Whose memory?

As we have known since Freud (and Nietzsche), a distinction can be made between two kinds of memory: on the one hand memory that derives from retrievable traces which have been registered in the past, and on the other memory that is based on forgetting and which enables memories to "return" via a new path. The four films by Ruth Beckermann being shown at this festival all exemplify both these ways in which memory functions, whether via verbal utterances, embodiments of remembering (and forgetting), or by grasping the significance of places of remembrance.

Ruth Beckermann's first full-length film, which she made in collaboration with Josef Aichholzer, is devoted entirely to the 'memory-work' of a single person. It is a portrait of the Viennese Franz West, formerly editor-in-chief of the Communist daily Die Volksstimme, which in the early 1980s began to ask questions about the inter-war years that had not interested anyone in Austria for decades. This form of oral history first emerged as part of the new attempts [in Austria and Germany] to deal with the recent past by historians and film-makers. Return to Vienna is the portrait of an emigré who became a victim of racist Nazi violence long before the Anschluss, and who had been profoundly disappointed by the weakness of the Social Democrats in the struggle against Christian-Socialist Austrofascism. 'Red Vienna', today like the Freud museum in the Berggasse a compulsory part of every progressive tourist's programme, was just being rediscovered while this film was being made. The cinematic material incorporated in the film came from various party branch offices in Vienna, not from a central archive. Copiously quoted in the film, these 'found objects' are quite obviously recent discoveries, and yet the film does not pretend to 'unveil' a truth, or something that was previously unknown: the propaganda images do not serve as an illustration, nor are they present in Return to Vienna as historical traces or intended to constitute memory, but rather to evoke the process of remembering. In a series of informal, sensitively-conducted interviews, the young film-maker asks about various aspects of West's life, exploring his cultural origins, his identity as a Jew, his political career, emigration and eventual return. What is important here is not the question of an individual's adaptation to a political culture, or its dogmas or potential for denial but what Franz West has retained for himself of this culture over the years. His unspeakably traumatic loss does not ultimately emerge as direct speech, as part of the dialogue, in front of the camera. Franz West lists the members of his family who were murdered, trying to remember, trying to create a memorial with names. This he can only do alone, with the aid of a small audio recorder, which later, in the presence of the film-maker, enables him to provide an account of them. It is surely no coincidence that this form of memory resembles the lonely monologue of the young Marceline Loridan in Jean Rouch's Chronique d'un été.

In Towards Jerusalem an historical trace is also presented by means of a technical device but here it represents a parallel present (of the shooting of the film): in this 'road movie' which takes the film-maker from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in order to record the different layers of this country like a geologist, the 'other' side makes its presence felt through the radio, which constantly relays reports on the Intifada. This doubling of the sound track breaks up the affective quality inherent in the film and creates the possibility of distance from the image. For the continuous, overpowering presence of the image prohibits the intersection of past and present, thus inhibiting the critical effort that is the precondition for a historical discourse. Paper Bridge, the second film in the trilogy that also includes Return to Vienna and Towards Jerusalem, also attempts to wrest from the power of the image the possibility of using the places of remembrance as a starting point for developing the process of remembering. Ruth Beckermann travels with her camera woman, Nurith Aviv, to the Bukovina, a region where her father was once happy. However, the film crew will not arrive at their destination, which was still on Soviet territory at the time the film was made, there will be no images of Czernovitz, the city so beloved of her father. Instead the film revolves around this culture which has now vanished in Central Europe, visits small Rumanian villages, travelling through foggy landscapes crossed by horse-drawn carts that evoke a time long past. At a Jewish cemetery a man who is a sort of "walking repository of living memory" recounts stories of people from a time in which collective identity was still transmitted orally. In Ruth Beckerman's film this man is more than just a transmitter of tradition or last surviving witness; he does not represent 'death at work': this man lives in the present, he flirts with the women who are filming him, cracks jokes about himself "being in the picture" for once in his life.

What is past often cannot be translated into an image. Paper Bridge begins with views from the draped window of an apartment, from the tram, in Vienna, where so many terrible things happened in the 1930s and 1940s. Here the film-maker's intention is to explore the feeling of 'Unzugehörigkeit' or not belonging (this is also the title of a book that Ruth Beckermann wrote about the post-war relations between Jews and Austrians), by examining in a new light places in which her grandmother survived during the Nazi era by pretending to be a dumb homeless person. She interviews her parents about what it is like living in this country where they were once persecuted. She films Theresienstadt: not the historical site where the Nazis carried out the perverse project of having a propaganda film made by inmates, only to exterminate them afterwards, but a Theresienstadt made of papier mâché, the set of an American film being shot in the Balkans with a cast of Viennese extras.

Some remember, others only want to forget. The election campaign of the Austrian presidential candidate, Kurt Waldheim, afflicted with mysterious and convenient amnesia about his war years, finds its place as a matter of course in this film made by a Viennese Jewish woman from the second post-war generation. On Stephansplatz those who exhort others never to forget argue with those who think they know everything better and who are not slow to come out with the old language of prejudice and hatred.

The indivisibility of memory and this difference in the formation of the collective memory also underlie the seemingly random structure of Towards Jerusalem: the people the film-maker meets along a few dozen kilometres of a road in Israel tell of the past but also about the different ways the present is viewed. "Not everybody has the same eyes; everybody sees with his own eyes", says a Palestinian as he changes a tyre. The people we meet in the film interpret the history of the country according to their origins and occupation. An elderly coin collector in the middle of a rubbish tip picks up something which he proudly identifies as a centuries-old Turkish coin. He makes a living by selling scrap and reclaimed timber to the Palestinians. These coins seem to have become an obsession with him, as guarantors of the historicity of this bleak wrecking yard. Towards Jerusalem is not about a chronological recording of history or a clear-cut evaluation of the short and conflict-laden history of Israel; it is a snapshot, an instantaneous portrait which seems to set itself the Marker principle as a leitmotif: "One never knows what one is filming". Thus no stone-throwers appear in the film, but again and again one hears shots or planes flying overhead.

On the way towards Jerusalem it is not only the many different landscapes, secular and religious buildings which in this country are often invested with several different mythological meanings, that reveal themselves, but also very different cultures: proud Ethiopian women sitting in stoical calm, their lack of Hebrew or other foreign languages causing irritation on the part of their new compatriots; newly-arrived Russian Jewish women who talk about Israel's strength in tones of conviction. Their faces reveal the dream they have taken with them from Eastern Europe, evoked as a repeated leitmotif by the strains of Tchaikovsky's Serenade mélancholique. The film ends, as it has to, before the journey ends, because the object of desire can never coincide with the real Jerusalem. The motor of the film Towards Jerusalem becomes the memento mori of photography, as Susan Sontag has described it: the participation in the mortality, vulnerability and mutability of other people (or things). The consciousness of momentariness in this fragmentary travel essay preserves it from seeming outdated ten years on.

Ruth Beckermann's trilogy - three films which explore different aspects of Jewish identity and which all in one form or the other deal with the (painful) constitution of memory - was followed by a film about the Wehrmacht which deals with the aspect of forgetting. The forgetting of the perpetrators and the perception of those who belong to this society of perpetrators, who grew up alongside them. Those who don't remember, whose sole wish is to stay put in their hereditary place without being disturbed, have amputated their memory, as Klaus Theleweit so appositely puts it when writing about Nazi war criminals. They don't want to be disturbed by those they drove into exile or murdered. And yet they have come to this exhibition which informs the public about the killings, and in which they were involved in some form or other - as eye witnesses, those who knew about it, those who were ignorant of it and even as participators. East of War was not made with the intention of sounding out individual visitors to an exhibition about the crimes of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern front. On the contrary: their wholly natural appearances in front of the camera unfold like a therapeutic ritual and even occasionally even surprise the viewer: a Loden hat or a wooden leg is not necessarily an indication of dyed-in-the-wool recidivist or reactionary sentiments. There are the exceptions, there are those who were there and didn't want to participate, there are even a very few who were shocked by events, then as now, and who refused within the bounds of possibility to serve in this army. The exhibition itself, its objects and photographs which were used by historians as the source material and proof of crimes which were not just committed by the SS but also by ordinary members of the Wehrmacht, hardly features in the film. "The opportunity offered by the documentary", writes Ruth Beckermann in the diary she kept during the making of the film , "is the dispassionate gaze, observation, analysis". The strength of this film lies in the variation in the reactions, in the doubt that obtrudes when the defensive utterances start coming, or in the third-hand accounts that sound like authentic personal experiences. The return of past experience inscribes itself in a person's habit of mind, whether in the form of conscious realisation or in the form of unconscious resistance. That, in the best case, is what a film can show.