A Gendered Suspension of Time: Waiting in the Cinema of Angela Schanelec

Abstract:From within the frame of feminist phenomenology and its crux of lived experience, this essay explores the element of time through embodied acts of waiting in four of Angela Schanelec’s later films: Nachmittag (2007; Afternoon, 2020), Orly (2010; Orly, 2010), Der traumhafte Weg (2016; The Dreamed Path, 2017), and Ich war zuhause, aber . . . (2019; I Was at Home, But. . ., 2019). Each of these films portrays waiting as suspension, in which characters are stuck in a state of fatigued arrest, unable to act and uncertain of what is to come. Essentially a state of vulnerability, waiting can even invite violence. I ask how this portrayal might connect to feminist politics, which permits us to read Schanelec’s films at least indirectly as feminist. The topic of waiting has a long history in film and film criticism, not least in discussions of gender. I trace this history from slow cinema’s ambivalent embrace of unhurried time back to melodrama’s temporality of too-late-ness and art cinema’s wearied figure of the housewife marked by time’s passing.