Emily Babette

Of Non-places and Heterotopias: The Mise-en-Scène of Death and Terror(ism) in Antigone and the German ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1977 By Emily Babette  In this essay, I will attempt to compare and contrast the ‘mise-en-scène’ of the play  Antigone  (specifically Sophocles’ version, although the Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich Hölderlin version would work as well) with the historical events undertaken by the urban terrorist group the Red Army Faction (the RAF) in the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1977 in Germany. In addition to real-life events of the RAF, I explore the film  Germany in Autumn  directed by Alexander Kluge, and two distinct bodies of artwork which were made in response to the actions and demise of the RAF. I use these responsive works to further my investigation of the mise-en-scènes found throughout all of them. These bodies of work are  October 18, 1977  by Gerhard Richter and  I am Ulrike Meinhof or (someone once told me time if a flat circle)  by Daniel Joseph Martinez. To begin with, I am

     Historically women have been repressed to stay within the private sphere, ‘behind-the-scenes’ so to speak, as the public sphere was initially intended only to be accessible to men. This was true well into the twentieth century, but as women today in the twenty-first century continue to strive for equity and equality, the quest for accessibility is an on-going project. Part of the historic inaccessibility to the public sphere was due to the lack of occupations and opportunities available to women, as women were mostly relegated to the role of caregiver. Caregiver could be taken literally, to denote mother and/or house-wife, but for working-class women caregiver could also denote domestic-mimicking occupations such as housekeepers, cleaners, child-care workers, servers, etc. (i.e. domestic labor).        I will emphasis that this essay is not to be considered an ethnographic sweep of all women , and I go don’t want to come across as deliberately leaving out vast amounts of the fem