more truth is seemingly implied by the formal relationship between standstill
and movement than in the exchange of words that is usually central in Fassbin-
der’s films. On the other hand, there is a complex relationship between the vi-
sual standstill and the apparatus. The image is frozen while the sound of the
recording device repeats the words that were just stated as always already re-
corded, preformed, reiterated speech, an emblem of therapeutic control that
(quite in the Foucauldian sense ofdispositif) maintains the disciplinary system
of the prison in another form. Here, confession is shown within an agency of
power (ordispositif) that is explored in connection with a media apparatus. If,
during the entire film, Peter’s speech is transmitted as“blocked”speech, this
blockage is ultimately related to the enigmatic image of the trauma of the deed
that returns near the end, which is solved as a hermeneutic puzzle for the spec-
tators. With a different apparatus, in this case a telephone, which is the object
and symbol of his blockage, the hero is able for the first time to tear himself
away from his compulsive petrification, in anacting out, to kill a restaurant
owner whom he suddenly perceives as looking like his father. The body’s
stance, media apparatus and visual standstill coincide at the end of this film in
a figuratively condensed constellation.
Certainly, the most striking freeze-frame in Fassbinder’s work is found at the
end ofMutter Küsters Fahrt zum Himmel(Mother Küsters Goes to Hea-
ven)(). The violence and suddenness of this final interruption may be
modernistic, whereas the motionlessness of the aerial views at the beginning
awakens the desire of the spectator to watch a story begin that can be read as a
homage to classical cinema. The final shot of the film shows Mutter Küsters in a
medium-long shot, frozen in horror as she is confronted with the reversal of her
political leanings. Her struggle for dignity ends, to her own surprise, with a
hostage-taking organized by a group of radical activists who use her like the
political party had earlier done.
The all-too spectacular event of the hostage taking, which ends the story, is
ultimately told with intertitles on the“obtuse”side of the freeze-frame that
further highlights the frozen stare of Mutter Küsters: cf. the intervention of the
police, the death of Mutter Küsters, as well as the newspaper’s chief editor,
whom she feels has victimized her. The visual standstill here appears as a sus-
pension of both filmic narration and motoric action. This arrest leads the specta-
tor without a transition from visual projection to mental projection using text.
The end is presented as a screenplay, which reasserts the projective function of
the latter. By leaving out a spectacular ending, the visual standstill insinuates
the virtuality inherent in any screenplay. Incidentally, the American version of
the film has a happy ending.
A comparable example of narrative virtuality and contingency is found in
Despair(), where Dirk Bogarde, after murdering his doppelgänger, with
80 Christa Blümlinger