Falling: 3 x Girls in Uniform: The Video Essay as Curatorial Practice

In her forthcoming BFI Classics volume on Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform, 1931), Barbara Mennel devotes a chapter to the “Remakes, Rediscoveries, and Remixes” of Leontine Sagan’s classic film adaptation of German-Hungarian writer Christa Winsloe’s original play and subsequent novel Das Mädchen Manuela (The Child Manuela, 1932). The play, novel, and films all memorably tell the story of a fourteen-year-old boarding school pupil who falls in love with her female teacher.² One of the remixes Mennel writes about is my 2019, two-minute-and-39-seconds-long videographic study “Falling: 3 x Girls in Uniform” (embedded above). This multiscreen work performs an unfolding but simultaneous comparison of two sets of sequences from the 1931 movie, and its 1951 and 1958 cinematic remakes. Its two display rows center on how (in the top row) the films image the scene of a kiss bestowed by the teacher on her student, and (in the bottom row) on how they stage the story’s dramatic climax around the school stairwell (figures 1 and 2).

My video begins with captioning, which introduces the work as follows:

After these words, there follows no further (or specific) verbal labeling of the rows of images, and no conventional verbal or audiovisual argument is made about them, such as that which might be routinely expected of a documentary about these films, or of an “essay film,” or indeed a “video essay” about them, either. Despite this intentional dearth, in her account of my scholarly remix, Mennel is easily able to interpret my interface and its precise chronological, color, and narrative placement choices. She can also conclude that my video reedits its sources to heighten and expand (queer) feminist meaning and viewing pleasure, its focus on key scenes of affection and care (despite differently patriarchal contexts and dramatic outcomes), and its found-musical score evoking the 1931 film’s aural motif of the ringing school bell. As for the video’s title,

In her feminist historical study of the Das Mädchen Manuela / Mädchen in Uniform hypotext and hypertexts, then, Mennel offers a gratifyingly rich, and much more perspicacious, interpretation of my video remix than I have so far felt necessary to attempt as its “author.” I am very grateful indeed for her interest and attention. But I would like to offer a few thoughts for the record, in this short, written reflection on its design and making, about why my videographic study of these Mädchen in Uniform adaptations emerged in this interpretable display form, and why I would describe it as having been composed primarily according to a curatorial, rather than expressive or argumentative, logic.

I was certainly thinking in a curatorial context when I made “Falling” in the fall semester of 2019. That year, I was course director and main teacher of a class at Birkbeck, University of London, called Curating Film, Sharing Passions.⁴ Devised by my colleague Janet McCabe in 2015, it is a core part of the master’s in Film Programming and Curating curriculum, a graduate degree program founded at Birkbeck by Laura Mulvey in 2014 under the title Film Programming. The course description reads:

McCabe was on study leave in 2019, so I switched out her chosen film of focus, her cinematic object of passion, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), for a later Weimar Cinema classic that is one of my all-time favorites, a formative movie in my lesbian cinephilia, and very much still a work of and in the present: Mädchen in Uniform.⁵ This choice also led to my decision to employ the UK artist-filmmaker Sarah Wood, a well-known and experienced curator of Sagan’s 1931 film, equally passionate but even more knowledgeable than I am about this queer feminist classic as well as about its 1958 West German remake, to coteach some of the sessions.⁶ We decided to screen both German-language films as one way of accounting for how and why the 1931 Mädchen had been remembered through “rewriting” in different political and historical contexts.

When we began teaching the course, I also spent some time researching the Mexican remake Muchachas de uniforme that, as a Latin American film specialist, I knew existed but had never seen. I was finally able to obtain an un-subtitled digital copy of a pre-restoration version and was fascinated by how it remade the 1931 German film. Since I couldn’t screen it for my students in its entirety, due to the lack of subtitles, I first wondered about showing an extended excerpt. As is my pedagogical as well as analytic wont, though, I immediately set about exploring Muchachas de uniforme alongside Mädchen as digital files imported into my video editing software, investigating these two films and their aesthetic relationship at close quarters, through videographic comparison. I quickly produced Adieu, a short audiovisual study of the films’ endings, using superimposition (including the English-language subtitles to the German version, which also helped roughly to translate some of the Spanish-language dialogue of the later version). I screened this work in class as the prompt for a discussion about the aesthetic, political, moral, and affective differences between the two films’ climactic scenes.⁷ It worked very well for that purpose.⁸

Thus conceived, Adieu was a poetic work in the mode of what artist-filmmaker Harun Farocki called “soft montage.”⁹ As Nora Alter writes of that mode,

For Alter, then, soft montage allows for an increased flexibility and openness of the text for the spectator (“associations are suggested but not formally mandated”), paralleling Theodor Adorno’s understanding of the essay film, more broadly, in a number of ways:

The superimposition aspect of Adieu (figure 3), though, was for me a slight drawback in relation to its potential status as a curatorial object that could speak pedagogically, and not just artistically and passionately, to an audience who didn’t yet know but might want to learn about the precise form of the Mexican film. It could be argued that, purely for that function, Adieu remixes too much, through its lack of respect or curatorial care for the full and separate frame of the 1951 remake.¹² While I really liked Adieu, it was this lingering feeling that motivated my ongoing experimentation and efforts to find a more careful and complete way (in relation to showcasing full frame images at least) of comparing key elements of the 1931 film adaptation Mädchen in Uniform with its two later remakes.

My decision to expand the video to compare the three films, and to narrow down the section from the endings, drew me quite logically to the decision to incorporate the sequences featuring the teacher-student kiss: to evoke through this juxtaposition as well as through the semantic and affective charge of my new video title, “Falling,” what Mennel argues is a suggested (albeit varying) relationship between love and despair in all three films.

These affective as well as visual kinds of design or “interface” considerations of videographic studies, perhaps especially when it comes to those that inform the making of the kind of multiscreen compilation video exemplified by “Falling: 3 x Girls in Uniform,” approximate some of the design decisions involved in the exhibitory arts more generally. For me, my experience in these aspects of making recalls discussions of the layout design of gallery and museum culture, for example, those by curator Mark Nash (and his collaborator Vladimir Seput) in Nash’s recent book about his own practices Curating the Moving Image.¹³ Nash’s work has often centred on moving image installations, and he writes compellingly of the parcours—the designed journey through an exhibition, in the moving image gallery or museum context, one “precisely timed by the sequencing of individual works,” as follows:

As Simon Sheikh writes in his 2012 study of exhibition-making, the choices of meaning achieved through practice (carried out through selection—including of duration—as well as through spatial association and staging, or literal mise-en-scène) are

Curatorial acts, including parcours composition of installations, or the interface design of multiscreen videos, can thus be articulatory acts as well as ideational ones. Videographic studies can, I hope, and as Barbara Mennel’s assessment of my work seems to suggest, offer curated experiences of feminist ways of seeing, pointing, in the case of my audiovisual exploration of the cinematic adaptations and remakes of Das Mädchen Manuela, not to a linear argument about cinematic progress but, instead, to an associative one about historical contingency, and the variability, ambiguity, and ambivalence of transcultural fantasies and desires.