Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave

Part-Time
Work of a Domestic Slave

Alexander Kluge's Part-Time Work of a
Domestic Slave is a film that probes just how difficult it is
to understand the complex workings of politics and society, and to make a
difference, when society and its structures are designed to eat up so
much of a person's time and energy. The film's title itself implies as
much: Roswitha (Kluge's sister and frequent star Alexandra) is the
"domestic slave," a housewife who must divide her time between caring
for her three children and her verbally abusive husband Franz (Bion
Steinborn) and working to provide for them, leaving little time for
thoughts or concerns outside of family life. The film is divided roughly
in half, reflecting two different definitions of Roswitha's "part-time
work." In the film's first half, she works as an illegal underground
abortionist since Franz has no job and she must support the family. In
the second half, after Roswitha's practice is shut down and Franz is
forced to get a job, she becomes involved in social and political
matters, trying to learn about the world outside her family. Her
part-time work thus shifts, over the course of the film, from the need
to provide for her family's physical and material needs, to the freedom
and time to develop her own thoughts and ideas independently of the
family. It is seen as an essential trade-off: when Franz isn't working,
he's free to read and think, to study with no clear purpose in sight,
but once he has to get a job he all but disappears from the film. By the
same token, when Roswitha stops working, her mind becomes active and
engaged, and she has time to develop an interest in things happening
outside of the home, outside of her immediate scope.

What Kluge
is interested in here is how segmented people's lives are, how people
are forced, by society's demands, to split up their lives between home
and work, unable to reconcile these two separate areas. Early on, the
narrator intones, with deadpan irony, "to afford more children of her
own, Roswitha carries out abortions." Roswitha, of course, doesn't see
the irony, doesn't understand the profound contradiction between work
and home contained in this simple statement. This announcement is
followed by an extraordinarily detailed abortion scene, after which,
once she's dumped the tools and the little blood-encrusted fetus into a
metal pan, Roswitha takes a sip of tea and offers her patient a shot of
liquor. It's all so casual, so offhand; it's obvious that Roswitha turns
her mind off during these procedures. She's not in this profession for
radical reasons, she's not doing it to help the women who come to her
(though that's part of the rhetoric she uses when talking about it),
she's doing it as a way to provide for her family, as a job like any
other.

This all changes once police interest forces Roswitha to
drop her profession, and Franz goes to work for the family instead.
Roswitha, along with her friend Sylvia (Sylvia Gartmann), becomes
involved in politics and social issues, though they aren't quite sure
where to start at first. Their journey into these issues ranges from a
distanced observation of official announcements and policies, to
analysis of media reports, to trying to find understanding through art
(they memorize a Bertolt Brecht song from a record), to finally becoming
directly engaged and seeing things for themselves, hands on and face to
face. It is, in essence, a journey into the world, struggling through
the barriers and layers of representation erected by society, heading
back into the direct experience of reality. Roswitha finds no
satisfaction on an official tour of "the social situation," accompanying
some politicians (almost all white, older men) as they spout rhetoric
and she simply watches silently. She also finds no answers in the
newspapers, because she quickly realizes that what she considers
important issues — matters that directly affect people's families and
children, matters that affect working conditions — are of no interest to
newspaper editors, who reserve the front page for staid political news.
Roswitha and Sylvia wind up storming out of a newspaper's office,
enraged by the editors' inability to care about real people and their
struggles.


Roswitha's struggle to understand, to have an
impact on the world, eventually leads her to more direct, radical
political engagement, trying to excite workers into revolting against
unfair practices. Her engagement has its roots, as does everything for
her, in the family: her husband's company is rumored to be shutting down
its plants and moving to Portugal for cheaper labor, so she fears her
husband will lose his job. From here, Roswitha becomes involved in labor
and union negotiations, engaging in increasingly radical acts. She
breaks into the company's offices looking for proof that they're going
to move to Portugal, she distributes pamphlets to the workers, she meets
with union leaders who seem to lack her passion and prefer a slow,
steady approach. Finally, she goes to Portugal herself and sees the
building site, with crates clearly marked with the company's name; she
has her proof, because she has seen it with her own eyes. Kluge films
this as a moment of peace and, almost, transcendence. There is a sublime
hush as Roswitha stands in front of the crates overlooking a grassy
field where, presumably, the new factory is to be built. This is the
moment when Roswitha has come back into contact with reality,
experienced directly and without mediation; she has seen it for herself
rather than relying on documents or rhetoric or newspaper accounts or
conflicting rumors. It is difficult to get to this point, Kluge
stresses, but very much worth it; afterward, Roswitha smiles with
genuine satisfaction, even before she knows if her work has actually
made any difference. It hardly matters as much as the fact that she has
shed her reliance on others and experienced something of significance
for herself.

The balance between this engagement with the world
and the demands of family is at the heart of the film. The idea that
one's family is all that matters — stressed as a supreme value of
society — can, for Kluge, actually be an impediment to caring about or
understanding the wider world, to embracing and feeling empathy for the
needs and problems of all people rather than just one's immediate family
and friends. And yet Roswitha's social and political activism
originates with the family: she is driven to make things better for her
family, and to do so she must become involved in matters outside of the
family. It is a central and irresolvable paradox, one that Roswitha
never quite overcomes. For one thing, no matter how much she learns in
her new ventures, no matter how much she accomplishes, she is never able
to throw off the oppressive influence of her unappreciative husband
Franz, who remains nasty and judgmental to the end.

Still,
Roswitha is clever and inventive in making a place for herself outside
the home, using her ingenuity to circumvent the strictures of a society
that doesn't have much use for a woman outside of the home. In one of
the film's funniest scenes — and as always with Kluge, there's a certain
absurdist humor at work in his socio-political satire — Roswitha is
confronted by police seals placed on the locks of her clinic. The seals
read, "any unauthorized person tampering with these seals will be
prosecuted," but this won't stop Roswitha. She pays a man for his dog,
and lives up to the letter of the law, if not its intent, by having the
trained dog open the door with its paws; thus, no person tampered with
the seals. It's hilarious and absurd, and in many ways absurdity is
what's required for someone who wishes to move within the confines
dictated by this social situation.

To this end, Kluge structures
his film as a collage, incorporating paintings, clips of old movies,
and interludes taken from children's storybooks, all of these inserted
elements commenting obliquely on Roswitha's story. At the pivotal moment
when Roswitha makes her decision to become involved in matters outside
of the family, Kluge inserts a montage of shots of the wind blowing
through branches or causing ripples in water: grainy and damaged images
from older movies, poetically suggesting a change in the air. Some of
the other film clips come from war movies, including one in which a
soldier says that he can do anything, that's he essentially limited only
by his lack of knowledge about foreign languages. These clips suggest
that Roswitha lives in a man's world, where political matters are often
decided by strong-willed men on distant battlefields, far from her
prosaic world. Kluge similarly uses art and culture to define Roswitha's
place within a long and perhaps overbearing cultural legacy: snatches
of classical music frequently score scenes, while paintings show women
as always being in the home, caring for children, doing domestic chores.
Culture and society show no other options; Roswitha has to create them
for herself.