The Impossibility of Touching: Looking at The Death of Maria Malibran

Abstract

This short story explores the interaction between voyeurism, music, gender roles, the impossibility of touching, and the attempt to arrest time in Werner Schroeter’s 1972 film The Death of Maria Malibran. It dramatizes the space generated by looking at the film’s unusual tableaus as part of a theater audience and fictionally details the production itself and the creative impulses of its director.

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Notes on contributors

Jeff Jackson

Jeff Jackson is the author of the novel Mira Corpora (Two Dollar Radio, 2013), a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Five of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award-winning Collapsable Giraffe theater company in New York City. He is the managing editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and editorial associate for Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Psychoanalytic Perspectives.