ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Monika Treut's own work in light of the dual visions afforded by this event: a prospective and retrospective account of where things stand. Given the predictable, somewhat adolescent savvy of much recent German filmmaking—which seems to alternate between weak imitations and pompous dismissals of Hollywood—Treut's films head off in unfamiliar directions. Treut's films are often bound up with questions of gender, but they would appear to internationalize, or perhaps denationalize those questions. In Virgin Machine, Germany figures in its absence-bound to an anachronistic heterosexuality that is comically inflected as personally and sexually untenable. In the face of this diverse group of films, whether it makes sense to describe Monika Treut's work in terms of a deterritorialization of German cinema-an oeuvre that implicitly formulates a critique of the very conditions that would enable a national cinema.
