'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

y war. A final interesting point of this scene is that the difference in film grain
emphasizes for the viewer that this is a dialogue of time levels. Lene‟s conversation with
the boy is representative of the objective of Sanders-Brahms‟ film; a dialogue with the
past. Just as the mother figure asks questions of the documentary record of the past,
Sanders-Brahms holds a dialogue with her mother‟s past.
In another sequence of the film, documentary footage is used to distance the
viewer from the action of the fictional narrative. After Lene and Anna have arrived in
Berlin, they find refuge at the apartment belonging to rich relatives. A medium shot
shows them taking a bath together. Sanders-Brahms‟ off screen voice-over comments,
“So liebten Lene und ich uns in der Badewanne und flogen wie die Hexen über die
Dächer” (Film-Erzählung 113). 47 The voice-over bolsters the happy mood of the playful
interaction between mother and infant. It is from the perspective of the adult filmmaker
and it recounts her idealized memories of those times spent wandering through war-torn
Germany with her mother. It is at this point in the film where the objections of some
feminist critics that the harsh realities of war are minimized by the mother-daughter
symbiosis seem most justified. For example, Claudia Lenssen claims that the film is “the
story of a very happy symbiosis and an escape from the bombings and all the horrors of
war. The mother and daughter create a world of their own” (Fehervary, Lenssen, and
Mayne 176). Moreover, Seiter claims that, “[t]he emphasis on the psychological self-
sufficiency of the mother and daughter relationship results in the detachment of women
from social, economic, and political relationships” (572). In my view, the filmmaker‟s
idealized memories of that time are undermined by the sequence of documentary footage
47 “And so Lene and I loved each other in the bathtub and flew like witches over the rooftops” (Sanders-
Brahms, Film-Erzählung 113).
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