Diva Time, Diva Space: Fassbinder and Veronika Voss

This article explores the aesthetics and ethics of the diva by offering a comparative analysis of Fassbinder’s penultimate film, Veronika Voss (1982), and the filmmaker’s self-presentation as a diva. Veronika Voss offers a unique mode of engagement with the past in the form of its central female figure, the outsized Nazi-era actress Voss. Voss is not only, like Fassbinder, a drug addict; she is also unlike the divas who came before her in Fassbinder’s films, for she is not rendered a fetish. Fassbinder’s film presents a cinescape of “diva time and space.” Diva time evokes a nonlinear, expansive temporality of queer longing that eschews restorative nostalgia, blending past and present in a manner that complicates Manichean notions of victimhood and capitalist exploitation. And diva space is likewise expansive, as the diva spreads out and multiplies, engulfing space in a manner that is both narcissistic and generous.