Film Show 036: Ruth Beckermann
An interview with the Viennese filmmaker about making films with Trotskyists, taking inspiration from Chinese art, and her new award-winning feature 'Mutzenbacher'
Ruth Beckermann
Ruth Beckermann (b. 1952) is an Austrian filmmaker who has spent over 45 years creating documentaries and essay films that touch on history, memory, poetry, and labor. Her career began in the 1970s when she worked as part of an independent video collective, documenting an autonomous culture center in Vienna while the city called for its demolition to make space for a textile conglomerate. The result was Arena Squatted (1977). She later made Return to Vienna (1983), a harrowing documentary that features a longform interview with the Austrian artist Franz West, showing the rise in fascism and antisemitism within the country. Beckermann’s parents are Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and The Paper Bridge (1987) finds her tracing their migratory paths before World War II. Other films include East of War (1996), where Beckermann talks with dozens of former Nazi soldiers; American Passages (2011), a wide-ranging look at America during the Obama administration; and The Dreamed Ones (2016), a film centered around the correspondence between poets Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan.
Beckermann’s newest film, Mutzenbacher, saw the filmmaker announcing a casting call that led to 100 men between 16 and 99 years old reading text from the controversial 1906 Austrian novel Josephine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore. The film won the award for Best Film in the Encounters section of last year’s Berlinale. Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with Beckermann on March 5th, 2022 via Zoom in light of Mutzenbacher’s premiere. The two discussed her life as a militant leftist, numerous films throughout her decades-long career, and the process behind making approaching her latest feature film.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I’m interested to learn about your early memories of growing up in Vienna.
Ruth Beckermann: With regards to Mutzenbacher (2022)? Or just in general?
Just in general.
Grey city, former Nazis, want to leave, my family thinking of leaving. On the other hand, happy memories like all children have. A time when people were less clean, less shaved, things I wouldn’t appreciate today, but when I think back to my childhood, there was some sensuality there. You went in packed buses or trains, and in summer people were just… everything was quite… at least as a child, I had the feeling that everything was very sensual in a way. People, life. Maybe that’s how children feel. Nature, everything was much different than today, in a way. But of course, today I’m not a child anymore. And of course, there were many taboos. Not like today. I mean, nobody talked about child abuse or rape or whatever. I mean, all this happened, but nobody talked about it so I didn’t know about it. Of course, there was no internet so we didn’t have easy access to information about sex, or other things. Books were still very important. And this book [1906’s Josephine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself] was prohibited until the year 1969. In my childhood and young adulthood, we just searched for information and we found this book.
With regards to your childhood and that sensuality, was there a particular thing that comes to mind? Don’t feel that you need to bring it back to Mutzenbacher, as I’m really curious about your entire filmography.
Did you see all of my films?
I’ve seen about eight of them.
Oh, really? What’s your name, by the way? They didn’t tell me.
Joshua.
Joshua, hello. I was born into a Jewish family. That made a difference, of course. My mother never wanted to stay in Vienna. She had been in Palestine during the war. But my father wanted to stay. I always wanted to leave. This was very important in my childhood, this lack of permanence, being in transition, not belonging. Children want to belong, so I suffered from it, in school, and later on. Today, I think this was an advantage because it gave me the opportunity to look at society from a different perspective, as strangers or outsiders always do. And today, I don’t think that belonging is such an important thing in life.
Why do you say that?
I mean, belonging to one country is not that important. Of course, I’m Viennese, and Vienna is my city, the only city I know with all its nuances and sounds. That’s very important for me. But I’m against every nationalism. Belonging to Austria is okay, belonging to Europe is okay, but I’m a human being, I’m a citizen of the world. That’s my feeling today. And it gives me a chance as a filmmaker to look at so many things. I try to look at every subject I’m interested in with an open mind and without too much judgment. We always judge, we cannot avoid judging, but I try not to let my pre-jealousies enter my work too much. As a documentary filmmaker, I think it’s much more interesting to present things and give the spectators the opportunity to discuss them and make up their own minds. I don’t want to tell them, “I think this is this and that is that.” I just present it in a way I think is appropriate and open-minded.
Is it important for you that your intent comes through at all?
Sure, sure. I mean, I wouldn’t like a film to be completely misinterpreted. That can happen because films are watched in different countries in different circumstances. You have to let your child go. But, of course, every author brings in his subjectivity, and my films are very subjective. I don’t know if you’ve seen East of War (1997). I talk to this man, I don’t discuss with him. But still, I hope that it’s clear for the audience that I wouldn’t agree with the crimes of the war on the Eastern Front. So of course, many of my films have an off-text, even. I speak in the first person. “I,” “me.” But I try not to be too manipulative with the people I talk to in my films.
You were in journalism and you were also an editor. In your films, you’re documenting these people in these time periods, and using archival footage. Do you think about your filmmaking through the lens of journalism?
I cannot compare filmmaking to print journalism, I can compare it to TV journalism. I want to make a big difference in making films for cinema, even if they are shown on TV later. With TV journalism, TV documentaries, I think one of the main differences is the judgment in the form. In TV documentaries, they usually use everything, every material they can get. They do interviews, they use archival footage, they do some shooting, and so on. It’s a mixture of everything around the subject. In filmmaking, you have to decide on what you want to focus on, and leave out everything else.
If I decided to make a film like East of War, and I wanted to focus on the memories of the man who came to this exhibition, I decided not to insert the photographs of the crimes which were hanging on the walls, because this would have shifted the focus completely into juxtaposing facts and memories, if we consider the photographs as facts. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to focus on memory and on the different memories, to juxtapose memories, and not photographs and memories. So you have to do all this thinking and reflecting to find the right form for your film. It’s the same with Mutzenbacher. I used the texts as triggers for the fantasies and memories of those men. So the form of a movie for the cinema, or of a movie in general is much more important. It’s also a longer time for reflection. Journalism is something that has to be done much faster, usually. It’s different. Unfortunately, it’s different. I wouldn’t call any of my films a piece of journalism.
Given the different fields you’ve worked in, what initially prompted you to get into filmmaking?
I started to make films at the end of the 1970s. At the time, we were working on 16mm and film was the most advanced media. I was quite a militant leftist and I wanted to convince people, so we made some short films about a strike. It was a time when you had only the very official media and not much opposition in magazines, in other channels, or whatever. It was important for ourselves as opponents of the general politics in Austria to also document from our side. That was also the reason why I went to the streets during the Waldheim Affair, with my camera, not to make a film, but just to document. Because Austrian TV didn’t show our side, the side of the people who were against Waldheim. This was the reason when I first started. It was only later that I would consider myself an author, a filmmaker. In the beginning, it was more like leaflets or militant films, partisan films.
Were your parents also militant leftists? Do you feel like you got some of your political urgency from them?
No, not at all.
Was there anything that really brought you to this point of militant leftism? Were you radicalized by anything in particular?
No, I think it was the need to belong, in a way. There was so much not belonging to Austria, that this group of people who were Trotskyists gave me the opportunity to become friends with them, to share ideas, to try to change our country, or the world. Revolution! It was a mixture of getting out of that feeling of being alone and wanting to share ideas with other people.
Is there a person that you connected with deeply during this time? That you feel had an important impact on your life?
Not really. It’s not that clear. Of course, it was literature, we read a lot of philosophers. It was the time when Sartre and Beauvoir and Camus and all those people were still active. Enzensberger and Habermas and Adorno. It was the time when pocket books came out, and you read a lot of these people from the Frankfurt School, and Foucault, and so on. This was very important: to read and to share what you read with other people, with friends.
At what point do you feel like you became an author? Was that with The Paper Bridge (1987)?
Already with Return to Vienna (1983), it had started. Return to Vienna and then The Paper Bridge. Because Return to Vienna I made with a colleague, together, and then from The Paper Bridge on I did my own films. I was alone. The Paper Bridge, of course, is very much a film d’auteur, in my opinion, and a very personal film.
I wanted to ask you about The Paper Bridge. You mentioned this feeling of belonging, and in that film you’re tracing the origins of your parents’ lives and also your own life. Looking back on that, what do you feel is the most important thing you gained from having made that film?
Sometimes I call this film my proper psychoanalysis. It took me three or four years to make it, not only because I was looking for money, but because it was so difficult for me to come out of the closet. Because, until the Waldheim Affair in 1986, being Jewish was quite a taboo. We didn’t talk very much in public about that. With this film, I had decided to talk about it and it was not so easy to overcome inhibitions to overcome fear—fear of filming your own parents, of showing them in public, and so on. That was very important for me, this time when I worked on this film.
What was the response like at the time when the film came out?
Well, the film came out at the moment when the Waldheim Affair took place. Which, of course, was completely unexpected when I started to make the film. But it helped the film, because all of a sudden the subject was in the open. Everybody was talking about Jews in Austria, and not only in Austria, but in the Western world. I toured the US with this film for a long time. All of a sudden, this film was very successful (laughter). And that’s happened many times. My Waldheim film [The Waldheim Waltz (2018)] came out when Trump was president. All of a sudden, it was quite timely. But you can never know when you make a film what happens when it’s finished.
Earlier you mentioned that with films you need to think about what sorts of things you don’t want to include. The Paper Bridge is such a personal film. Were you already, at that point, thinking of what you didn’t want to include?
I already had the idea with Return to Vienna. I always wanted, from the beginning, to make films with as few images as possible. The Paper Bridge has very long scenes. I had a whole list of scenes I wanted to find, like this carriage in the fog. That was on my wish list, and then it happened. For The Paper Bridge, I wanted to show this landscape of memory in winter, in a way that one could project memories on it, or fantasies of memories. I didn’t think that much of what I didn’t want to do. With this film, I really thought a lot about the frames, the traveling, and the way to shoot it, and so on. That was very important. I worked with Nurith Aviv, a very good camera person, for the first time on this film. It was very important for me then.
She lived in Paris and came to Vienna to discuss the project. There was an exhibition of Chinese drawings. I don’t know what you call them, but there were scrolls. They were stretched out very long in this exhibition, and contrary to Western paintings, there was no center. It was not conceived in a way that all the perspectives lead you to the most important moment, Jesus Christ in the middle or whatever. Everything had the same importance. There are all these people, then all of a sudden there’s the carriage with the Emperor, but it was not highlighted. We went to this exhibition, and I explained to her that I want my films to be like that, where it’s not just drawing all the attention to one highlight or action. I wanted to make it more equal, or to give it a different rhythm. It gives people more time and space to look at different places in the scenes, with less guidance, if you understand what I mean.
This makes sense because your films have a way of focusing on specific people or space, and allowing that to refract and become something much bigger. It’s never just about the subject you’re shooting. We’ve talked about The Paper Bridge and East of War. Is there another landmark film that was important in developing your approach to filmmaking?
I think The Dreamed Ones (2016) is a very important film for me.
That was an exciting film for me because of how different it was from your other work. Do you mind talking about what that film meant to you?
Well, those two poets [Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan] mean a lot to me. Their correspondence moved me deeply. Only years later I thought of making a film out of it. I thought for a long time, how could I make a film out of this, and not a conventional piece or a historical fiction film? I came up with this idea to shoot it in one studio with two young people whom I told not to play the two poets, but to read those letters as if for a radio piece. I really wanted them not to identify completely with the characters, but to always keep a distance, or try to keep a distance. This is not easy, because sometimes the letters are very emotional.
It was my first time working with actors. It was very exciting and challenging, and I must say, I’m very happy with this film. I think we really succeeded in transforming a piece of literature into film in a nonconventional way, in a way that is appropriate to these letters. And to show, at the same time, how young people today respond and react to these letters. That’s always so important for me. Also in Mutzenbacher, the important thing is to show the disparity between the moment when the book was written and the man who reads it today. This time in between is important.
I do admire that about your films, how history isn’t some fixed thing with a single viewpoint, but something that is always evolving over time.
We always make films about our time, and not about the historical time. We can only show our gaze or perspective on that time, which says much more about our time than when the book was written.
Do you ever feel like it’s unfortunate that you can’t truly capture a previous period in time?
No. You mean that we cannot beam ourselves in another time? That would be interesting. Beaming myself into another time for one day or two would be nice (laughter). But it’s not possible yet.
With Mutzenbacher, when did you first learn about the book? How old were you?
Young, quite young.
Do you remember how you felt?
Excited. Everybody was very excited about that book. As a kid or a young person, what is more exciting than sex?
For me, one of the exciting things about watching the film is how, when people read a text out loud, it becomes a very revealing process. Did you know, when you first started approaching this film, that you wanted people to say these texts out loud?
It came much later. I usually work like that. When I’m interested in a subject, I do a lot of research. I read books about the time, I talked to historians, I talked to prostitutes in this case, and so on. And only when I have the feeling that I know a lot—I read Foucault again, I read Freud again—do I ask myself, “What kind of film could this be?” Then I focus on the form for the film. So in this case, only after almost a year of research and thinking, I had this idea to do a casting call, and only for men. Even then I didn’t know if this would be the whole film, or only part of the film. But after two days of shooting, it was quite clear that this was good, this was the right way to do it, and we didn’t need more than that.
I was pretty amazed by the sort of stories they were telling. It reminds me of doing interviews, how there’s a certain atmosphere that comes when talking to someone and I don’t know if we’ll ever talk again. A lot of artists end up sharing and divulging things that they might never have in a regular conversation, even among friends. In the film, we have these men sharing these stories about sex that I’m sure they probably wouldn’t share in ordinary circumstances.
We don’t know. Yeah, I think it’s something you cannot really learn, but which improves with experience. You have a certain aura as an interviewer, or as a filmmaker, that makes people feel comfortable. I think part of it is being honest. You give them an authentic feeling that you don’t want to cheat them, that you don’t want to expose them just for the fun of exposing them. I think that’s very important and people feel that. And of course, you have also to be quite fast in communicating with a stranger. I didn’t know the people at all, I didn’t talk to them beforehand. They were in a waiting area, and they just came in. So I met them in front of the camera. I wanted to do it like that. That was the challenge for me. I never talk with people before the camera is on because I think you lose a lot of spontaneity. I don’t want people to repeat anything they have said before. So you have to be very concentrated on this person and just forget the world and concentrate—then something can happen between you and the other person.
How do you feel like your understanding of the book has changed after having gone through this process?
I’m not so interested in the book anymore (laughter). I did it, you know? I read this book so many times. It took a long time to pick out these passages. So I’m done (laughter).
Were there particular men in your life who opened your eyes to the way men behave?
Not specific men. All men. Every man makes you understand something. It always depends how close you observe people. For me, it’s interesting to observe other people, how they act. You can also learn from people who are different from yourself. For instance, how men behave, or how men handle relationships. I don’t want to judge that, if that’s good or bad. Sometimes I really observe someone, even my own son, and I think, “Good. So different, so good.” Or sometimes I hate it. But you can pick for yourself. I’m very much against generalizing, I would never say all men are this or that. Of course, men have more power in the world today. That’s obvious, that’s a banality. I’m very much for fighting for equality for women, and equal pay, especially. But I’m interested in many people, not only men, but men do many things quite differently. Even in the film, how they come and sit on a couch like that. “I’m here!” There are so many small things that are cute or interesting, or you can copy.
You’ve been a professor, you’ve taught at universities. What sort of things do you want your students to take away from your classes?
To be open-minded, to not judge easily. Sometimes it’s very important to be militant and to fight for something, for the rights of a minority group. But I think one should also always stay human and not too easily become enemies with others, and accept that there are people who think differently, or who are different. Even if you’re a small minority, or part of the LGBTQIA+ or Black Lives Matter, to not go too much into extremes and fight against each other, but to build up solidarity between the different groups. There are so many small groups that fight against each other. This was also the case in the 1970s, when all these small leftist groups were fighting more against each other than against capitalism. For me, that’s a problem. If I want to give something to other people, it’s to listen to others. Have your opinion, of course, and discuss it and debate it, but try not to become enemies. Build up solidarity.
What does your average day look like?
Talking to Joshua (laughter). No, I am working. I’m working. I’m working and having fun, like everybody.
Are you able to share about future films that you’re working on?
Yeah, I’m working on a film about a school class with small kids, like nine-year-olds, in a neighborhood in Vienna. It’s the biggest school and there’s not one kid who has two parents who speak German properly. These kids come from all over, from different nationalities and languages and they struggle very much. They have a good teacher, who herself comes from a Turkish family. I’m observing these kids. That’s my project at the moment.
Sounds lovely. I’m a high school teacher myself.
What do you teach?
Science. Biology and chemistry.
Wow. I was very bad in those (laughter).
I think one of my goals as a science teacher is to have everyone understand that they can do science. Schooling in America is structured in a way where a lot of my students come in thinking that they can’t do science, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m trying to break my students away from that sort of thinking because it feels so destructive.
It’s horrible. I hate the school system.
I had a couple more questions.
It’s five o’clock in the morning for you?
Yes.
Oh, god (laughter),
Speaking to you as someone who has made so many films across so many decades, do you feel content and satisfied with what you’ve done so far?
Yeah, I mean, I’m not someone who looks back a lot. I’m always interested in the next project. But I think I made some good, important things. I’m still alive, still healthy, I’m up for more!
Do you feel like you’ll be making films until you die?
I would like to write a little bit more, but I cannot do both at the same time. I would have to decide not to make films to start writing. I’m not sure if I’m ready for that. Maybe one day, but it’s very lonesome to write. When you make films, there are some lonely periods when you write your treatment. But then again, you work with people, you’re not sitting at home all the time. Writing is great, I think, but very difficult.
Are there specific things that you want to write?
I don’t know, maybe it’s just the idea of writing that I like.
What about the idea of writing is exciting for you?
Well, it’s the opposite of filmmaking. In filmmaking, you have to struggle against the world to get what you want. When you write, you can invent, and the whole world is lying at your feet. You can jump from one country to another in one sentence. You cannot do that in film. That’s the exciting thing about writing for me.
There’s one question I always ask everyone I interview. Do you mind sharing one thing that you love about yourself?
(laughs). I don’t know, my laughter. My irony.
More information about Ruth Beckermann’s films can be found at her website.
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