'Finally a Human Being in this Palace': How 'Sissi' Deals with the Past

Müller, Sabine 2008. 'Finally a Human Being in this Palace': How 'Sissi' Deals with the Past. New Readings 9 , pp. 1-5. 10.18573/newreadings.63

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (185kB) | Preview

Abstract

The article uses the Sissi trilogy as a case study to offer a new perspective on popular film in the 1950s in general and on Heimatfilm in particular. Rather than reading those films as the expression of a wilful collective amnesia, the article aims to show that, despite representing a sugar-coated world of royal romance, these films form a crucial part of people’s coping with the past. In adopting a phenomenological approach to cinematic representation, the article emphasises the fact that realism is not to be sought in the fantastic setting of the costume spectacle but in narrative structure. The conventionality of narrative patterns and iconographies is brought out as an integral part of a social practice of narrativising, and thereby integrating, historical events within the private sphere of everyday experience. Within this familiar sphere, urgent issues of the 1950s such as gender relations and national identity were addressed and renegotiated. The argument culminates in the claim that it is only by suspending rash moral judgement and acknowledging this ‘privatisation’ as a necessary element in people’s narrative coping with the past that a new perspective on films like Sissi can emerge to provide us with a more complete picture of the 1950s.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Modern Languages
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) D History General and Old World > DD Germany H Social Sciences > HM Sociology P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Motion Pictures
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	1359-7485
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	17 January 2020
Last Modified:	04 May 2023 11:13
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/128826

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item