'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

work, Sanders-Brahms draws the viewer into a story, which is above all an
intergenerational dialogue.
A second aspect of the interaction across the generations in Deutschland, bleiche
Mutter is Sanders-Brahms‟ use of the cinematic voice-over technique. In creating a
fictionalized account of her mother‟s and to some extent her own personal experiences of
the war and post-war period, the director does not attempt to create an illusion of
objective history. While she constructs the plot of her filmic narrative around her
mother‟s life, she emphasizes her own authority in the cinematic retelling of her mother‟s
story through the use of an off-screen voice-over. A disembodied female voice, Sanders-
Brahms‟ own voice, comments on the images of the film and thus lends a discursive
quality to this work of memory. From the outset of the film, the filmmaker foregrounds
her role in the construction of the film‟s meaning by identifying her parents and by
establishing herself as the narrator of their story. The director thus emphasizes her
autobiographical perspective on the events being played out in the film. As Kosta
explains, “The narrator is the author as well as the speaking subject; she narrates her
mother‟s past. The commentary interprets the image and establishes the autobiographical
viewpoint in relation to the image” (135). The voice-over not only serves to inscribe the
author within the text, but it also works as a distanciation technique that prevents the
audience from unmediated identification with the film‟s illusion of reality. One of most
striking examples where Sanders-Brahms uses the voice-over to foreground her authorial
subjectivity and to alienate the viewer from the on-screen action takes place when the
newly married Hans and Lene embrace in their home. As the newlyweds tenderly
undress one other, the off-screen voice interrupts the intimacy on the screen, stating:
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