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My mother is 30 feet high and made of light tonight. How beautiful she is: synced-up, costumed, in motion. She is speaking in German, a language I have never heard her utter a word in, but it seems so natural that I say Mutter back to her, hoping she might respond this time. I surrender to the image before me, dying into it a little. How to describe this feeling-the one I have had my whole life, that thrilling combination of dream, dread, hope, and wish-every time the theater dimmed?
How happy I am to see her again, even like this with the angles exaggerated, the color saturated. How is it my mother, glowing, has ended up here projected before me? How much more intimate she seems this way-sad as that may seem, how much more approachable. I'm not sure I would have chosen to put her into a Fassbinder film-but there she is nevertheless-a sort of Hanna Schygulla figure: a creature of infinite, limitless allure and mystery. Even veiled, lipsticked, disguised, I can recognize her as my mother, and I wave to her as I try to keep up with the subtitles.
I am watching her do things I have only somehow guessed: she is entertaining the Germans against her will-giving the performance of a lifetime. How sad she looks, compromised, and how resolute. In the close-up she is lurid, ruined, drenched in red light. Such strange sorrow and absurdity and doom permeate the scene. The camera pulls back and kneels before her in adoration, and I, too, grovel at her feet, trying to make her understand at last how grateful I am that she found the way to live. An unbearable idea to her. Never to be uttered. Mutter, I say to her, speaking her despised mother tongue and reaching out to her, but she is lost in one of those delirious 360-degree pans,...