Film, Media and Music
Chapter 3 discusses the two films as documentaries of passage which aim towards an unreachable object of desire (the lost central European Jewish homeland of Czernowitz, the utopia of Jerusalem). In Paper Bridge, the uses of folk tale and cultural memory are related to the formal deployment of structures of circularity and repetition; in Towards Jerusalem the linearity of the road movie genre structures an exploration of Israel as a semiotically complex and politically ambivalent space. Both films draw heavily on numerous critical and cultural intertexts which are outlined and discussed.
Chapter 2 discusses Beckermann’s 1983 documentary Return to Vienna and 1984 exhibition and book Die Mazzesinsel as explorations of Jewish history and memory in post-Holocaust Austria. The chapter examines the film’s attention (via the narrative of Austrian Marxist Franz West) to events in ‘Red Vienna’ in the 1920s paralleling the rise of fascism. It then turns attention to Die Mazzesinsel as a documentation in images and texts recording memories of the destroyed Jewish community of 1920s Vienna.
Chapter 5 explores A Fleeting Passage to the Orient and its concern with the late nineteenth-century journeys to Egypt of the Austrian Empress Elisabeth (‘Sisi’). The chapter examines the pervasive mythic construction of Sisi in the Austrian cultural imaginary, as dialectical image and icon of female mobility, and as figure within Austrian versions of Orientalism via Heimatfilme and the popular 1950s ‘Sisi’ films of Ernst Marischka. It also explores Austria’s complex and often uncanny relations to Egypt, specifically in relation to the history of psychoanalysis in Vienna.
Chapter 6 explores these three works as analyses and celebrations of Jewish homeliness and precarious belonging (in contrast with earlier explorations of unbelonging). The chapter relates homemad(e) to the cosmopolitanism of Marcus Aurelius and the tradition of Austrian films and books based on street life, analysing the film’s ambivalences in its exploration of Derridean ‘hostipitality’ and its centring on the Viennese coffee house as a space of itinerant homeliness and of the continual performance of belonging. This performative element is extended in the analysis of religious and family rituals and traditions and of the distinctions between generations in Zorro’s Bar Mitzvah, and the photographs of Margit Dobronyi of post-war Viennese Jewish social life in Leben!, which is linked to the works of the Jewish artist and Holocaust victim Charlotte Salomon.
Chapter 4 explores these films as analyses of Austria’s historical trauma expressed in different approaches to the image as ‘intolerable’ (Rancière); through documenting public responses to the Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944 photography exhibition in Vienna in late 1995 in East of War, and through documenting the successful 1986 election campaign of Kurt Waldheim in The Waldheim Waltz. In each case, the image (photograph/media persona) and its meanings become deeply contested, suggesting profound ideological rifts in the Austrian body politic.
The Introduction presents and contextualises Beckermann’s biography and oeuvre in relation to key moments in post-war Austrian history and to key reference points in documentary cinema. It outlines key theoretical frames of subsequent discussions (theories of identity and difference, interstitiality and essay films, utopianism, Beckermann’s notion of ‘unbelonging’), and outlines each chapter, establishing the linking theme of the passage as central to the oeuvre.
Passage Works – Ruth Beckermann’s Art explores the works of the contemporary Austrian film-maker, artist, and writer Ruth Beckermann (b. Vienna, 1952). Essaying across multiple media, Beckermann’s oeuvre interrogates and comments on identity and geography as complex, shifting formations produced by multiple intersections between the past and the contemporary. In a career spanning over forty years, Beckermann takes as her abiding thematic concern Austria and its position at the ‘centre’ of an expanding Europe alongside its problematic history and politics, her own identity and sense of ‘unbelonging’ as a post-war Jewish woman, and the contemporary global geopolitics of migration and displacement. She expands these frames into wider meditations in film, art, and writing on the persistence of European memory, and the meanings of Europe itself; on borders, migrations, and identities; on memories, traumas, and traditions; on the image as marker of presence and absence, repository of the traces of historical violence; and on the passage as metaphor for a range of physical, psychological, and ideological movements that define the complexities of contemporary cosmopolitan identities. Passage Works reads Beckermann’s oeuvre in relation to historical and theoretical frames of reference, elaborating and expanded conception of passage as marking a persistent transhistorical and transnational experience of movement between places, times, contexts, and conditions – above all, the post-memorial condition of being Austrian and Jewish in the aftermath of trauma.
Chapter 1 discusses Beckermann’s early documentaries and their relations to the geopolitical situation of Austria in the late 1970s and early 1980s, situating them also in relation to political documentary film traditions, notably Chris Marker and the Medvedkine movement. The chapter specifically identifies elements of these early films and their concerns with varieties of political utopianism that prefigure later concerns with Austria’s traumatic history.
Chapter 7 explores these two films as analyses of contemporary migrancy and displacement (contrasting with the previous chapter’s emphasis on home and belonging) via the road movie structure of American Passages, which draws on Robert Frank’s photography in its presentation of individual performances of American identity and enactments of the image; and the restrictions and containment of migrancy through borderisation processes in Those Who Stay Those Who Go, which maps a neoliberalised geopolitical world of intersecting states, borders, and transit zones via a structure of palimpsestic intertextuality, notably drawing on the cinema of Theo Angelopoulos but also on a long tradition of textual revisions of Homer’s Odyssey.
Chapter 8 explores two films and an installation structured around the basis of post-war Austrian identity in performance. The Dreamed Ones dramatises the romantic letters between writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, a performance that implicitly re-enacts another potential romance between the performers. MUTZENBACHER records men reciting passages from a pornographic model, performances that evoke the history of Austrian fascism. The Missing Image restages a repressed moment in Austrian history, the public humiliation of Jews in Vienna during the Anschluß of 1938. In each case, Beckermann foregrounds gender and national identity as key elements of the performances presented.