Views, Reviews and Interviews: A Passage through Ruth Beckermann‘s Documentary Work

What can be conveyed by a face, can never be wholly captured by photography. In the person who studies it, it always leaves behind an inexplicable residue, something insoluble, the basis of which is the unbridgeable gap that opens up between the recording of the image and its recurrence: no image can be so clear that nothing of its mystery remains, because it comes from a distance, even if it was produced only yesterday, and reaches us from another time and another place. An image, whether it is fixed as a photograph, a motion picture or as a video shot, is a memory, a trace, not a piece of evidence. The truth which it contains cannot be decoded once and for all, the knowledge which it communicates is based on presumptions, presentiments. The image does not give one certainty: it makes one think and dream, but not understand.

In 1998, while visiting the exhibition about the crimes of the Wehrmacht, Ruth Beckermann discovered a photograph of an anonymous young woman, a Polish Jewess who, gathered in the open with hundreds of other citizens of her town, is waiting to be executed by the Nazis in Lubny on 16th October 1941. Writing about this photograph, Beckermann noted the following: “The young woman looks into the camera. Her body is half averted, but she turns her head towards the camera. Her lips are shut tight, her right eyebrow is raised almost to the height of the carefully crimped strands of hair which peep out from under her headscarf. A look from out the corner of her eyes. A look of the deepest scorn. (…) She is wearing a coat of speckled fur – ocelot? woven fur? – conspicuous in the midst of all the dark materials in which the other people around her are clothed. Does her coat belong to her (it seems to fit), or to her mother, her aunt, her grandmother? She looks elegant. ‘From a good family’. And very alone. The sky is white. There is nothing to tell us if the weather in Lubny in October 1941 was mild or severe. (…) What would one think if this photo stood alone, detached from the context of the exhibition? A crowd of people outdoors. Homeless people after an earthquake or a fire? Yet there is this look in the eyes of the young woman. It is not the way one looks after a natural catastrophe. It is the way one gazes at an enemy.”

The gaze covers everything that happens in cinema (and in visual art): who looks at whom (and how that happens), what one should look at and what one should look away from are among the most decisive questions in cinema. In her films, texts and installations, the documentary artist Ruth Beckermann intensively investigates the questions of look and face, the complex context of seeing and showing, of reception and representation. europamemoria is a project which addresses these questions; it focuses on 25 European citizens who at the start of the 21st century live somewhere or other in Europe, a place which was once foreign to them: stories of voluntary and involuntary migration, of politics, work and love, of family, identity and home, of liberating and frightening border crossings and of phases of assimilation – stories of violence (colonialism, Communism, the War in the Balkans and the Holocaust), contrast with stories of solidarity and courage. europamemoria gathers the (remembered) images of people who are remembering: in it the look back is redoubled. Memory has been the driving force behind Ruth Beckermann’s artistic work from the early 1980s onwards, in two respects: as the film-maker’s own memories (of her own family history, her own environment) and as the memories of those whom she portrays.

“A hearing” is how Beckermann describes her fourth large-scale documentary work ‘East of War’, which she completed in 1996 (and which, from a formal point of view, as a polyphonic reminiscence, already clearly prefigured the reductionism of europamemoria): ‘East of War’ records a series of interviews and debates which were held in an exhibition space, in images that have been left deliberately raw and ‘artless’. The space in which the film is trapped, in which it seems to be caught, is – quite evidently – a place of memory, an ‘abstract’, stage-designed space, a kind of corridor that leads back into the past: the stardling exhibition on the crimes of the Wehrmacht, which was first shown in Vienna in autumn 1995, forms the background (and the occasion) for the film. ‘East of War’ presents conversations and monologues, opinions (and differences of opinion) on the ‘morality’ of the Wehrmacht and on the legitimacy of military obedience. The film presents the thoughts of people who were involved: first-hand memories. A series of old men, former combatants, who were visiting the exhibition in Vienna, give information about their (very varied) positions regarding the question of how many and which crimes Hitler’s Wehrmacht was guilty of committing. In almost all cases, the soldiers of those times, marked by the war, are hardened and embittered by the experiences it has forced upon them; the war has left its mark upon the bodies, upon the faces of these witnesses who defend themselves or get excited or simply relate their stories here in front of the camera. The film-maker herself hardly intervenes in the process at all, asks only a few questions and then very neutral ones (“Where were you?”, “What did you see?” “Why did you come here?”), taking the offensive in exploiting the unplanned, the unplannable: she triggers conversations and confessions, but she dispenses with guiding these in one particular direction or even with commenting on them. The simplicity of the form guarantees, both in ‘East of War’ and later in europamemoria, the interviewees’ freedom. Here the idea is not so much to obtain confessions as to evoke memories – even if they are only memories of repression.

The mystery of the story behind the (unknown) face has preoccupied Ruth Beckermann for years. What does one believe one sees in a face that one does not know? Is everything that one seems to ascertain there simply a chimera? Although the film essay ‘A Fleeting Passage to the Orient’ (1999) actually deals with the travels of the Austrian Empress Elisabeth, known as ‘Sisi’, to Cairo, the fundamental questions of europamemoria arise there too: What can the image of a face show? Can one trust pictures? Are experiences also recorded on one’s external appearance? Are all the associations which are communicated by the sight of an unknown simply projection? A photograph of the popular Empress which Beckermann presents right at the beginning of the film sets it off in this direction: it testifies to the Sovereign’s will to retain control of her own image, to manipulate and maintain the (youthful) image which the public had of her.

The film-maker decided to trace Sisi’s travels to the Orient, even though the results were uncertain. With great openness, she embarks on a journey, with the risk of perhaps discovering nothing at all: no clues to the real figure behind the fairytale princess, no answers to the question of how one deals with foreign countries as a privileged traveller. ‘A Fleeting Passage to the Orient’ is a film that is fragile, dreamy and free of any set ideas, and in the end it is only the images that remain tangible, providing a kind of final security. As the first-person narrator, the film-maker thinks about images: forbidden, official, falsified and ‘genuine’, incidentally including in her reflections the problem of the tourist’s view of things, which not even she can escape. Ruth Beckermann’s Orient film intersperses its questioning of the limits of what can be represented using cinematic means – a question also very evidently asked by europamemoria – with the great pleasure it takes in ornament and decoration. In this way, it represents a fascinating and, to a certain extent, ‘oriental’ counter-image to the much simpler and stricter presentation of the exhibition.

The question of Jewish identity, with which Ruth Beckermann’s cinematic and journalistic work has been inextricably connected for twenty years, does not play a dominant role in europamemoria; it only forms part of the intricate stories of migration in the twentieth century. In contrast, the first three of the six full-length films that Beckermann has made to date constitute a trilogy of Jewish identity and deal exclusively with this question. Stylistically very different, they survey the wide field, opened up by the studies of the history of the Jewish people between the fin de siècle and the present. ‘Return to Vienna – Franz West (Weintraub) 1924–1934’ which was made by Ruth Beckermann and Josef Aichholzer in 1983, recapitulates the story of a Jewish communist who experienced the rise of National Socialism in Vienna. A long interview with Weintraub, who in the course of his emigration changed his surname to West “for safety reasons”, as he says, forms the centre of the film, which illustrates its hero’s narrative with archive material of old Vienna.

From the sober, stylistically already astonishingly self-assured, yet thoroughly conventional documentary work of this debut, the film-maker then moved on, setting her sights on an essayistic project concerned with the question of Jewish history in Central and Eastern Europe, which shifted the focus of attention from the individual to the greater whole and established a connection between the private and the public, the political: ‘Paper Bridge’ (1987) takes Vienna as its starting point, in order to embark on a winter journey, a journey to the East, to Romania, to Bucovina. Here, Ruth Beckermann traces the roots of her family’s culture and, more generally, those of Jewish culture in Europe, and in doing so creates a net of varied reflections: in the poeticised voice-over she places her own thoughts next to those of the people whom she meets on her journey, and beside those of her friends and parents. In this way, various layers of memory coalesce: in the text, to which she adds the travel images, the film-maker transforms these into thoughts and in the movement allows them to become fixed as memories. “Like photographs”, says the author at one point from off, “like photographs, that is what they seem like to me, the last Jews from Radautz, high up in the north of Romania”. And a little later: “It is good not to have any images from some places. In that way they are retained in memory.”

In the last part of this film, which for a long period moves through landscapes that are misty and cold, yet still strangely inviting, the story returns to Vienna, to an essentially more uneasy place, where the quiet work of remembering suddenly evaporates in the face of political urgency. The public agitation about the repressed NS past of the Federal Presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim gives ‘Paper Bridge’ an extra twist towards the end: the film changes, if only for a few minutes, from a search for traces that seem to lead to another distant time, into something very contemporary, into a piece of agitprop, for topical reasons; Ruth Beckermann becomes similarly resolute in her dramaturgy fourteen years later in her film ‘homemad(e)’ (2001), where she reacts to a political topicality: the shift to the right in Austria caused by the FPÖ’s participation in the government in February 2000. For this film-maker it is evidently not a matter of designing her cinematic work ‘uniformly’, without any breaks: when it is a matter of protesting against unacceptable political events, of recording and documenting one’s own indignation, then she is at all times ready to break her planned dramaturgy in favour of dramatic shots.

Of the films of the trilogy, the last one, ‘Towards Jerusalem’ (1990), is probably the most direct; it is more impressionistic and less reflective than the two previous works, allowing distinctly more scope for chance, for the unplanned than ‘Paper Bridge’. The fact that it is once again a travel film is already made clear by the title: Beckermann makes a journey from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, observing the landscape and the people, reflecting the moods of modern Israel, which is no longer able live up to its traditional mythic promises. The land which ‘Towards Jerusalem’ presents is indeed one of great vitality, yet it has also been Americanised far beyond the limits of kitsch, and furthermore is characterised by bitter poverty. The film-maker lets herself drift and is not determined to have her prejudices confirmed, she decides to simply look around and listen out, regardless of what might happen: Ruth Beckermann’s open eyes are a sign of her love for the world. Most of Beckermann’s films can be described as road movies. One signature of her work is the quiet journey through distant landscapes or cities, the patient view from moving trains or cars. The elegiac travellings, which appear time and again in these narrations, has been artistcally defined with cinematographer Nurith Aviv, the film-maker’s closest collaborator. These films owe a lot to her eye for landscape and gentle movement. Her trilogy, says Ruth Beckermann herself: “is travelling, being on the road, formal principle and content at one and the same time”. Ever since then, the principle of the journey has remained in her work, up to and including europamemoria, an undertaking which relies on 25 people dispersed all over Europe – and which assumes of the viewers that they are ready to enter into distant thoughts and foreign views of the world without prejudice. However, it can sometimes also be a journey to research what is one’s own or what is nearest to one. In ‘homemad(e)’, the film-maker strolls with her video camera through Vienna’s Marc-Aurel-Straße, through its bars and little shops, making a reconnaissance trip through the street in which she lives.

The question of ‘home’, of that place where one is ‘at home’ – a question which is not easy to answer – runs through ‘homemad(e)’ just as it also characterises europamemoria. Even in the microcosm of Marc-Aurel-Straße, the border between being and scene-setting is a thin one: “The whole of life is play-acting”, someone in this film says in passing, and nowhere is this sentence more appropriate than in Vienna. What is new in ‘homemad(e)’ is that, for the first time, the film-maker asks and observes almost exclusively people that she knows, calling them by their first names, like friends. A poetess, a photographer, a film director get to speak, also journalists, passers-by, waiters; Ruth Beckermann takes her cinema personally, she is herself part of the world which she presents. The everyday gossip and coffee-house conversations usually lead from private matters to political topics and back again, but they also evoke memories. The philosopher Franz Schuh, in his interview with Beckermann, calls the street a village in the middle of the city which makes urban life bearable at all. “To live in the city”, says Schuh in ‘homemad(e)’, “means being constantly associative, having to permanently divest oneself. (…) In order to be able to stand that, people create villages in all the cities of the world. And someone with bad luck does not belong to any of the villages in a city.”

To reproduce at least fragments, pieces of what can lightly (and mistakenly) be called reality, is one of the most pressing tasks of the documentary film. Then again, what is ‘real’? europamemoria gets to the heart of the ambivalence of the documentary: it seems as if there is nothing ‘more real’ than people who tell stories about themselves: in the end, no one knows more about oneself than oneself. In europamemoria, perhaps for reasons of humility in the face of the significance of the subject and the openness of the narrators, the actual ‘cinematic’ element is consciously reduced (though nonetheless absolutely present: questions of editing and composition, questions of spatial and temporal order form the basis of the mise-en-scène of the europamemoria installation). Even the apparently simple portrait form which Ruth Beckermann has chosen (and which, incidentally, is balanced exactly on the interface between portrait and self-portrait), is found, upon closer examination, to contain a series of irritations and imponderabilities. It is not only the exactitude of the (clouded and transfigured) memory that can be doubted, but also the ‘truth’ of what is said (and sometimes said without thinking) here; basically, what the people in europamemoria do is connected with the concept of the presentation – in a threefold way: the people introduce themselves in short films, they present themselves, but in doing so they also ‘play’ themselves, they present their own biography, in front of and for the camera – and while they are remembering they imagine themselves in other times, other places. As one moves through europamemoria, one sees a series of creative acts: self-representation and self-presentation. Most of the narrators, who form the focal point of this exhibition, are educated, live in a middle-class way, are rhetorically adept and, as far as Europe’s emigration history is concerned, constitute a cross-section that is anything but representative. Yet that is not what Ruth Beckermann is concerned about here. Her work remains, as far as possible, concerned with the individual, and hardly ever rises to the level of fundamental principles. europamemoria, too, revolves around the idea of the individual narrative, rather than that of a ‘grand’ historical or stipulated narrative. In the difference between what relates to the personal (the ‘unofficial’) and what relates to world politics (the ‘official’) something becomes visible – that is what Beckermann relies upon, that is what her project is based upon.

One can see that with the artistic undertaking of europamemoria Ruth Beckermann has taken her film work, and her thinking about it, a step further. Yet the transition to the museum space does not signify a break and a new beginning; the setting and the technology may have changed, but the film-maker’s ideas, subjects and interests have not. Even the analysis of divergent ways of speaking and narrating has long been present in Beckermann’s work, at the latest since ‘East of War’. Nonetheless, in europamemoria, this sujet becomes the main subject. The variety of the narratives is striking: not only do the individual contributions to the exhibition display great variety in language and timbre, they also confront the viewer with completely contradictory forms of self-design and self-presentation – the work of remembering here proceeds falteringly and smoothly, melodically and monotonously, yearningly and detached, in tears and without any external show of emotion; it is sometimes done in such a lively way that there is a danger of it bursting the bounds of the frame, or of the person portrayed being lost to view the gaze of; in other cases the narrators are almost petrified, as if paralysed by the presence of the camera and the situation of the interview. Common to them all is only the context: the ‘pure’ image, without a subtitle, reduced to a close-up, a face which almost completely covers the room behind it. What lies behind the faces remains – literally – boundless. Alternatively, once again in the words of Ruth Beckermann, from the diary which she kept while shooting ‘East of War’: “Faces speak, faces deceive."