Dora Osborne (Cambridge) p.22-39
2006 Issue 3
Abstract
In the context of post-Wende film, Tom Tykwer’s Winterschläfer seems to turn away from the socio-political implications of the fall of the Wall and reunification, retreating instead to a more familiar space of originary symbiosis. In this paper, I will show how Winterschläfer extends and suspends the sleeping state, holding its characters in a uterine time and space of hibernation. Using Kristeva’s notion of the abject which confuses the attempt at defining the clean and proper body, preventing a clear demarcation of self and other, this essay will consider how sleep, as a borderline state, is exploited to defer the traumatic effects of separation from the (m)other. The characters’ retreat into cocoon-like interiors anticipates a logic of metamorphosis, making the film’s title programmatic. The frozen world outside doubles this suspension, but renders it problematic. The bleached snowscape contrasts with Tykwer’s self-conscious use of colour, marking topographically the loss the characters experience: loss of life and memory. The snow at once bears and hides the traces of events, which, following Freud, become distorted in the dream-work, and, most significantly, of fallen bodies, expelled, ab-jected from the womb-like interiors.