THE REALISM IN SURREALISM - On the filmic work of Peter Weiss - by Andreas Wutz, 2012

Published  in:  TEXTE  ZUR  KUNST,  no.  87,  pp.  176-­‐181,  Berlin  2012   THE REALISM IN SURREALISM On the filmic work of Peter Weiss INTRO: For the first time, part of Peter Weiss’s cinematographic work is available on DVD. The film selection is accompanied by two documentaries by German filmmaker Harun Farocki, a booklet containing interviews, and a filmography. Although presented as a single portrait of the hidden oeuvre of an international author, it seems more a double portrait of two documentarians of their time. The DVD may not only illuminate their historical and intellectual backgrounds, but also contribute to the analysis of current social and political issues by discussing hybrid forms of fiction and document and debating the relation of individual and collective history. After Peter Weiss’s first retrospective at the Cinématheque Française in 1958, it took almost 30 years until the Stockholm-based author of the three-volume novel “The Aesthetics of Resistance” (1975–81) and “Marat/Sade” (1964) was eventually acknowledged as a filmmaker in Germany as well. His complete cinematographic work was presented for the first time in 1986 at the Nordic Film Days in Lübeck, which additionally published a thoroughly researched catalogue on all his 18 films. The current DVD, released by filmedition suhrkamp, offers half of them and is based on a selection that was originally presented at the 1980 Biennale Forum in Berlin and then used by Harun Farocki for his subsequent film essay on Weiss one year later. This essay complements the films gathered in the anthology, along with another Farocki film from 1979: In an interview he talks with the author about the working progress of “The Aesthetics of Resistance” and Weiss explains how his cinematic and literary practices are interrelated. In this interview and in two others from 1980 and 1981, which are included in the accompanying booklet, Weiss also comments on his two feature films, neither of which, unfortunately, is offered on the DVD. Weiss’s engagement in the film medium started with his return from war- ravaged Berlin in 1947. He did several reports on Germany for the Swedish press 1   after so-called year zero. On this trip he also got the chance to watch Wolfgang Staudte’s film “Murderers Among Us” (“Die Mörder sind unter uns”, 1946) and Helmut Käutner’s “In Those Days” (“In jenen Tagen”, 1947). He commented on them for the film magazine Biografbladet: “Subject matter for filmmaking you may find on every German street. Infinite matter of human destiny is waiting for its design. Here, a poet of images may have an inexhaustible stock of painfully realistic, oddly dreamlike and surreal, shocking, accusatory, and thought-provoking visions of this world.” (1) This statement may be considered as programmatic for Weiss’s own film work and his subsequent literary work as well, as it clearly reveals its recurring dichotomy – Surrealism meets realism, dream vision meets document. Weiss’s first films are his five surrealist “Studies” (1952–55). Filmed on 16mm in black and white, they resemble collages he started to make during his time in Paris, either showing compositions of fragmented bodies celebrating an obscure and yet rescue promising eroticism, or telling the story of an isolated ego that tries to escape from the dark of the night, from an intrinsic trauma or from surrounding alienation. Like tableaux vivants, two of the films are based on precise enactments of Weiss’s drawings, thereby trying to leave behind “the static vision of the artist” enabling him as a “film poet (…) to represent the infinite composite character of an experience.” (2) The “Studies” have titles such as “Awakening,” “Hallucinations,” “Liberation,” “Interplay” (3), which also refer to a biographical context: Weiss had more than just a theoretical interest in psychoanalytic literature, as one can recognize in his ingenuous letters to Henriette Itta Blumenthal in 1940 (4) or the description of his multiple inner crises in his autobiographical report “Vanishing Point” (“Fluchtpunkt”, 1962). Max Hodann, the German sexologist and member of the International Brigades, who like Weiss had emigrated to Sweden, had introduced him to psychoanalysis and was later portrayed in “The Aesthetics of Resistance”. This novel also introduces us to the poet and Weiss’s fictitious close friend Karin Boye (Weiss met her only once briefly before she committed suicide in 1941), whose work was strongly influenced by Surrealism and radical socialist ideas and whose psychoanalyst Weiss also consulted. As an emigrant, he could understand and shared feelings of deracination and extraneousness with her, and as an artist he tried to find a language by which a 2    Published  in:  TEXTE  ZUR  KUNST,  no.  87,  pp.  176-­‐181,  Berlin  2012   “deeply deformed reality” (5) might be described. One resource for that language, according to Weiss’s alter ego in “The Aesthetics of Resistance”, lies in the surreal world of the dream, because “only a dream gives you insight into the specifity of the preserved” and “communicates to us the dimensions of everything that we can take an interest in.” (6) However, this mnemonic and utopian quality of dreams lacks ethical quality, because “we remain insentient facing the agonies with our dreaming eyes.” (7) Therefore the second resource should be a detailed reconstruction of reality as “leaning out to the outer reality outside resembles the exploring the dream as in either case we are looking from one world into a completely different one.” (8) Therefore, even if Weiss himself tended to be overcritical on his own cinematographic work, his early “Studies” should not be considered as mere stylistic exercises of the later documentary and feature filmmaker. On the contrary, he already understood the concept and process of “dream work” in close and necessary proximity to the documentary process as dream matter and reality matter are both needed to reconstruct and understand historical processes and the current situation one is living in, however fragmented and confusing it appears. Over time, these ideas were refined and eventually, as Farocki learns in his conversation with Weiss, turned into the closed blocky structure of “The Aesthetics of Resistance”, which like the “Studies” also begin with a description of fragmented bodies and their paradigmatic attempt at liberation, the “Arab spring” of Pergamon. As a result, the first documentary “Faces in the Shadows” (“Ansikten i skugga”, 1956), shortly following the experimental “Studies”, may be considered an attempt at self-liberation by opening the studio door toward a critical art practice embedded in the neighboring social environment. The “film poet” Peter Weiss left the studio with his artist friends (e.g. Öyvind Fahlström, Carlo Derkert, Pontus Hultén) and discovered, as previously announced, “the subject matter for his films on every street” that would surpass any surrealist vision. “Faces in the Shadows” drastically details the daily life of destitute old men who were populating the streets and backyards of Weiss’s studio neighborhood. These men represent a lost generation of the emerging postwar Swedish society; they resemble the outcasts and the forgotten of “Las Hurdes” (1933) by Luis Buñuel, to whom Weiss gives key importance in his book 3   “Avantgarde Film”. (9) However, compared to “Las Hurdes” where according to Weiss “each face has the effect of a blow: dull, animal-like faces, faces paralyzed by unutterable pain, faces of cripples, cretins and freaks” (10) the old men of Weiss’s ”Faces in the Shadows“, sitting in beer halls, sleeping in night shelters and mingling around the streets, appear pathetic rather than grotesque. Even though the filmmaker’s empathy becomes visible, the maximization of the documentary-real loses its power due to a distant (hidden) camera and more atmospheric but purposeful shots of the protagonists. Maximizing the documentary-real transforms reality into the surreal-grotesque. This strategy may be recognized more clearly in Weiss’s subsequent film about the daily life in a juvenile prison that is also included in the anthology. The film “In the Name of the Law” (“Enligt lag”, 1957) succeeds in maximizing the documentary by meticulously highlighting specific details and noises, by its clear presentation of the surrounding and omni-regulatory architecture, and finally by the fragmentizing representation of the inmates whose body image is reduced to a torso, due to an official directive that no face of a prisoner was to be shown. Here, reality seems unreal by its seclusiveness, “but it appears normal to those who are inside for months or years,” Weiss says. (11) In his next film, however, a social “report” titled “What shall we do now?” (“Vad ska vi göra nu då?”, 1958), “normal reality” signifies a prison that the young people are trying to get out of. The filmic “report” was commissioned by the Swedish Youth League as an educational film about juvenile drug addiction and unemployment experienced by protagonists of three different social contexts: a worker, an employee, and a grammar-school pupil. Based on previous extensive field research, this time Weiss was working with young amateur actors who performed their own lives and thereby produced a feature film that looks like a documentary – or the other way round. While Farocki mentions this process to be reminiscent of Éric Rohmer and Maurice Pialat, one may also think of Peter Watkins. Fringe groups and peripheral areas, individual or social isolation in the urban context seem to be the preferred “matters of reality” for the films of Peter Weiss. This may also be recognized in “Behind the Facades” (“Bag de ens facader”, 1961), a 4    Published  in:  TEXTE  ZUR  KUNST,  no.  87,  pp.  176-­‐181,  Berlin  2012   documentary on a dormitory suburb of Copenhagen, as well as in a film project on outsiders that Weiss started with Staffan Lamm, his last collaborator in the cinematographic field, but that could only be carried out in form of four fragments, one about the artist Öyvind Fahlström. However, neither “Behind the Facades” nor the four fragments of the unfinished outsider project are included in filmedition suhrkamp’s DVD selection – even though they would have greatly enhanced the understanding of the provided films. Also, Weiss’s two feature films were unfortunately ruled out: “Swedish girls in Paris” (“Svenska flickor in Paris”, 1961), a story about three Swedish students trying to survive in bohemian Paris (12) as well as “The Mirage” (“Hägringen”, 1959). This is all the more regrettable, as on this film project Weiss spent most of his time and energy and it would have added yet another very good example of how he combines surreal and documentary vision. The film is based on his early novel “Document I” (1949) which illustrates his “dreamlike and traumatic” experience of emigration (13) and combines the introspective vision of the “Studies” with the descriptive attitude of the documentaries about the juvenile prisoners or the old men: For instance one long sequence showing a huge and almost unbearably noisy construction site in the center of Stockholm is filmed and audio- recorded like a battlefield of modern urbanism. War doesn’t seem over, and extraneousness continues. Lamm, who later collaborated with Weiss in “The Mirage”, “Swedish girls in Paris” and in the outsider project, also made a feature length documentary on Weiss’s films (“Strange ways in and through and out”, 1986). In contrast to Farocki, the Swedish documentarian compares selected film excerpts with his own experiences during the shooting, with self-portraits and paintings of suburban settings by Weiss, filmed in their current repositories: in private homes such as that of Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss or Lajos Székely, collector and psychoanalyst of the young artist Weiss. Privileged by his direct testimony, Lamm’s documentary makes more visible how Weiss’s cinematographic work is related to his other art practices and life circumstances than Farocki’s film essay does. Doubtlessly the film selection now published by filmedition suhrkamp will contribute to a better understanding of Weiss’s work by a German audience. However, Swedish 5   language skills are occasionally needed as only one documentary is subtitled and non- German speakers will be excluded from understanding the interviews. It seems surprising that the publisher should not have given one of its most renowned authors a little more internationality and context. ANDREAS WUTZ “Peter Weiss – Filme. Vorgestellt von Harun Farocki“, filmedition suhrkamp 2012. -------------------- Andreas Wutz is an artist and film curator living in Barcelona. Since 2003 he has presented the cinematographic work of Peter Weiss. In 2012 he organized a retrospective of the Zimbabwean filmmaker Michael Raeburn (Filmmuseum München) and currently is working on a film project about an agricultural zone in the suburbs of Barcelona. -------------------- Notes (1) “Peter Weiss, Swedish Original”, in: Biografbladet, 3, 1947. German translation by Jan Christer Bengtsson: “Peter Weiss über Film und Filmemachen”, in: Peter Weiss und der Film, exh. cat. Nordische Filmtage Lübeck, 1986. English translation by Andreas Wutz. (2) Booklet accompanying the DVD “Peter Weiss – Filme. Vorgestellt von Harun Farocki”, Berlin 2012, p. 5. (3) Original Swedish (German) titles: “Uppvaknandet” (Das Aufwachen), “Hallucinationer” (Halluzinationen), “Frigörelse” (Befreiung), “Växelspel” (Wechselspiel). See booklet “Peter Weiss – Filme”, op. cit., pp. 34–35. (4) Peter Weiss, Briefe an Henriette Itta Blumenthal (1941–43), Berlin 2011. 6    Published  in:  TEXTE  ZUR  KUNST,  no.  87,  pp.  176-­‐181,  Berlin  2012   (5) Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, Vol. III, p. 37, Frankfurt/M. 1981. English edition: “Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance” (Vol. I only), Durham, North Carolina, 2005. (6) Ibid., pp. 206, 208. (7) Ibid. (8) Ibid., pp. 208-209. (9) Peter Weiss, Avantgardefilm, Stockholm 1956; translated into German by Beat Mazenauer; Peter Weiss, Avantgarde Film, Frankfurt/M., 1995. Weiss’s book has been considered “for long the only publication in this field” (Hans Scheugl/ Ernst Schmidt jr., Eine Subgeschichte des Films, Frankfurt/M., 1974). Besides chapters on Luis Buñuel, Jean Vigo, and Sergei Eisenstein it offers essays on “film music” and “the city”. (10) Ibid., p. 55. (11) Booklet “Peter Weiss Filme”, op. cit., p. 11. (12) Although Weiss repudiated the final editing his authorship can still be recognized in the selected locations, the composition of images and incorporation of own documentary footage like a sculpture parade by Jean Tinguely that the actors spontaneously participated in. (13) Booklet “Peter Weiss Filme”, op. cit., p. 21. 7