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107 INTERTEXTUALITY, BROKEN MIRRORS, AND THE GOOD GERMAN Andrew deWaard The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again . . . For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. —Walter Benjamin, Thesis V in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” The Blend of History In an interview a few years before beginning production on The Good German (2006), director Steven Soderbergh related his formal and stylistic promiscuity to his desire to make an innovative “leap” within the medium of film. Soderbergh is searching for “another level,” and one idea he has is to tell a story spanning the entire twentieth century and then “cut it up into ten ten-minute sections. You pick a year from each of those decades. In each year, let’s say the 1903 decade, you shoot in the aesthetic of The Great Train Robbery. In the teens, you shoot in the style of D. W. Griffith. In the twenties, you shoot in the style of the silent films. Each section is done in the aesthetic of that period” (quoted in Richardson). Four years later, the trans-historical spirit of just such a formal undertaking would be realized with The Good German. If Soderbergh were to have continued that train of thought for his dream project, listing styles according to decade, surely he would have chosen the sultry American film noirs of the forties.1 The Good German certainly focuses its brazen pastiche on 1940s-era film noirs such as Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and The Third Man (Carol 108 Andrew deWaard Reed, 1949), but like the noirs themselves, the cinematic lineage goes back further and continues down the line as well. Film noir is intimately tied to German expressionism, so perhaps we can assume Soderbergh would have chosen this style for the twenties and thirties, before returning stateside for the noirs. From there, The Good German skips over to the seventies for a neo-noir, Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), which is itself nostalgically set in the thirties. The penultimate stop on Soderbergh’s history travelogue is the nineties, in which Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) would reinvigorate the use of black-and-white cinematography within Hollywood and begin a minor resurgence in Holocaust memorial, affixing it (some would say appropriating it) as a key site for American trauma and rebirth. Spielberg himself would use a multitude of forms, styles, and genres in his self-described “authentic” (quoted in Russell 78) portrayal of the forties, so perhaps we can imagine that when Soderbergh arrived at his tenth decade and tenth style, the first of the new century, he chose neo-meta. This decade would be The Good German. Midway through the film, there is a brief exchange between Jake (George Clooney) and Levi (Dominic Comperatore), a disabled Jewish Holocaust survivor and shop owner. “What happened to you?” asks Jake, to which Levi responds, “An experiment, to see if you can transplant a bone from one man into another. It turns out you can’t. . . . How about a camera? Rolleiflex. The old ones used to turn the image upside-down in the viewfinder. Little mirror sets it right.” This offhand comment is of little relevance to the film’s plot but is an explicit, literal embodiment of the central intertextual tension in the director’s work: Soderbergh’s philosophy of history is predicated on polyphonic mediation. Levi’s suggestion to “turn the image upside-down” in order to “[set] it right” operates on two levels. Formally, Soderbergh emulates and simulates myriad cinematic styles and forms, the 1940s film noir of Michael Curtiz in particular, “transplanting” these cinematic methodologies from one era into another. Thematically, Soderbergh performs a deft intertextual and intermedial negotiation of mediated history. Levi’s innocent sales pitch—“How about a camera?”—has been the prolific American director’s continual refrain for twenty films over twenty years. Soderbergh, occupying the role of director of photography, as well as director and editor, presents the “POV of a DOP” in a distinctly intertextual assemblage of style, theme, and philosophy.2 The Good German, a morality play about historical guilt, is experienced as a multiplicity of mediations; Soderbergh is not just shining a light into the abyss of American war crime complicity but tak- [3.135.219.166] Project MUSE...

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