MAREN ADE'S FILMS explore the play between humor, irony, and sentimentality, in order to unsettle viewers’ expectations regarding cinematic social relations and interactions. The role of humor in Ade's films cannot be neatly mapped to either irony or sentimentality, nor can one speak of clearly masculine or feminine uses of humor. Far from being binary opposites, irony and sentimentality flow into one another in Ade's films, dynamically defining each other in complex ways that are dependent on multiple factors, including the gendered positionality of the characters in relationship to their social class, ethnicity, and age. Depending on such factors, as well as on the potential offered at specific moments for individuals to assert agency, humor and sentiment can serve either to break down gendered hierarchical boundaries between individuals and deterritorialize gendered spaces or to reinforce boundaries. Ade's films are in part an exploration of how and why such processes occur, as well as aesthetic experiments in creating the very moments that enable human agency to transgress identity categories. Her cinematic aesthetic undermines the use of humor as a device to avoid deep exploration of characters’ complex relationships to their own past and present gendered positionalities; through careful contextualization of characters as individuals with histories, Ade's mise-en-scène and long takes invite viewers’ lingering, thoughtful, and thus “tender” gaze on the gendered bodies on screen.

Ade explores the potential of humor and affect for either disrupting or reinscribing gendered hierarchies of power in a neoliberal economy in which identity and consumption have become coterminous and in which gendered hierarchies are far from being leveled. Both Alle Anderen (Everyone Else, 2009) and Toni Erdmann (2016) reveal an asymmetry in the use and effect of humor and sentiment between men and women; at the same time, these films attempt to break viewers’ asymmetrical relationship to masculine and feminine performances of humor and sentimentality. Ade uses cinematic techniques that can be productively analyzed in terms of the concept of the tender gaze elaborated in this volume, for example the use of ambient sound and diegetic music rather than bombastic soundtracks, lingering camera gazes that zoom in and out of closeup to explore characters within the context of their environments, as well as long silences and awkward dialogues.