At first sight, the Ruth Beckermann's two most recent films seem radically different. The first, taking place within a limited space, represents a sort of Austrian cinéma-vérité. East of the war (Jenseits des Krieges) is a chronicle filmed during an exhibition that detailed crimes by the regular German army (the Wehrmacht) using a form of intelligent questioning based on a confessional-like filming approach. Using home video becomes in this case a productive technical constraint. It gives a distance to the intimate which works well in this inventory of a generation whose repressed acts have made their impact felt in current political culture. The other work is sumptuously filmed in 35mm accompanied by a complex sound construction. A fleeting passage to the Orient (Ein flüchtiger Zug nach dem Orient) is an essay on the theme of travelling, on the search for images and points of view captured in the eyes of others, on the spirit of curiosity which is the starting point for a trip to Egypt covering the ground which, towards the end of the 19th century, made the Empress Elizabeth of Austria - later dubbed by the kitsch industry as Sissi - a pioneer of modernity.

On looking a little closer, the same style, the same "camera-pen" as Astruc would say in his description of avant garde cinema, is recognizable in each of Ruth Beckermann's films. In different ways, the director and essayist has always dealt with the question of the heterogeneous, the nomad in our culture and she has, right from the beginning, used a highly personal language. Whether it be as an interlocutor, both sensitive and provocative, in her first feature-length film, a portrait of a Jewish and Communist Viennese whose life touches on the catastrophes and contradictions of the past century (Return to Vienna, made in collaboration with Josef Aichholzer), or as the narrator of her second film (The Paper Bridge, Die papierene Brücke). Here, she gives to her first person narration the form of a soliloquy - interrupted by the encounters of the film - read as a voice over searching for the traces of the absent or survivors. The film is constructed like a mozaic - it does not aim to establish a one dimensional identity, but to transcribe in film a feeling of non-belonging. She drives through the Vienna where she grew up, looking through a veil that allows her to discover the city in a fresh light. For example those places where her grandmother ran, hiding from the Nazis in her own town. She drives along the roads of Romania, when it was still communist, looking for vestiges of the Jewish culture of Boukovine dating from the period when the region was Austrian. She crosses Yugoslavia, when the country still existed, just as a fiction film on the Theresienstadt concentration camp is being shot, and she interviews a Viennese writer friend hired as an extra in this American film whose role was to play a "typical" victim. The shooting of this film took place precisely as the future Federal President Kurt Waldheim was campaigning across the country, covering the same ground as Beckermann through Vienna and as the public debate between citizens and politicians was reaching a climax in a sort of late and begrudging examination of the past. Retrospectively, it can be noted that the director had already drawn a lucid portrait of the Austrian syndrome that she revealed with so much subtlety in her recent film around the "astonished" visitors at the exhibition on the German army. As a documentarist, Ruth Beckermann has an extraordinary gift for making the past present, for catching the significant moments of her country's political culture.

"Often, leaving is the very goal of a journey" as someone says in The Paper Bridge. The following film Nach Jerusalem (Towards Jerusalem) translates this idea in the very structure of the film. It is a film born on the road along the road, more precisely, which leads from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and along which can be read History, the stories and the strata of this country, Israel, which is both very young and very old. Through chance encounters, among emblematic names and places, archeological digs and construction sites, Towards Jerusalem lays bare the different phases and contradictions of a project which has considerably evolved over fifty years.

The collaboration between Ruth Beckermann and Nurith Aviv over three films shows how much the creative documentary genre depends on constant communication between spontaneous mise en scène and intuitive camerawork. This complicity allows a complex montage of image and language. Nurith Aviv manages to capture the dramatisation within even the tiniest events and frames with such precision that the framing itself concentrates multilayered meaning. Whether it be cutting down trees in the Romanian countryside evoking the period of early industrialisation (The Paper Bridge) or the ritual of a young Egyptian bride putting the final touches on her dress as she gets ready for the photographer (A fleeting passage to the Orient), a social situation is expressed through figurative framing. In A fleeting passage to the Orient, Nurith Aviv perfects her art of the camera which bears a distant, yet nevertheless insistent point of view, expressed through framing but also changes of focal length, tracking shots or other camera movements. The form of this way of looking creates a truly fictional originality, an imaginary terrain favourable to the digressions of the narration evoking Egypt as a European projection. Ruth Beckermann confronts in her film the point of view of a modern casual visitor and the orientalism and fragmentary perceptions which might be those of a 19th century traveller. She takes the risk of "lateral montage". This formula, used by André Bazin to describe the Chris Marker's method of building a link of intelligent connivance between sound and image, is absolutely appropriate here. The essential link between the speakable and the visible is here the subtle mix of sound and music, which creates the space necessary for the imaginary, for representing Elizabeth's obsessions, which in the play of indirect relations between narration and filmed image, are set in the mind of the spectator.

To a certain extent, A fleeting passage to the Orient shifts the special worlds of The Paper Bridge and Towards Jerusalem which were placed in the realm of memory and story, to situate them entirely in the imaginary construction of a place of desire. The director's travels first of all concerned a region which was in the past Austrian, at a period when the Empress liked nothing better than to take the train in such an unheard of way that others of her time could hardly fail to take notice. The director then travels around the Promised Land whose oldest city, entirely inhabited by myths, is incapable of offering a real haven to a woman born of the Diaspora. Finally with A fleeting passage to the Orient, this being in movement no longer places herself on the side of loss but on the side of the pleasure of a (feminine) way of looking, conscious of the power of fascination in its movement.

Published in Katalogue Lussas, August 2000