'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

essentialize men or women‟s experiences of war in that these experiences are based on a
historical and social reality.
The second sequence of the film that depicts a woman‟s gendered experience of
war is the scene in which Lene is raped by two American soldiers. In the film narrative,
the rape sequence takes place during Lene and Anna‟s migration to the East and
interrupts Lene‟s narration of the Grimms‟ fairy tale ““Der Räuberbräutigam” (“The
Robber Bridegroom”). The scene is preceded by two scenes of early-colour documentary
newsreel footage. The first consists of a very lengthy aerial panning shot of bombed out
Berlin, which goes on for 1 minute and 5 seconds and which shows the extreme scope of
the devastation to the German metropolis. This scene is accompanied by a sombre piano
melody dominated by shrill disharmonies. The accompaniment appears to be a funeral
march and it underscores the sadness, loss, and otherworldliness of the devastation. The
second scene shows an American soldier sitting on the ground playing a legless concert
piano. His dissonant plunking captures the attention of a female civilian standing at the
far left-hand corner of the screen holding a broom and dustpan. She turns to look at the
piano player briefly and, moving from right to left, walks off screen. Two American
soldiers walk past the piano player, pause, turn to look at him briefly and smile. Then
they lift their heads quickly as if the off-screen woman has caught their attention and they
saunter off screen as if wanting to catch up with the woman. The right to left movements
of the woman and soldiers create a sense of tension and uneasiness in the Western
viewer. This is because right to left movement contradicts the Western eye‟s natural
instinct to move over an image from left to right, due in part to the way people are trained
to read (Giannetti 33). The image of male members of a conquering army following a
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