Dissertation

Abstract

Written by Elfriede Jelinek and directed by Werner Schroeter, the film adaptation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina was released in 1991 to high expectations. Despite this, the film was met with swift criticism following its initial screenings. Feminists characterized the film as running counter to the intentions of the novel, with some even equating the adaptation to a “murder” of the original text. Echoing Malina’s preoccupation with Austrian complicity in WWII, critics such as Alice Schwarzer and Kathleen Komar referred to Jelinek as a “collaborationist” who “became complicit” with the male director’s gaze— in order words, as a woman re-enacting exactly the collusion with a fascist and patriarchal symbolic order which Bachmann criticizes in Malina. From Jelinek’s part, Brenda Bethman noted in a personal conversation she exchanged with her in 1999 that the scriptwriter felt ‘unjustly accused of being responsible for the disaster that the film was, even though Schroeter had changed much in her script and had not followed the interpretation of Bachmann’s novel that she had incorporated into her text.’  

In this way, it can be argued that Jelinek’s revival of Bachmann’s work unwittingly resulted in her own erasure, thus re-creating the complex triangulation of victim, bystander, and perpetrator present between the Ich-Erzählerin and her male counterparts. Central to this are the different registers of death, murder, and perceived “loss” at play— the murder of the Ich-Erzählerin at the hands of Malina, as well as the death of Malina the novel through its translation to script and screen. Implementing this loss as a point of entrance, I hope to interpret the writing, criticism and reception of both writers to reflect on how sexual violence travels through the distortion of language through technology in post-WWII Austria. My intention is not to refute criticisms of the film, but to more closely examine the diegetic and extra-diegetic tensions which appear within (the narrative) and outside (the production) of the film.

15.6.2023

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