Der Regisseur

Two actors sit in a room, late at night, one of them telling the other about his chaotic day on a film set. A third person talks on a telephone. The description is confused and nervous, and the speaker has a problem (the film’s running gag): He repeatedly stumbles over the word “Regisseur” (German for “director”). We’re all familiar with the situation: When talking about something, the most important element, the intractable “thing” (a name, a term, a central character) eludes us, leading to a stuttering of the narrative flow, creating an embarrassment; the verbal inhibition, the “hang up,” robs us of our auctorial (and therefore authoritative) position as a speaker.

The boss isn’t there. The speaker’s scatter-brained, dysfunctional discourse repudiates the “director,” the textual and concrete disciplinary power, as is familiar from both Hollywood’s factory-like system and the “independent enterprise” of the auteur film. His frivolous forgetfulness regarding the paternal sovereign is in equal parts a parody and leveling of the hierarchies of both film and linguistic production. The symptom of stuttering, the incomplete sentences and fidgeting reveal the hysterical logic of affective work in a control society’s (creative) industry: one’s survival always being at stake, constantly chasing after things, the notorious pomposity, never having enough time or money, the dissatisfaction of not being able to finish a job and slogging through in precarious working conditions, and the resulting noble sense of doing something special. If the boss isn’t there or you can’t think of what you wanted to say, this world is shown as one big mess which is always too much to deal with. And so it just might happen that the English word “director” comes to mind as a life saver.
Incidentally, “Der Regisseur” is extremely funny.
Michael Palm
Translation: Steve Wilder