as something intimately known that suddenly becomes alien and strange, how does one still encounter the familiar in one’s voyage to distant lands with their foreign customs? How does Asian ritual, prominent in all three films, feature to make strange Western convention?

Pro-Porn Rhetoric and the Cinema of Monika Treut

In this essay, I ferret out points of confluence between Treut's queer agenda and anti-porn feminism, arguing that the discourse on the films, unlike the films themselves, produces a simplistic figure of opposition, namely anti porn feminism. This results in a fake and unproductive dichotomy whereby tolerant, pro-queer, fun-loving, pro-porn feminists protect the rights of the sexually oppressed against puritanical, anti-queer, militant, anti-porn femi nists. Such a dichotomy undermines the important questions that Treut's films pose and that encourage us all, pro- and anti-porn feminists alike, to consider what our erotic options as women, lesbians, and/or feminists might be. (MC)

The Body Politic of Performance, Literature, and Film: Mimesis and Citation in Valie Export, Elfriede Jelinek, and Monika Treut

The Body Politic of Performance, Literature, and Film: Mimesis and Citation in Valie Export, Elfriede Jelinek, and Monika Treut

The Body Politic of Performance, Literature, and Film: Mimesis and Citation in Valie Export, Elfriede Jelinek, and Monika Treut

The Body Politic of Performance, Literature, and Film: Mimesis and Citation in Valie Export, Elfriede Jelinek, and Monika Treut

Triangulated visions: women in recent German cinema

Major-O'Sickey, Ingeborg and Ingeborg von Zadow, eds. 1998. Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema. SUNY Series in Feminist Criticism and Theory. Albany: SUNY Press. $65.50 hc. $21.95 sc. vii + 291 pp. Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema is a significant anthology for the way it brings together German filmmakers' and German film scholars' post-feminist insights into the conjunction of women/woman and German cinema. This volume has a lot to recommend it: it compiles in English 17 scholarly essays on the recent German cinema and five interviews with German women filmmakers. It is particularly valuable to the U.S. readership for its attention to under-treated areas of German film in English language scholarship, areas such as the former GDR (East German) cinema and documentary filmmakers.Yet the volume also includes articles on films and filmmakers who have had a higher degree of visibility in English language journals and book publications and on the screens of repertoire theaters and university classrooms. These include some of New German Cinema's famous Filmautoren (Fassbinder and Wenders), German avant-garde filmmakers (Ottinger and Treut), and women associated with the genre of women's/feminist films (Sanders-- Brahms, Sander, and Rosenbaum). The key intervention that the editors want to make in publishing this volume is to redress the relative absence of work on German women filmmakers in booklength studies on the German cinema (6). Thus the unifying theme of Triangulated Visions, according to its editors, is a psycho-politically informed discussion, from a variety of approaches, of the triangulated intersections of filmmaker/image/audience. These intersections have formed the basis of feminist film theory's investigations into gender as constructed/deconstructed/reconstructed. At the same time, the editors and the authors of the essays make clear that we are operating in an era of post-feminism, an era, that is, in which it no longer suffices to talk about a feminist or feminine aesthetic, a feminine spectator position, or representations of women with the same sense of assuredness or mission that was possible in the previous two decades. The anthology is divided into five parts (Genre and Other Border Crossings; Triangulations of Ethnicity, Gender and Class; Images of Power and Pleasure; Images ofWomen as Social Ciphers; Recovering (from) History: Memory and Film), each part reflecting theoretical and historical concerns that are addressed somewhat unevenly by the essays in each section. Of course, such divisions are themselves only constructs, and one finds many of the same films, filmmakers, and concerns reappearing in various parts of the volume. Germany's women avant-garde filmmakers Monika Treut and Ulrike Ottinger receive the most attention throughout the anthology, beginning with the lead essay by Nora Alter. The avant-garde texts by these two filmmakers exemplify Alters assertion that the triangulated intersection is an unruly place of meaning formation. According to Alter, we must approach the view of the spectator as one that is both unstable and a place where meaning is constituted. Both Treut's and Ottinger's films transgress genre categories through which the spectator participates in construing meaning. Ottinger's Johanna d'arc of Mongolia and Treut's The Virgin Machine weave documentary style and feature film sequences seamlessly together, creating a post-genre hybrid text that destabilizes our categories of understanding-categories that include sexuality, historical time, and geographical place. More than any other essay, Alters theorizes the effects of such textual/spectatorial processes for triangulated vision:. . .(it) is at once confirmed, disrupted, and confirmed again (21). Douglas Kellner's article on Fassbinder revisits the way in which his films use (Sirkian) melodrama to both create and disrupt conventional meanings (by mixing strategies of identification and distanciation) in the service of social critique. …

The Sexual Woman and Her Struggle for Subjectivity: Cruel Women in Sade, Sacher-Masoch, and Treut

Nietzsche mentions the cruel, sadistic woman who requires the whip to maltreat the male masochist. The masochistic projection of the cruel woman is embodied in Sade's female figures and in Sacher-Masoch's Wanda, among others. The cruel woman reappears in Monika Treut's work as the one who actively lives out her sexuality and consciously renounces the institutions of marriage and family. This paper traces the question of how far this re-emergence of the figure of the cruel woman in Treut's films can be attributed to a cultural-critical impulse, or whether she should be seen as constructed in the patriarchal image of woman. (SW)

From "Taboo Parlor" to Porn and Passing: An Interview with Monika Treut

From "Taboo Parlor" to Porn and Passing: An Interview with Monika Treut

From "Taboo Parlor" to Porn and Passing: An Interview with Monika Treut

From "Taboo Parlor" to Porn and Passing: An Interview with Monika Treut